I am so, so tired of that question. I want more stories to take it as read that werewolves/vampires/zombie/robots/whatever are people -- not everyone in the story has to accept it, but I want the narrative to take it as a given. Because I'm tired of it, it's boring and it's exhausting and you're right, it's a tool of violence.

(Some day I might actually write my androids story that's set a couple hundred years in the future. It's not actually... all that optimistic? Because wow, honestly, introducing a new class of people who are legally property is... history tells us how well that goes! It gets worse when you can fairly trivially literally wipe the memories of that class of people. Society ends up a terrible, depressing mess, but story itself is not grimdark, it's depressing in all the ways that people currently are depressing and what it's about people struggling with that and sometimes winning small victories.)

Anyway, awesome for fiction that rejects that damn fucking question, and now I will put this on my to-read list!