This ain’t your granddaddy’s psychosis.
If you have yet to be introduced to, perhaps, the strangest of all LGBTQ+++™ identities (no small distinction) known as “otherkin,” here’s a brief introduction via failed Social Justice™ outlet Vice (emphasis added):
“I feel my selfhood to be discrete from this body. It’s not inherently me—it’s just a vehicle I’m operating. Plus, what does it mean to be human, anyway?”
Riviera identifies as a dragon. He decided this 15 years ago after having what he describes as prophetic dreams of a past life. As an “otherkin,” he is one of the hundreds of Australians who identify as another species—whether from Earth or myth.
Sitting on the grass outside the University of Melbourne, Riviera shows me a large handmade magpie head. “I feel like there is a mix up between otherkins and furries in the media,” he says. “For many otherkin, it’s a quiet spiritual background to their lives, and not something that they can ever switch off.” He puts on an elaborate headdress, explaining that making and wearing costumes is a central part of acting out of his identity. Meditation, ritual dance, lucid dreaming, and trance work also factor in.
Talk about stretching “spirituality” to its conceptual limits!
Note that pseudo-religious terminologies at play. This kind of stuff is largely a replacement for conventional religion in the aftermath of God’s figurative death in the West. How many Quakers or Amish, after all, would become “otherkin” even if they were exposed to the concept via Chinese-owned social media, which they are fortunately not? They have already found an identity and source of meaning — one that they are seemingly content with.
Related: Trans Rights Means No Rights at All
As Vice goes on to explain, there is substantial overlap between more mainstream transgenderism and what some call the “trans species community”:
The debate between transgenderism and otherkin is one area Miranda would like to see evolve. “It seems that many people of the transgender community think that otherkin is a mock version of transgenderism and are very hateful of it,” she says. “This is not the case for us of course, as many of us are in the LGBT+ community.”
Riviera, who is both otherkin and transgender, says the “raging debate where people think that otherkin are appropriating transgenderism is something that I find a little bit frustrating being trans myself.
The otherkin individual below, who self-identifies as a bird, discusses a concerning syndrome called “wing dysphoria” and likens the experience of feeling non-existent wings to the “phantom limb” phenomenon experienced by amputees.
This person sometimes identifies as an animal and not a human and suffers from “wing dysphoria” pic.twitter.com/BzHFzRpqZo
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) July 25, 2023
Social Justice™ people are apparently also now derogatorily referring to their mates as “nesting partners,” as if they are birds. The term is apparently meant to indicate that the woman in the video has no special attachment to her primary mate (she is polygamous) because, in her words, she doesn’t believe in “relationship hierarchies” in which any one of her numerous mates might take precedence over any other.
I am left with no choice but to leave you with the prescient words of Terence McKenna.
“It’s only going to get weirder. The level of contradiction is going to rise excruciatingly, even beyond the excruciating present levels of contradiction. So, I think it’s just going to get weirder and weirder, and weirder, and finally it’s going to be so weird that people are going to have to talk about how weird it is. And at that point novelty theory can come out of the woods, ah, because eventually people are going to say, “What the hell is going on?”… The systems which are in place to keep the world sane are utterly inadequate to the forces that have been unleashed.”
—Terence McKenna
