A handful of things I just want to say and forgive me if it sounds like I’m vagueposting anyone in specific I’ve just seen these things said in a number of places by a number of different people today and I honestly cannot find a good singular post to respond to with all of them in one place:
1) If your response to people not liking “kinning for fun” is “stop policing how other people understand their identity,” you have fundamentally misunderstood the problem. The entire problem is that it’s NOT their identity, and they’re explicitly stating that. Policing how other people understand their identity would be telling them that if they have more than [x] number of kintypes they’re not serious about it, or if they “don’t take it seriously enough” they’re not ~really~ ‘kin, not “hey if you’re explicitly saying you don’t actually identify as the thing in any way, why are you using the word that means you identify as the thing in some way”. (And don’t get me wrong - the former definitely exists, but it’s not what the KFF argument is about. That’s a separate argument entirely (and it is shitty and gatekeepy to arbitrarily decide that someone who is telling you they actually do identify as something actually doesn’t do it seriously enough for you) and I am a little tired of people conflating the two, honestly.)
2) “people find out they’re otherkin through roleplay a lot, so “kinning for fun” in that sense is okay and valid” - the former statement is true, but it doesn’t actually support the latter imo. Roleplay is great, and people absolutely explore identity using it a lot - but that doesn’t mean it’s the same thing as identity. Someone playing a character of a different gender in D&D might be a step in them figuring out they’re trans, and it may even be a sign that they’re trans, but it doesn’t inherently make them trans and it would be kind of insulting (and just. objectively incorrect) to call it “transing”, y’feel?
3) One of the biggest differences between, like, queer exclusionism and syscourse versus this whole thing (since I keep seeing this comparison occasionally), even ignoring the whole “nowhere is anyone telling KFF they’re wrong about their own experiences, just that the actual word they’re using is Not It” aspect, is that exclusionism is driving people out of spaces and communities they’ve historically been a part of. As far as I am aware, and please correct me if I am wrong here, otherkinity has always and exclusively been about being your kintype - people who just relate to a thing have, as far as I have ever seen in all my reading, never been a part of it. It’s not people suddenly being shoved out of a community they’ve historically been a part of, it’s outsiders trying to shoehorn themselves into words that were never meant to describe their experiences and getting mad when they’re told “hey, that’s not what that actually means.” (At risk of a controversial comparison here, it’s not m-spec lesbians suddenly being pushed out of the word “lesbian” because they don’t fit an increasingly narrowing label even though they were historically a part of it, it’s white people trying to insist that they’re “smudging” and that the spirits they’re interacting with are their “totem animals” even when they’re being repeatedly told by Native people that no, you have misunderstood what those words mean, stop misusing them that way, please use these other words that actually mean what you are describing instead. Obviously with a little less weight courtesy of the history tied in with cultural appropriation, but like - you get my point.)
There has to be a point at which a community is allowed to go “hey, you’re not allowed to try and force the word we created to describe a specific phenomenon to include a hundred other things that have very little in common with that specific phenomenon, or it becomes impossible for us to actually talk about our own experiences clearly because suddenly words mean borderline nothing.” I am all about inclusion, but words have to mean something or why do we have them at all? There are at this point literally dozens of other words for the things “kinning for fun” is supposed to mean - there are not other words for actually being nonhuman, which is the entire reason we created these words to begin with. If you want an umbrella term to cover all these things, that’s what “alterhuman” is for - we seriously do not need to be trying to force “otherkin” to be the umbrella term “alterhuman” was always supposed to be.
