They aren’t really. I mean some otherkin people are /also/ trans and due to their beliefs of where the otherkin stuff comes from they incorporate their kin identity into their pronouns because it makes them comfortable with themselves etc. (I can’t go into much detail about neopronouns since I don’t use them, I apologize.)
But other than the fact people can be both trans and otherkin they don’t correlate much.
So how does the otherkin community hurt the trans community?
Unfortunately there are a lot of trolls online who like to cause strife and disharmony. So they pretend to be otherkin and completely misrepresent who we really are. They troll along saying things like “I am pizzakin, my pronouns are cheese/cheeseself” because they like to warp what being an otherkin is into an expression of gender. And so to people who are unfamiliar with otherkin, it looks like we appropriate or blatantly make fun of the dysphoria and gender expression they experience. But what a lot of people do not realize (or just plain ignore because they want a safe reason to be cruel) is that otherkin is a spiritual/psychological identity and not a gender. Some of us are both otherkin AND trans* (I happen to be both). So otherkin do not harm the trans* community, trolls do. @inexplicablehanyou@fromfiction or @trashcats-palace may be able to expand or explain better if I missed something.
That’s basically it. Worth mentioning might be the few fringe who aren’t trolls and still conflate them. There are some actual kin (and some impressionable folks just trying to be) who are very new, very uninformed, and make really screwed up comparisons. The last one I saw was that “kin shifts are like being genderfluid!!!” mess, which is wrong for one thing, and rude to genderfluid people in the comparison. So that kind of thing does happen, and when it’s actual kin doing it then it’s the… mostly self-appointed responsibility of older/more experienced kin to correct them and explain why that kind of thing isn’t okay. But this is tumblr, and correcting people on plain facts is just opening yourself up for abuse. b:
The bulk of it does come from trolls though. It’s a plague. And all of this combines and allows already transphobic people to go “look, see, otherkin are CRAZY so I don’t believe in trans people either!”
