People ask ‘what does it mean to be Otherkin’? A better question is ‘what does it mean to be human?’ I don’t know what ‘humanity’ means to Otherkin, but I know what it means to other humans.
It’s easy to get this gist with language like ‘I’m only human’ or ‘kill babies, are you even human?’ Most people when they say human do not in fact mean the biology of it. To most being ‘human’ means several things.
Sentience: the ability for self-awareness and independent thought
Compassion: the ability to feel empathy and emotion for other beings
Fallibility: the ability to make mistakes and be wrong about things
Mortality: the ability, nay, inevitable eventuality, to age and die.
Can any of us deny taht any of those traits apply to us (well, maybe one per person is debatable)? Anyway, these are the traits by which humans judge the “humanity” of other species. In literature when meeting alien races and in every day life, but also it is the standard that we judge what animals we keep as pets, and which are fit to eat. The fewer of these traits an animal seems to poses the more inclined we are to consume it without guilt.
Whatever we were in the past, it seems we are now subject to the ‘human condition’.
