as small as a world and as large as alone, madeofpatterns: fierceawakening: So I just read a...

5:00pm June 1, 2015

So I just read a post (from someone I usually really respect, will screenshot if people need it) where someone asked something like: “I’m a cis woman, and I know that not everyone is like me, but for me, some of my body parts and my body’s features (like being able to carry a child) are part of my sense of womanhood. Am I being insensitive?”

And the person I respect said “I think you kind of are.”

And I’m troubled by that because… isn’t a person’s own sense of gender and how their body does or doesn’t tie into their own gender their business?

Why would it be any less their personal business if they are cis?

It seems like it parses as “Your sense of yourself is offensive,” and I’m not sure I’m down with that.

(In most cases. I get that most people consider, say, someone being transracial inherently offensive. I’m torn on it, but leaning toward it being generally offensive, because I suspect at least some people are identifying with a stereotype.)

People just need to *stop* ‘splaining to other people about what their own experiences are, FFS.

My experience of gender and my own identity does not match what people keep trying to say it does. At all.

Agreed.

Although, transracial was never much of an actual thing, it was mostly a bunch of trolls who had started out trolling transgender people as well, and then discovered it was more fun to turn transgender people and PoC against other groups of people and watch them fight, and started trolling with a lot of fake Otherkin blogs and fake transracial blogs. In fact the biggest transracial blog that everyone was up in arms about was a fake, and so were most of the rest of them. It really bothers me that people don’t know most of that was trolls. I’m sure there’s a small number of people who really think of themselves as transracial, but many of those people would not think that if trolls hadn’t given them the idea, and the few who are left after accounting for that, are… a vanishingly small number, if any.

The trolling bothers me on multiple levels. And the trolling was also gleefully exploiting some prejudices that exist in the trans community these days. Not that I think transracial should actually be a thing. But people were being played, and I wish they knew that and hadn’t taken the bait. Trolls everywhere will only continue as long as they manage to get the outrage and resulting infighting that they want.

Actual Otherkin were victims in that too BTW. And yes they exist and no most of them don’t see themselves as “just like [false ideas about] trans only species”, or didn’t before that became a sort of idea-meme or whatever they’re called, planted by trolls. Yes, the sense of having a different body than they should is there for some of them, but that’s hardly an experience exclusive to trans people. And most of the stuff I’ve heard against Otherkin is horribly, terribly, destructively ableist – also to the glee of trolls everywhere. They love it when you tell Otherkin that they should get locked up in psychiatric wards or see a psychiatrist (many Otherkin actually have psychiatrists who tell them that being Otherkin is not actually a problem in and of itself, mind you, although some psychiatrists treat it as a delusion) or “get help” or whatever. So if you want to please asshole trolls, by all means keep trashing Otherkin and plural systems and other people who have INTERNAL experiences of themselves that you don’t understand.

(That’s what gets me about the anti-Otherkin and anti-plural bullying. It so very psychiatrically ableist, and it’s also so very ignorant about what those things are. Both of them are about a person’s internal sense of themselves. You can’t really say a person’s internal sense of themselves isn’t, or shouldn’t be, what it is. Like, how can you count the number of people/identities one body has? Can you? Can you say it should be only one? How do you know these things? Did you know that plurality has been documented extensively for centuries, attributed to all kinds of things? Can you say that a person’s internal sense of themselves shouldn’t be non-human? (We’re sometimes talking about things like “the soul” here, which nobody should even claim to understand.) Mind you I’m not fond of the Otherkin community at all, but that’s not because of their identity, it’s because of the community dynamics.

I was someone who identified internally as nonhuman for most of my adolescence, I see it as wishful thinking on my part as a way to explain my autism-related alienation from the non-cognitively-disabled world, but I needed that back then and it was not unhealthy as a coping mechanism. I know even the idea that it can go away or “just” be a fantasy or a coping mechanism or wishful thiking is offensive to some Otherkin (another reason I’m not fond of the community itself), but fantasy and coping mechanisms are not evil things that need to be stamped out by the nearest psychiatrist. If anything psychiatry made me dig in my heels and claim to be an elf for longer than I would otherwise have, because I felt like it was an act of resistance against some truly evil people who branded me delusional and abused me during therapy. (I knew I wasn’t an elf, but I thought if I tried to be one and tried to believe then maybe there was a tiny chance of it coming true, and that was sometimes all that got me through the day, the idea that I had a people somewhere I had been lost from and would be able to come back to one day. So to all outsiders it looked like I believed it rather intensely. I didn’t run into the Otherkin community until I was almost done with this, in fact it was the Otherkin community combined with finally beginning to understand my autism diagnosis, that finally convinced me to drop it altogether.)

Most of the more outrageous Otherkin claims are likewise trolls, or else planted in the Otherkin community by trolls so they could watch Otherkin and trans people fight it out. It bothers me that people can’t seem to tell the difference – that’s just a victory for trolls and bullies.

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