u can become fully immune to a lot of scaremongering transphobic headlines simply by being chill about otherkin stuff. ‘what’s next? children identifying as CATS and DOGS??’ why not! i hope they have a lovely time doing it.
obviously being trans & being otherkin aren’t directly equivalent to each other but like. a major part of LGBT acceptance is u know 'people should be able to do whatever they want so long as it’s not harming anyone’ so a lot of these slippery slope type arguments are just. very silly. it literally doesn’t effect me at all if people want to identify as animals. also people have been doing that for years and it hasn’t brought about the downfall of society yet so i think we are okay.
like. there’s a whole goddamn spectrum of becoming, from “momentary whim” to “this is who I am now.” most kids spend huge amounts of time being cats and dogs, knights and princesses, space heroes and cowboys, characters in the last book they read, themselves visiting the setting of the last book they read, doctors and mothers and astronauts and outlaws, grown men and women.
some of them grow up and become things they once played at being. some of them become things they played at being and then grow up. some of them are things they cannot become yet, and pass the time by pretending to be them. some people can’t become the things they are because it’s not physically possible (dog) or culturally available (medieval princess, superhero) and devote significant aspects of their lives to an acceptable mimicry or remaking (furries, ren faires, conventions).
some of these things are transient, and some of these things will become a permanent part of you, and even some of the things you hold and let go will still play their part in shaping you.
but, like.
we’re getting to the point of people unironically being the anti-imagination mom from Miracle on 34th St or the headmistress from A Little Princess (who stopped the servant children from having a little tea party in their garret with pretty decorations and saved treats), just downright ugly beliefs about forcing humans to stick to “their place” and demonizing even imagination as too subversive to be allowed.
and that’s appalling.