I am not unaware of the history. These aren’t different ideas from what I came into the community with. They’re just worded differently.
The belief is that we chose to live this life in this form and be otherkin before we were born. As all souls choose the lives they live and forms they take. I don’t necessarily think that’s universally true, but that’s what they’re talking about in that quote, and it’s part of a very old religious belief about reincarnation.
The second quote refers to the truth that no one but you can define your own identity. We cannot choose what we are but we can choose the labels we use to define ourselves and how we wish to present ourselves. I believe that I am a dragon because my soul has always been such, and that I am fae because I chose to live as one of them, which shaped the nature of my soul. I also chose to live as a crow and made that part of myself. I chose to live as a cat, and a hawk, and many other things, but I choose now not to consider those kintypes because they are not as deeply intrinsic to my nature. I have identified with other kintypes based on other past lives, until I realized they did not fit as perfectly as the labels I wear now. But I did not arbitrarily choose to call myself those things because I liked them, I chose labels based on my experiences and my beliefs about my identity.
In much the same way that I cannot choose my sexuality but I can choose to describe it as “grey asexual” (as opposed to demisexual, or spending two paragraphs explaining details I don’t think anyone needs to know) because that most simply conveys to other people the things I want them to know about me.
We are what we are, and labels are optional, but we can’t take it upon ourselves to change what those labels mean whenever it suits us.
None of this is new and none of it has changed on a fundamental level. The wording evolves over time for clarity, and yes sometimes how it’s presented and the shape of the community changes a little as we come to deeper understanding of ourselves as a community. We’ve welcomed fictionkin into the community with the understanding that they’re not actually that different from elves and such, and accepted that different people explain what we are in different ways. There was a time when some otherkin rejected fictionkin and psychological otherkin. That didn’t change because we redefined otherkin, but because we understand things better now.
I will concede however that otherkin was not necessarily always the umbrella term it is now. The Silver Elves, the dragon community, and therians evolved as separate groups, and a lot of therians didn’t like the otherkin label for a while, and that has changed.
But the core nature of what we are has not changed, and being otherkin has never been a game, as some people on Tumblr would have you believe.
If you read all that and more, and you still choose to interpret that as anything other than “if you wish a place in our community, then you belong here” then you’re honestly not someone I’m wasting my energy on.
Like you’re just blatantly missing the point. And don’t pull some “i was there when it was written” crap on me when you only have 3-4 years on me in the community, tops. That’s just being obnoxious and rude.
It’s a mistake to cite the Silver Elves as an example of what the otherkin community was like when it first started. The Silver Elves predate the otherkin community by about 20 years, the term otherkin was not even coined until 1990, and the beliefs of the Silver Elves have never reflected the norms of our community. They are their own, unique, spiritual group who much later found their way into the community and applied our community’s terminology to their existing spiritual beliefs. In fact, when they first found their way onto early otherkin community mailing lists such as darkfae-l, they were so far outside the community norms at that time that a lot of people found them to be fluffy and difficult to take seriously.
In the nearly three decades since the term was coined, being otherkin has never referred to a purely voluntary self-identification. The questions have always been “how do I know if I am really otherkin?” or “how can I find my kintype?”, never “what is the best reason to choose to become otherkin?” or “what kintype should I choose?” If we open up the community to this new way of being otherkin, by choice, what exactly unifies the community anymore? What would someone who chooses a wolf persona (fursona?) have in common with a wolf therian who believes they have the mind or soul of a wolf? What would someone who chooses an elf persona have in common with someone who believes they have experienced past lives as an elf? What experiences would they all share, to base community around? Who would benefit from this more inclusive redefinition, and who would be harmed or pushed out of the spaces that once existed for them?
Edited to add: I saw a post the other day, which I can’t find again right now, concerning the difference between community and scene. It made a point regarding the focus of scenes being on aesthetics. Is that what we’re coming down to, as our sole remaining point of commonality? An aesthetic associated with a particular “kintype”? Elf aesthetics and dragon aesthetics and wolf aesthetics, etc? Is that what our community, or perhaps our “scene”, is coming to revolve around? And if it is, do we really want that?
More to the point, how does a youth who doesn’t understand why they don’t feel human find support if the community of people who share that experience is drowned out by people playing a game?
I was born otherkin. I have never been anything but what I am. The reason I even bother with this site is to help other people who have had similar experiences. We use the word otherkin to find each other. No one is allowed to take that away from us.
(The post on scene vs. community is either here or the post linked in that one, mine specifically addresses my thoughts on nonhuman/otherkind spaces but I don’t know which one was being mentioned specifically.)
Thank you, amxinith, it was the one linked from your post.
I am not unaware of the history. These aren’t different ideas from what I came into the community with. They’re just worded differently.
The belief is that we chose to live this life in this form and be otherkin before we were born. As all souls choose the lives they live and forms they take. I don’t necessarily think that’s universally true, but that’s what they’re talking about in that quote, and it’s part of a very old religious belief about reincarnation.
The second quote refers to the truth that no one but you can define your own identity. We cannot choose what we are but we can choose the labels we use to define ourselves and how we wish to present ourselves. I believe that I am a dragon because my soul has always been such, and that I am fae because I chose to live as one of them, which shaped the nature of my soul. I also chose to live as a crow and made that part of myself. I chose to live as a cat, and a hawk, and many other things, but I choose now not to consider those kintypes because they are not as deeply intrinsic to my nature. I have identified with other kintypes based on other past lives, until I realized they did not fit as perfectly as the labels I wear now. But I did not arbitrarily choose to call myself those things because I liked them, I chose labels based on my experiences and my beliefs about my identity.
In much the same way that I cannot choose my sexuality but I can choose to describe it as “grey asexual” (as opposed to demisexual, or spending two paragraphs explaining details I don’t think anyone needs to know) because that most simply conveys to other people the things I want them to know about me.
We are what we are, and labels are optional, but we can’t take it upon ourselves to change what those labels mean whenever it suits us.
None of this is new and none of it has changed on a fundamental level. The wording evolves over time for clarity, and yes sometimes how it’s presented and the shape of the community changes a little as we come to deeper understanding of ourselves as a community. We’ve welcomed fictionkin into the community with the understanding that they’re not actually that different from elves and such, and accepted that different people explain what we are in different ways. There was a time when some otherkin rejected fictionkin and psychological otherkin. That didn’t change because we redefined otherkin, but because we understand things better now.
I will concede however that otherkin was not necessarily always the umbrella term it is now. The Silver Elves, the dragon community, and therians evolved as separate groups, and a lot of therians didn’t like the otherkin label for a while, and that has changed.
But the core nature of what we are has not changed, and being otherkin has never been a game, as some people on Tumblr would have you believe.
If you read all that and more, and you still choose to interpret that as anything other than “if you wish a place in our community, then you belong here” then you’re honestly not someone I’m wasting my energy on.
Like you’re just blatantly missing the point. And don’t pull some “i was there when it was written” crap on me when you only have 3-4 years on me in the community, tops. That’s just being obnoxious and rude.
It’s a mistake to cite the Silver Elves as an example of what the otherkin community was like when it first started. The Silver Elves predate the otherkin community by about 20 years, the term otherkin was not even coined until 1990, and the beliefs of the Silver Elves have never reflected the norms of our community. They are their own, unique, spiritual group who much later found their way into the community and applied our community’s terminology to their existing spiritual beliefs. In fact, when they first found their way onto early otherkin community mailing lists such as darkfae-l, they were so far outside the community norms at that time that a lot of people found them to be fluffy and difficult to take seriously.
In the nearly three decades since the term was coined, being otherkin has never referred to a purely voluntary self-identification. The questions have always been “how do I know if I am really otherkin?” or “how can I find my kintype?”, never “what is the best reason to choose to become otherkin?” or “what kintype should I choose?” If we open up the community to this new way of being otherkin, by choice, what exactly unifies the community anymore? What would someone who chooses a wolf persona (fursona?) have in common with a wolf therian who believes they have the mind or soul of a wolf? What would someone who chooses an elf persona have in common with someone who believes they have experienced past lives as an elf? What experiences would they all share, to base community around? Who would benefit from this more inclusive redefinition, and who would be harmed or pushed out of the spaces that once existed for them?
Edited to add: I saw a post the other day, which I can’t find again right now, concerning the difference between community and scene. It made a point regarding the focus of scenes being on aesthetics. Is that what we’re coming down to, as our sole remaining point of commonality? An aesthetic associated with a particular “kintype”? Elf aesthetics and dragon aesthetics and wolf aesthetics, etc? Is that what our community, or perhaps our “scene”, is coming to revolve around? And if it is, do we really want that?
How many otherkin on this site a) know what the terms Awakening and Awakened mean, b) Still describe themselves as Awakened, c) Still use the terms regularly in conversations within the community?
I’m sorry that you seem to be missing the point of my post, and many of my others, because it never was and never has been to avoid critical thinking and doing work. There are plenty of resources still available, and people working to keep them available.
Do I agree how a lot of sections of the “community” are behaving? Absolutely not. But it’s not my responsibility to clean up because I’d rather spend my time helping people who will listen, not screaming at a bunch of kids who decide this is about “kinning to cope/for fun”. They aren’t part of the community in my eyes, and are not worth wasting resources on. People have thrown resources at them constantly and they’ve made up their minds.
I’d rather discuss with people who will listen to reason, and not be a jerk, and keep an open mind. If people forget that there’s work to be done or refuse to acknowledge it, that is not my fault. You can lead a horse to water, etc. etc.. Pushing myself onto people will only make them more defensive, and it’s high time people picked up on that and realized that education by force is not gonna cut it.
Yes, some people will be geared more towards helping newbies and that sort of thing is absolutely vital. But I don’t have the patience for that, nor do I have the desire to. Communities need to be flexible, and that means accepting that if people are going to misuse something, that is their fault.
Forgive me for being tired, but I’ve been in enough communities that have benefitted far more from nurturing their own spaces and providing for the people those communities were made for as opposed to obsessing over the wannabes and confused/terrified/disgusted onlookers, and the otherkind community NEEDS to do that and has needed to for a long time.
We will never be normal to the general populace. Nor should we strive to be. That ruins the whole fucking point of having spaces like this in the first place. Yes, it’s important to say that if you’re doing this for fun, or to cope, or because you think it’s a result of a mental illness, that you aren’t in the right place. But people will ignore that from all angles and that needs to be understood so resources can be allocated elsewhere.
I’m just far more interested in cultivating a space for those of us who are otherworldly and nonhuman to be able to be ourselves, explore and experiment in peace, and discuss amongst ourselves than working ourselves up into a fury and frothing at the mouth over all the people who always will exist who dislike us or misuse our community.
I dunno. Call me naive if you will. But I think the focus for spaces for otherworldly folk and nonhumans should be about… well, otherworldly folk and nonhumans. Not the people who can’t and won’t understand. But that’s just my opinion.
I feel like we’re at a point in the community where sooner or later, if it has not happened already, new people will not realize there IS work to be done. That critical thinking and self-exploration are meant to play a critical role in this. Where choosing your kintypes and being “kin to cope” and claiming that it’s not bad to have an otherkin identity based on an actual medically diagnosed delusion and having 20+ kintypes five minutes after you realized you were kin and having everything be about aesthetics with no substance is all normalized, even normative. I look at the community as it exists today, and I see little that has changed for the better. Otherkin being an umbrella term does not mean that umbrella needs to keep expanding until it has lost all meaning. But perhaps we have already reached that point, and all that is left is to surrender to the inevitable.
I think it gets glossed over a lot of the time that, with regards to questioning, the person who is going to be most affected by lack of critical thinking is the individual. If you’re going to claim to care about someone’s self-exploration process, and want them to be honest with themselves, there are going to be a few things that you have to accept.
First and foremost is that you just can’t force this kind of help onto someone that will not accept it. Full stop. Secondly, you need to analyze your motives for questioning them in the first place. You can tell yourself you care about their development, that you don’t want them to delude themselves, but the moment you try to force help on them that they won’t accept (overall or for the time being) you NEED to recognize that it has become selfish at that point, especially if your thought process turns to “but they could harm the community and spread misinformation!”
That is always going to happen. Always. I’m sorry. There is literally no way around it. The community will ALWAYS be invaded by wannabes, roleplayers, and people who just cannot accept that their (equally important!) identities aren’t otherkind. Stop wasting your time, effort, and resources on people who won’t listen. You cannot, cannot, determine whether or not someone is otherkind for them. Full fucking stop. If you want to correct misinformation, stop throwing it at people who won’t listen. Focus on the community you claim to so desperately care about.
You also have to accept that in a community like this, that there WILL be people whose experiences, thoughts, and identities do NOT line up with your beliefs and experiences and expectations. That doesn’t mean they haven’t done the work, or they’re just trying to feel special, or that they’re just wishkin. They could be newbies who are just figuring this shit out and need lots of extra time and resources. They could be people who have been struggling with stuff for years and are trying to parse things for their own wellbeing. They could be people whose experiences and reality are literally too different from yours for you to comprehend.
You cannot claim to legitimately care about a community and the people in it if you continue to bully, harass, chase after, and otherwise exclude and put an inordinate amount of effort into hunting down and grilling the people you don’t agree with or think “need the experience”. If a wannabe is a wannabe, they’ll grow out of it. If someone is wrong about kintypes, or about being otherkin, they will realize it in time.
And ultimately, it literally doesn’t concern anyone but them. If you are worried about a lack of proper information, make posts. Network. Share these things, find people who will help you distribute them. If you are worried that someone is mistaken about something, make gentle suggestions and corrections and be prepared to cut your losses if they simply will not accept help.
Critical thinking and self-exploration are solely the responsibility of the individual and nobody else. If someone refuses to do these things, the one being most hurt by it is them. If someone cannot be bothered to learn, don’t waste your time. You can’t save everyone. And you definitely can’t save the people that can be saved the same ways. And if someone just won’t do the work? Leave them. Cut your losses. That is THEIR choice and THEIR responsibility.
And always remember that your experiences and beliefs are not the only truth. Many people will have varied truths that don’t line up with yours. That doesn’t necessarily make either of you wrong, or one party not otherkind. It’s an umbrella term for a reason.
I’m not missing your point, or the point of other posts that have recently been made on this subject. I just think you’re naive, and ignoring the transformation that has happened to the community as a *direct* result of this idea that nobody can be questioned, challenged, told they are probably wrong about being otherkin, no community norms can or should be established. WE HAD THEM. We had *decades* where these norms were in place, and we didn’t experience the kind of scope creep the community is seeing now. And it’s not about a scarcity of resources, it’s about those resources getting drowned out by others telling the newbies that the resources that exist that challenge them, that force them to answer questions and in so doing ASK the questions OF THEMSELVES are all just mean cruel gatekeeping ableist assholes and that anyone should get to be a cute little kinnie if they want to, uwu.
Sorry, editing to add - one of the reasons I get so worked up about this is the fact that if the community, when I first joined it, had looked anything like it does today I probably would have run screaming in the other direction rather than using its resources to learn more about myself. The transformation has been so absolute that nearly everything I connected with when I joined the community is outright gone or transformed beyond all recognition. And I worry about newly awakening otherkin who find it in its current state. Will the genuine ones even stick around, seeing all this? I wouldn’t have. I wasn’t looking for aesthetics, or people celebrating delusion and mental illness. I wasn’t looking for a culture that would accept any damned thing anyone claims as automatically valid. I was looking for real answers, for truth about myself and the world/universe/multiverse that I couldn’t find anywhere else. I worry that as the community exists now, it is failing people like that.
Otherkin, fictionkin, therian… these are things you are, not things you do.
“Kinning” as a word indicates that it’s something you do.
You don’t kin as something, you are kin because you identify AS something.
This rephrasing makes me profoundly uncomfortable because the core of being kin of any kind has always been, “it’s not something you do, it’s something you are”.
I think it gets glossed over a lot of the time that, with regards to questioning, the person who is going to be most affected by lack of critical thinking is the individual. If you’re going to claim to care about someone’s self-exploration process, and want them to be honest with themselves, there are going to be a few things that you have to accept.
First and foremost is that you just can’t force this kind of help onto someone that will not accept it. Full stop. Secondly, you need to analyze your motives for questioning them in the first place. You can tell yourself you care about their development, that you don’t want them to delude themselves, but the moment you try to force help on them that they won’t accept (overall or for the time being) you NEED to recognize that it has become selfish at that point, especially if your thought process turns to “but they could harm the community and spread misinformation!”
That is always going to happen. Always. I’m sorry. There is literally no way around it. The community will ALWAYS be invaded by wannabes, roleplayers, and people who just cannot accept that their (equally important!) identities aren’t otherkind. Stop wasting your time, effort, and resources on people who won’t listen. You cannot, cannot, determine whether or not someone is otherkind for them. Full fucking stop. If you want to correct misinformation, stop throwing it at people who won’t listen. Focus on the community you claim to so desperately care about.
You also have to accept that in a community like this, that there WILL be people whose experiences, thoughts, and identities do NOT line up with your beliefs and experiences and expectations. That doesn’t mean they haven’t done the work, or they’re just trying to feel special, or that they’re just wishkin. They could be newbies who are just figuring this shit out and need lots of extra time and resources. They could be people who have been struggling with stuff for years and are trying to parse things for their own wellbeing. They could be people whose experiences and reality are literally too different from yours for you to comprehend.
You cannot claim to legitimately care about a community and the people in it if you continue to bully, harass, chase after, and otherwise exclude and put an inordinate amount of effort into hunting down and grilling the people you don’t agree with or think “need the experience”. If a wannabe is a wannabe, they’ll grow out of it. If someone is wrong about kintypes, or about being otherkin, they will realize it in time.
And ultimately, it literally doesn’t concern anyone but them. If you are worried about a lack of proper information, make posts. Network. Share these things, find people who will help you distribute them. If you are worried that someone is mistaken about something, make gentle suggestions and corrections and be prepared to cut your losses if they simply will not accept help.
Critical thinking and self-exploration are solely the responsibility of the individual and nobody else. If someone refuses to do these things, the one being most hurt by it is them. If someone cannot be bothered to learn, don’t waste your time. You can’t save everyone. And you definitely can’t save the people that can be saved the same ways. And if someone just won’t do the work? Leave them. Cut your losses. That is THEIR choice and THEIR responsibility.
And always remember that your experiences and beliefs are not the only truth. Many people will have varied truths that don’t line up with yours. That doesn’t necessarily make either of you wrong, or one party not otherkind. It’s an umbrella term for a reason.
I feel like we’re at a point in the community where sooner or later, if it has not happened already, new people will not realize there IS work to be done. That critical thinking and self-exploration are meant to play a critical role in this. Where choosing your kintypes and being “kin to cope” and claiming that it’s not bad to have an otherkin identity based on an actual medically diagnosed delusion and having 20+ kintypes five minutes after you realized you were kin and having everything be about aesthetics with no substance is all normalized, even normative. I look at the community as it exists today, and I see little that has changed for the better. Otherkin being an umbrella term does not mean that umbrella needs to keep expanding until it has lost all meaning. But perhaps we have already reached that point, and all that is left is to surrender to the inevitable.
I am, privately and usually quietly, very tired of the word “kinnie.”
I get that some people took it to flaunt it at antikin, to prove that it doesn’t hurt them. I get that some people just use it because they think it’s funny, or because they like it for whatever reason. I get it. And I really don’t care if you call yourself that. None of my business.
But boy am I tired of people calling the entire community “kinnies,” when most of the people I talk to don’t actually like the term or being referred to by it. I am in particular extremely tired of reading a post that’s very good, very well-written, and then having to sigh and debate whether or not to reblog it because I really do hate being called a “kinnie.”
And I get it, it’s personal preference, which is why I don’t go around telling people not to use it unless they’re using it directly in reference to me. But to me it’s just… it feels immature, and childish, and condescending, and I don’t like that being applied to what is in fact an integral part of Who I Am. I don’t like treating my identity, part of the core of my being, like a joke or something to be taken lightly. It is serious. That’s the nature of the beast, if you will. In my personal opinion, “otherkin” is not a word that should have a diminutive applied to it (ie, “kinnie”).
Obviously I’m not going to go around telling people to stop. Even if I’m tempted sometimes.
Just… please, think a moment before you apply “kinnies” to the whole community? I understand that the anti “kinnie” opinion can come off as “hurr bdurr no fun allowed” sometimes, but there is a reason many of us don’t like the word being applied to us and our experiences.
Thank you for your time I’m very tired and need to go take a decade-long nap
Controversial opinion but it’s alright to not reject your upbringing or physical body and you aren’t less otherkin if you still identify strongly with the human parts of your life.
Reblog if you remember a time when otherkin discussions were fascinating explorations of spiritual beliefs and the boundaries of reality. When any time you said, “I’m X,” you were sharply questioned until you dug into your truth well enough to stand on your own or else reject it as a fleeting fancy. When there wasn’t a pride flag with a paw print, cis people weren’t using dog pronouns (which now come in the otherkin starter pack), and no one was coming out to their mom as a toaster.
If your fictionkin identity is Absolutely Human, does that count as “otherkin”?
(Asking because on one hand, it’s “fictional”, which works differently re: Reality and Physics and Relevance and Relativity. But on the other hand, being human is just… still being human.)
Personally I would stick it under the umbrella because of the association with “fiction” being “another world”, and maybe it’s a slightly different Kind of human. But I don’t know the community’s ruling on that.
Yes, it has been historically counted as otherkin by the community. See this definition from otherkin.net circa April 2001: “otherkin
(aka “other” and “kin”) Anyone assuming the identity of not being completely human, in body mind and/or soul Anyone assuming the identity of not being an ordinary (cf. “mundane”)
human. Includes, in the broadest sense, aliens, humans from other
worlds, furries, vampires, therianthropes (aka werewolves and
shapeshifters), etc. Usually used specifically to refer to mythological
phenotypes, including (but not limited to) fairies, elves, dragons,
merfolk, etc. Does not necessarily include “non-mundane” humans (such
as Psis, Mages, SCAdians, etc.). [see also What is an Otherkin and Otherkin FAQ] {also Fairth, Metahuman, Changeling…}“ Relevant portion bold for emphasis.
Edit to add: see also the Otherkin FAQ from February 2001: “While mythological species (elves, satyrs, fairies, dragons, and so on)
are widely accepted as being included under the term “Otherkin”, many
people in the community prefer to include aliens, vampires, furries,
extraterrestrial humans, and other nonhuman races.“
We sort of started this discussion at Chimeras' Othercon panel, but I wanted to keep it going so I figured I would send an ask. What do you think it would mean for our community to drop the focus on voluntary and involuntary identities? I agree that we fundamentally should, but a bunch of things immediately jump to mind.
Our community has spent years leaning heavily into the lines between voluntary and involuntary identities and taken special care to make massive distinctions between them, leaving little to no room for grey area. It's no bit surprise that alterhuman spaces have had actual, legitimate, longstanding issues of grilling and gatekeeping. Nonhumans with nuanced and complicated identities are forced to shove themselves into a box to fit into the community, and the ideas we have about certain identities needing to be involuntary are absolutely baked into many aspects of our community and its history.
At the same time, we have used this unjustified gatekeeping in part to protect the community from genuine threats and appropriation of our terminology. The way we have limited our concepts of who is allowed to identify in what ways is generally wrong and has no doubt harmed a subset of kin, but at the same time is understandable in the sense that it has a cause. Yes, this was an issue even before KFF, but KFF certainly don't make it easy to create space for genuine voluntary kin and other voluntary alterhumans.
How do we create the space for nuance and fluidity and complexity in these terms and identities after we have spent so long defensively creating rigid boundaries and restrictions regarding the ways people are allowed to identify? How do we address community gatekeeping while also protecting our community from the people who use our identities and terminology in bad faith?
I have a lot of ideas, but this is obviously a very complex topic that we can't just solve in a day. I was just curious to hear your thoughts, if you had any. Hopefully once our personal website is up one of our first essays will be about this issue. (Also, how is Page? /hj)
So I know we’ve been sitting on this ask for… -checks watch- …almost two weeks now, but it’s genuinely because I just wasn’t sure how to answer it...
An older otherkin finding his way on tumblr.
