as small as a world and as large as alone

9:56pm August 8, 2014

arctic-hands:

adorablegalaxies:

hey if someone says something like “stargazing offends me bc I’m spacekin” or “mowing your lawn is murdering plantkin!!!”, chances are they’re a troll blog bc not many otherkin I know actually say these things and i sure as hell don’t

this has been a psa thank u

What is otherkin?

Complicated to explain. But people who feel that their soul is nonhuman, or that they are nonhuman, or something like that.  The butt of way too many jokes, and seemingly an acceptable target for everyone.  The fact that they’re not technically oppressed means the SJ community won’t protect them and may even join in with the bullying, and the trolls love to set the two communities against each other by inserting inflammatory stuff like “being otherkin is just like being trans except species instead of gender” which is not a universal otherkin belief but to listen to some SJ people you’d think it was.

I used to be involved in the Otherkin community because of what I ultimately determined to be a fantasy that I was a sort of woodland elf.  I didn’t like the community much and there were some fucked up ideas floating around.  But they do not deserve the bullying they get, or the acceptable target status they have in most communities.  What bothers me the most is the “You’re not oppressed so you’re not worthy of protection against bullying” thing.  To me, if you’re a person, you’re worthy of protection against bullying.  And there’s a lot of fringe, non-oppressed groups that I’ve termed ‘hateable’ because of this exact dynamic – they are not always oppressed (although many may be, for instance many Otherkin experience psychiatric oppression), but they experience hate and nastiness on a scale way out of proportion to anything they’ve ever done to anyone.  Which is usually nothing.

See also: furries, furry lifestylers, therians, non-DID or non-trauma-split plural systems, soulbonders, and various other people who’ve been declared acceptable targets for unbridled hate, without necessarily being oppressed.  (I say necessarily because the group itself may not be oppressed, but members of the group may be, in ways that play into their group membership.  Like a lot of these groups contain lots of people who are heavily psychiatrized, and that matters.)  I also think the “Are they oppressed or aren’t they?” thing is something trolls love because it pits SJ people against hateable people in a way that gets really ugly and trolls love that kind of social destructiveness.  It’s also important to note that the trolls that started these wars between Otherkin and trans people, were just as much trolling the trans people and just as much saying they were “crazy” as they were saying the Otherkin were.  Trans people have forgotten that because they came out on top claiming legitimacy and claiming that Otherkin (who were mostly trolls trying to provoke Otherkin into making provocative statements towards trans people) weren’t legitimate.  But really trans people were just as much targets as Otherkin when that fight broke out, and the trolls said awful transphobic shit that has been somehow forgotten.

4,621 notes