#to any of my mutuals who've been getting dragged into this; i am SO sorry

[fonkeloog]

❤️‍🩹

[a-dragons-journal]

About your post about phrasing and using kinning as a verb, altho I'm someone who's realized they'd been nonhuman and fictionkin since the early 2000s, I find myself very often using kinning as a verb when talking to friends because that's the language they know and it's been an uphill struggle to use "older lingo" (for lack of a better term) to talk with them about kin related stuff. On one hand I feel kinda bad about using kinning style language but in the other I feel like I've gotten looser in caring what terms people use as long as the communication is there. And if kinning gets adopted into our lingo so be it, imo. Its been a bit difficult for me to come to that conclusion though, and I fought it for a long time, being very stubborn about language. And then I find myself defending loose definitions and words in queer identity and think that maybe, just maybe, I'm being a little TOO stubborn about "kinning" and idk I guess i lost whatever point I was originally here to make, sorry...

Yep, which is why I wholly do not agree with the idea that someone using the wrong grammar automatically means they're not actually serious. That can and should coexist with thinking it's probably not something we should actively encourage, in my opinion. "Someone using "kin" as a verb does not automatically mean they're not actually otherkin and you shouldn't be an ass to people about it just on principle" and "people using "kin" as a verb has contributed to the trend of people badly misunderstanding what otherkin means and thinking "kinning" means relating to something, then turning aggressive on the people who actually identify as their kintypes" are not mutually exclusive statements.

And yeah, I have had that last thought as well, but like... "the lines between one identity and another aren't always clean" is not the same as "calling a hobby by an identity word isn't misinformation at all actually". Even where there actually is blur between what's play and what's actual identity, like with the relationship between drag and the transgender community, there's a history there of that connection where there isn't one with the people trying to shoehorn themselves into the word "kin." Not wanting people to call their "haha mood" characters "kins" is not pushing people out of a community they've always been a part of, it's trying to stop people who've never been part of a community from taking it over and erasing the people who originated these words entirely. 99% of the time, queer identity word looseness is more like the definition of the word "therian" (ie, whether it's hinged on whether your theriotype actually exists in our world, or if anyone who experiences animality "counts" as a therian) than like the KFF thing, in my opinion.

(And, frankly, yeah, there probably is blur and gray area between "actual" otherkinity and "kinning for fun" - which is why you may notice that I'm consistently telling people I am not the arbiter of identity and it's neither my job nor my right to decide whether they're "nonhuman enough"; if it's identity to them in any capacity, even if it's not the "typical" experience of nonhumanity, then that's all that matters to me. It's literally only the people who are explicitly saying themselves that it doesn't actually matter to them and isn't serious/genuine at all for them that I want to stop using a word that inherently means an actual identity.)

I don't know. Maybe there's hypocrisy here that I'm just not seeing yet. But at risk of pissing people off with the analogy choice, it feels frankly more like appropriation - ie, walking into a community and stealing and misusing their stuff when you're being repeatedly told to stop and that it's not for you, and then calling it "gatekeeping" when that community gets mad - than like gray-area word looseness. There's probably an argument to be made on both sides and, again, I am not the arbiter of truth nor am I perfect, this is just my opinion and my thoughts on the matter.