This is really pissing me off
Stop saying that the term “other-hearted” was created to invalidate people or shove them out of the community.
“Other-hearted” began as “animal-hearted” on The Daemon Forum in 2006 when someone SPECIFICALLY ASKED what it would be considered if you strongly identified with an animal to the point of almost being a therian, but without really identifying as that animal in a therian way. “Animal-hearted” was proposed as a term BY AN ANIMAL-HEARTED PERSON. I even rememer specifically why–it came from a series by Tamora Pierce called The Immortals, which dealt a lot with animal identity.
Please understand that any time you might think to say that it’s a way to exclude people, that you are in fact not only excluding people yourself, but taking a word we coined for ourselves and saying that it’s being used to invaliddate us instead of give us words to describe OUR experiences which are DIFFERENT from those of therians, and otherkin and fictionkin in the case of other- and fiction-hearted people, terms which were added more recently to give more space to people with those experiences.
When you say that we’re a lesser, throw-away community, it hurts any chances we have of actually finding people that share our experiences to have discussions with, and it’s really pissing me off, especially as someone who *remembers very clearly when this term was coined.* Cut it out.
