im sorry if youve talked about this before but it kinda just hit me. dunno if anyones pinned this exactly but my working theory as to when alterhumanity started being confused with gender issues is when antis decided to kill two birds with one stone and say shit like “i identify as a rabbit and my pronouns are bun/buns/bunself uwu” to troll both otherkin and people who use neopronouns. and it got perpetuated bc its easier to buy into trolls when its something you dont know about lol
That’s basically my theory, nonnie. If I had to really guess, I’d say they started being conflated like that a long while after “otherkin” had become a joke online, so the definition was already twisted to anyone first hearing about it. And since you can’t usually count on people on the internet to research jack shit about something they don’t like or think is too weird (you gotta spoonfeed links, sigh), from there it became easy for people who were also transphobes to take the “identify as” bit and run with it.
And then you have people who try to be supportive of whatever issue they think it’s related to (again without doing any decent research, and these days not off tumblr especially), and eventually people who are actually effected by that issue get mad at us for assuming we’re trying to enter their spaces, lol
