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It's interesting. I've been becoming more and more aware of Tumblr over the past few weeks, and there's a very interesting movement happening there of all places that I don't see being mirrored in the rest of the otherkin community, and which I believe is very welcome.
Namely: the otherkin community is joining up with activists for social change. Mostly in the asexual and neurodiversity spheres, which themselves are slowly becoming recognised as raising serious issues of social imbalance and injustice.
We've got people like asexualheart blogging about why bigotry against otherkin and multiples isn't cool. We've got people like chasingcaribou blogging about why otherkin might not be oppressed, but they are treated with hate and hostility and expected to erase their internal identities without help or support. We've got people like amianym saying that having to hide a crucial part of one’s identity or having no social power is, irrefutably, oppression.
We've got different opinions, different debates, but none of it is centred around what people tend to think of when they think of otherkin talking about "oppression" and "rights": teenagers angsting about "fursecution". It's mature, it's well-thought-out, it's evolved; it's addresssing reasonable questions, like the right of people to be non-human-identified and how to express that in a world that is overwhelmingly human-cultured. Like whether non-human culture and expression deserves protections and allowances, whether it is right to erase its appearance in public. Like whether the very fact that we're not allowed to talk about otherkin seriously, not allowed to treat it as a serious identity, is a kind of erasure.
It's been a long time in coming, and I'm happy to see it. For all intents and purposes, this seems to be, finally, the beginning of otherkin identities being treated seriously in the activist sphere.
And why not?
Please spread the word about this, because this knowledge needs to become viral. That's how social movements take hold.
Namely: the otherkin community is joining up with activists for social change. Mostly in the asexual and neurodiversity spheres, which themselves are slowly becoming recognised as raising serious issues of social imbalance and injustice.
We've got people like asexualheart blogging about why bigotry against otherkin and multiples isn't cool. We've got people like chasingcaribou blogging about why otherkin might not be oppressed, but they are treated with hate and hostility and expected to erase their internal identities without help or support. We've got people like amianym saying that having to hide a crucial part of one’s identity or having no social power is, irrefutably, oppression.
We've got different opinions, different debates, but none of it is centred around what people tend to think of when they think of otherkin talking about "oppression" and "rights": teenagers angsting about "fursecution". It's mature, it's well-thought-out, it's evolved; it's addresssing reasonable questions, like the right of people to be non-human-identified and how to express that in a world that is overwhelmingly human-cultured. Like whether non-human culture and expression deserves protections and allowances, whether it is right to erase its appearance in public. Like whether the very fact that we're not allowed to talk about otherkin seriously, not allowed to treat it as a serious identity, is a kind of erasure.
It's been a long time in coming, and I'm happy to see it. For all intents and purposes, this seems to be, finally, the beginning of otherkin identities being treated seriously in the activist sphere.
And why not?
Please spread the word about this, because this knowledge needs to become viral. That's how social movements take hold.