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cobaltdrgn(cw: contains frank descriptions of transgender and transspecies dysphoria, hatred of "weirdness", and freak shows)
20 years ago, even 10, even 5, people were vile about otherkin. (Herein defined as people who identify as not entirely human.) They had no sense of self-censorship: our community was a favourite target of trolls, the kids who ended up as channers, to sneak into or raid so they could report back with their hilarious stories about the “lolcows”. (I suppose at least they were characterising us as nonhuman animals? Hey, you gotta take your bright side where you can get it.)
But "mainstream" media was vile about us too. The only time you ever saw kin was as a spot on a furry documentary, probably made by one of those channels who do "weird people" shows. They were deliberately distorted to present the most salacious side of the story: the modern version of freak shows. Instead of making a spectacle out of physical difference, they made it out of mental difference, showcasing people with unusual and often taboo attractions, life goals, or minds. (In fact, one show on which otherkin appeared was explicitly called Taboo.) Maybe they still do: I don’t watch much TV any more. Either way, they took real, living people who were presenting their sincere selves, and made mock of them.
And yet, kin chose to appear on these shows voluntarily. I was one of those. Why?
Well, people used to join freak shows, too. In that case, it was likely to be for money. We didn’t expect to get paid, but we hoped that in some way, in some distorted form, we could get the message out there to any kin sitting behind their screens that there are others.
The documentaries that we filmed for felt tasteful, but as far as we know the footage was never actually used. We were certainly never contacted about it again, and we’ve never heard of our slot being out there, so we can only assume it didn’t make the cut one way or another. (I should probably be grateful for that, given others’ experiences, but then our system never was one for folks who keep quiet and toe the line.)
A couple of lines from these documentaries have even become memes: “On all levels except physical, I am a wolf”, and “When people ask me ‘How does it feel to be a cat?’, I’m like ‘How does it feel to be a human?’” These memes are amusing to many people, because the idea of someone being, say, a wolf on all levels other than physical feels alien and even laughable to them. However, these are perfectly accurate ways to describe the experiences myself and many kin feel, and aren’t funny to us at all. In fact, when I see either of those memes, my immediate response is to be mentally like “Yeah, you get it!”, before realising that the image was likely posted to make fun of people like us.
~
In my past 20 years as a “netizen”, I’ve seen a lot of cruel responses to kin. That’s to be expected: we’re a hard concept to grapple with. Indeed, one regular response of kin to people who say “I don’t understand this at all” is, “Neither do we!”
After all— imagine being a transgender teen, waking up every morning and avoiding the sight of your changing body in the mirror, shrugging on baggy clothes to disguise your hated frame, walking to school sullen and withdrawn because no one can see the real you. Maybe you try for a while to be hyperfeminine or hypermasculine, to model the ideals for a woman or a man, and fail utterly; maybe you don’t try at all, and completely lose interest in your appearance, assigned role, and even your life. Either way, the price of not transitioning is a heavy, heavy burden. Puberty blockers, hormones and surgery can literally be an alternative to suicide, and if not that, then decades’ worth of self- and body-hating. Perhaps many of you know this pain intimately.
Now imagine that sense of wrongness, of longing and confusion, of a life put on hold because you can’t start living as yourself until you feel like yourself. But there are no surgeries, no hormones, no treatments that will bring you closer to that feeling. Even if you won a million dollars, you could not buy it. Perhaps in VR, you can control an avatar of your ideal self— but you cannot feel the body that should belong to you; you cannot stroke a hand over your own arm and know the texture, cannot marvel at your newfound softness or roughness, cannot reach to touch facial features that are differently defined. You cannot know what your scent would be like, on these imaginary hormones that don’t exist. You crave them, your body craves them, these equivalents of testosterone and estrogen that would shape your flesh, over time, into something you can look at in the mirror.
Imagine that sense of rightness, of euphoria, wants you to look like… a cheetah.
You might well be baffled, denying the evidence. After all, male-female is a spectrum you can transition along (let’s just sweep all the not-on-the-spectrum nonbinary people under the rug, why don’t we?), but humans don’t just turn into cheetahs. The idea that there could be some long-lost legacy of cheetah in your blood is ridiculous, given that the evolutionary paths diverged millions, billions of years ago, before a cat was even a cat and an ape was even an ape. Maybe you don’t believe in reincarnation or souls, and so how you came to feel like a cheetah in a human’s body can’t be explained that way. You try to shake off the feeling, laugh it off, play it off. Get invested in something else. Grow up.
And yet you still feel like a cheetah in a human’s body. Now you feel ridiculous and immature.
Then on top of that, the transgender community— the only place that might have a snowball’s chance in hell of understanding you— thinks you’re lying, and actively harmful to them. You may well be trans on top of all that, and now you can only talk about one part of yourself around your trans friends, so you don’t get ostracised.
What do you do? You try to forget about it. You can’t forget about it. What do you do?
~
Transgender people don’t need to accept the concept of kin. People don’t need to accept any concept they don’t like or understand. We can cling to that, and all go around laughing at the people below us forever... or we can try and listen.
People, in general, are not kind to otherkin— transgender people included. You don’t need to change that. But I’d like to think you can.
20 years ago, even 10, even 5, people were vile about otherkin. (Herein defined as people who identify as not entirely human.) They had no sense of self-censorship: our community was a favourite target of trolls, the kids who ended up as channers, to sneak into or raid so they could report back with their hilarious stories about the “lolcows”. (I suppose at least they were characterising us as nonhuman animals? Hey, you gotta take your bright side where you can get it.)
But "mainstream" media was vile about us too. The only time you ever saw kin was as a spot on a furry documentary, probably made by one of those channels who do "weird people" shows. They were deliberately distorted to present the most salacious side of the story: the modern version of freak shows. Instead of making a spectacle out of physical difference, they made it out of mental difference, showcasing people with unusual and often taboo attractions, life goals, or minds. (In fact, one show on which otherkin appeared was explicitly called Taboo.) Maybe they still do: I don’t watch much TV any more. Either way, they took real, living people who were presenting their sincere selves, and made mock of them.
And yet, kin chose to appear on these shows voluntarily. I was one of those. Why?
Well, people used to join freak shows, too. In that case, it was likely to be for money. We didn’t expect to get paid, but we hoped that in some way, in some distorted form, we could get the message out there to any kin sitting behind their screens that there are others.
The documentaries that we filmed for felt tasteful, but as far as we know the footage was never actually used. We were certainly never contacted about it again, and we’ve never heard of our slot being out there, so we can only assume it didn’t make the cut one way or another. (I should probably be grateful for that, given others’ experiences, but then our system never was one for folks who keep quiet and toe the line.)
A couple of lines from these documentaries have even become memes: “On all levels except physical, I am a wolf”, and “When people ask me ‘How does it feel to be a cat?’, I’m like ‘How does it feel to be a human?’” These memes are amusing to many people, because the idea of someone being, say, a wolf on all levels other than physical feels alien and even laughable to them. However, these are perfectly accurate ways to describe the experiences myself and many kin feel, and aren’t funny to us at all. In fact, when I see either of those memes, my immediate response is to be mentally like “Yeah, you get it!”, before realising that the image was likely posted to make fun of people like us.
~
In my past 20 years as a “netizen”, I’ve seen a lot of cruel responses to kin. That’s to be expected: we’re a hard concept to grapple with. Indeed, one regular response of kin to people who say “I don’t understand this at all” is, “Neither do we!”
After all— imagine being a transgender teen, waking up every morning and avoiding the sight of your changing body in the mirror, shrugging on baggy clothes to disguise your hated frame, walking to school sullen and withdrawn because no one can see the real you. Maybe you try for a while to be hyperfeminine or hypermasculine, to model the ideals for a woman or a man, and fail utterly; maybe you don’t try at all, and completely lose interest in your appearance, assigned role, and even your life. Either way, the price of not transitioning is a heavy, heavy burden. Puberty blockers, hormones and surgery can literally be an alternative to suicide, and if not that, then decades’ worth of self- and body-hating. Perhaps many of you know this pain intimately.
Now imagine that sense of wrongness, of longing and confusion, of a life put on hold because you can’t start living as yourself until you feel like yourself. But there are no surgeries, no hormones, no treatments that will bring you closer to that feeling. Even if you won a million dollars, you could not buy it. Perhaps in VR, you can control an avatar of your ideal self— but you cannot feel the body that should belong to you; you cannot stroke a hand over your own arm and know the texture, cannot marvel at your newfound softness or roughness, cannot reach to touch facial features that are differently defined. You cannot know what your scent would be like, on these imaginary hormones that don’t exist. You crave them, your body craves them, these equivalents of testosterone and estrogen that would shape your flesh, over time, into something you can look at in the mirror.
Imagine that sense of rightness, of euphoria, wants you to look like… a cheetah.
You might well be baffled, denying the evidence. After all, male-female is a spectrum you can transition along (let’s just sweep all the not-on-the-spectrum nonbinary people under the rug, why don’t we?), but humans don’t just turn into cheetahs. The idea that there could be some long-lost legacy of cheetah in your blood is ridiculous, given that the evolutionary paths diverged millions, billions of years ago, before a cat was even a cat and an ape was even an ape. Maybe you don’t believe in reincarnation or souls, and so how you came to feel like a cheetah in a human’s body can’t be explained that way. You try to shake off the feeling, laugh it off, play it off. Get invested in something else. Grow up.
And yet you still feel like a cheetah in a human’s body. Now you feel ridiculous and immature.
Then on top of that, the transgender community— the only place that might have a snowball’s chance in hell of understanding you— thinks you’re lying, and actively harmful to them. You may well be trans on top of all that, and now you can only talk about one part of yourself around your trans friends, so you don’t get ostracised.
What do you do? You try to forget about it. You can’t forget about it. What do you do?
~
Transgender people don’t need to accept the concept of kin. People don’t need to accept any concept they don’t like or understand. We can cling to that, and all go around laughing at the people below us forever... or we can try and listen.
People, in general, are not kind to otherkin— transgender people included. You don’t need to change that. But I’d like to think you can.
