Otherkin News - Rules version 1.1

[frameacloud]

This post tells about the Otherkin News project, the code of conduct for participating in it, and the style guide for submitting news articles to it.

I. About this blog

1. Otherkin News is a collaborative, volunteer-run blog for sharing news for otherkin, therianthropes, fictionfolk, plural systems, and all sorts of alterhumans. We’ll talk about current events in our communities, and discuss newspaper articles that are about us. You can post links to news articles you've found that talk about otherkin, or new fictionkin essays that you or others have publicly posted. You can advertise here about your surveys of therianthropes, and your calls for submissions to alterhuman essay anthologies. You can share news that you've found that aren't about alterhumans but that you think are relevant to the interests and experiences of many of us. Everyone is welcome to subscribe and to submit articles to this blog.
2. Otherkin News is a community blog hosted on Dreamwidth, a social blogging platform. That means this blog isn’t a place where only one user posts, it’s a place where many users can post, similar to a web forum. Certain members of the community have a moderator role. Here is the official FAQ about Dreamwidth communities.
3. You don’t need to have an account on Dreamwidth to be notified of updates to this community. If you have an RSS feed reader, such as Feedly, you can paste this link into it to subscribe to our RSS feed: https://otherkinnews.dreamwidth.org/data/rss Or, if you use Mastodon, you can subscribe to this automated feed of it. A community moderator also manually links to the posts on Tumblr and on their personal Bluesky, if you use either of those social media platforms. Although we make these options available, we recommend that you read the posts on Dreamwidth itself, so that you don’t miss out on updates to individual posts and the discussions in the comments.
4. If you choose to use a Dreamwidth account to comment or post to this community, and you’re new to using this platform, then here are some resources that you can explore about it to make your experience better:
   1. Carmentalis’s guide to Dreamwidth for Tumblr users is a brief overview of what this platform can do
   2. SASO Referees’s guide on how to use Dreamwidth, which focuses on how to join a community and post to it
   3. You can install Solarbird’s custom theme that makes DreamWidth work well on mobile devices.
   4. Dreamwidth’s official FAQ is very thorough about all of its features.

 

II. Definitions

1.  Alterhuman. As defined by the person who coined it in 2014, Lio of the Crossroads System, alterhuman is “a category of personal identity which encompasses identification that is alternative to the common societal idea of humanity” (Lio 2014). This for people who identify as nonhuman as well as people who identify as human in some ways, or wholly human in an unusual way (Lio 2023 May; Alt+H 2017; Sivaan 2025). For brevity, this blog uses this as a very broad umbrella term for types such as otherkin, therianthropes, fictionfolk, plural systems, and more. Some of these are defined below. This is the purpose of the word and its intention to help us unite in celebration of what we have in common as well as what makes us different (Lio 2023 February). The reason why this blog doesn’t use this word in its title is because this project was started on Livejournal in 2009, years before the word had been coined, and before there was any umbrella term for all of these.
2. Fictionfolk is an umbrella term for real people who feel strong connections to fiction or a personal origin in fiction (Poppy 2023). We use it to include types such as fictionkin, fictives, fictional introjects, soulbonds, and more. Fictionkin identify as characters or species from fiction, and their community started in the early 2000s (House of Chimeras 2021 June). Fictional introjects are documented in dissociative systems as far back as 1985 (Kluft 1985 p. 185).
3. Otherkin and therianthropes are people who say that they are animals or other nonhuman beings. Both of these communities started separately from one another: otherkin began in a mailing list in 1990 (Arethinn 2021), and therianthropes began in Usenet in 1993 (House of Chimeras 2021 November). Individuals vary in whether they explain this in terms that are spiritual or psychological, but these are not religions (Proctor 2019, pp. 94-95). They also aren’t mental illnesses and don’t correlate with mental illnesses (Clegg 2019). Readers new to this topic can start with this short essay, A Simple Introduction to Otherkin and Therianthropes (Scribner 2024).
4. Plurality, also called multiplicity, is an umbrella term for any people who experience themselves as more than one self in one body all the time. It includes Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), formerly known as Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD). Plurality isn’t a synonym for DID, it includes experiences that are disordered and non-disordered, with origins that can be psychological, spiritual, cultural, natural, or mixed (Yarbrough 2018; Manchester 2021). It includes daemians, tulpamancers, walk-ins, fugue states, certain cultural traditions of spirit possession, and more.

II. Code of conduct


This section applies to posts as well as comments.

1. Abide by the Terms of Service of the host for this blog, Dreamwidth. Here are a few relevant points from that. Users of this site must be at least thirteen years old; TOS preamble. Don’t post material here that is illegal in the USA; TOS XI(8), XVII. Don’t post content that is invasive to the privacy of others; TOS XI(1).
2. We tolerate harmless differences, and we cannot tolerate intolerance. We don’t allow hatred toward people for their ethnicity, race, ancestry, nationality, religion, spirituality, weight, disability, mental illness, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, type of plurality, type of alterhumanity, or non-alterhumanity.
3. Disagreements.
   
   1. We don't have to agree with one another about everything. We each have our own views about politics, spirituality, queerness, alterhumanity, and more. We can talk together about them and we can agree to disagree. Do not expect others to think the same as you or to change for you. Getting along with one another while holding different opinions is essential for keeping our communities healthy places to be.
   2. Thoughtful debates and disagreements are all right in the comment threads, but quarrels and flamewars are not. Don’t insult one another here. Act with civility.
   3. Posts to this community do not necessarily reflect the views of its moderators.
   4. The moderators prefer to allow people here regardless of whether they personally agree with them to keep this a welcoming space for our diverse communities.
   5. Keeping this a welcoming space is also why the moderators reserve the right to ban accounts from posting and/or commenting at their discretion.
4. News reporting is a quest for truth and accuracy. Don’t uncritically spread urban legends, misinformation, conspiracy theories, alternative histories, or extraordinary claims that contradict consensus reality.
5. The alterhuman communities have no shared cosmology, spirituality, or religion. Each of us are free to have our own or lack thereof. Others in this community are not obliged to share yours. If you personally hold beliefs that differ from consensus reality, others in this community are not obliged to do so as well. Treat one another with respect even if you do not share or disagree with their beliefs.
6. The alterhuman communities have no leaders. We are all equals in the community. Even if your alterhumanity involves a noble title in your system’s inner world, an alpha role in your pack, a spiritually divine status from your past life, villainous exomemories from your source in canon, or years of experience as what some internet forums would deem a greymuzzle, others in this community are not obliged to treat you as anything more or less than an equal.
7. Do not plagiarize. One violation could result in your account being banned from posting and commenting. Familiarize yourself with Purdue OWL’s guide to avoiding plagiarism.
8. Do not knowingly post images or texts that were created with the use of generative artificial intelligence (genAI). One violation could result in your account being banned from posting and commenting. You can write articles that report on something created with genAI, if that’s relevant, in which case, please start your article with a content warning about genAI.
9. Do not advocate for what a court of law would consider to be sexual contact in real life with animals, children, or non-consenting adults. We will ban people who openly profess to advocate for or involve themselves in such abuses, even if they did not discuss it in this group.
10. Members may have their posting access removed if they promote what the moderators consider to be scams or abusive groups, that is to say, cults. We recommend that our readers learn how to avoid these by reading a useful document by The Dragonheart Collective, “Safety in Alterhuman Spaces,” not only to keep themselves safe, but to familiarize themselves with what our moderators see as red flags of abusive groups.
11. To make this blog accessible for people with disabilities who use screen readers, please give image descriptions and use conventional spelling for your messages. 

III. Style guide for writing news posts to this blog


This section is long because writing about current events needs to be handled with responsibility. Even this small and obscure blog about small and obscure communities is nonetheless public on the internet, and therefore has the potential to be seen by anyone in the world. How you write in public about real people and events can have effects on the reputation and privacy of individuals, readers’ life decisions, how outsiders see our communities, and how we later see our own history.

1. In Dreamwidth’s official FAQ, here are instructions for how to post to a community blog. If you prefer visual instructions with screenshots, user SportsAnime has those.
2. If you found some news that you want to post about here, you can write your own news article about it here. You don’t have to write a whole essay, though. Another option is to make simply a notification of news, a minimal post with just the links to the news, with their titles, authors, and dates.
3. When you submit your article to be posted to this blog, at first it will be shown only to the community moderators for them to approve or reject it. We usually approve posts, and reject them only if they’re totally inappropriate for this project, the guidelines for which are described below. If you’re still waiting for that decision after three days, that means the moderators haven’t checked Dreamwidth and seen the notification for it yet. In that case, you can nudge a moderator to let them know that it’s waiting by sending them an email.
4. Common courtesy. Everyone deserves this, even people who you personally dislike, and even people who have been convicted of crimes.
   
   1. Be compassionate about your writing and be careful of how it might have a harmful effect on its readers and the people that it’s about.
   2. Don’t use this blog as a place to make allegations against someone based on weak “evidence” such as screenshots, word of mouth, or rumors.
   3. Respect the privacy of private individuals.
   4. Don’t dox people.
   5. Don’t write offensive and intentionally untrue things about specific people (defamation).
   6. If you write about someone who has changed their name, refer to them by their current name, and don’t mention any of their old names. When writing about people who use a certain name within the alterhuman communities, use only that name without revealing their wallet name. Use their current preferred pronouns and refer to their gender in the way that they currently describe it without indicating that this is in question.
5. Be especially careful with news about minors. Respect their safety and their right to be forgotten.
   
   1. Don’t write anything about minors that could contribute to them being doxxed, harassed, or abused, or which is likely to continue to cause them trouble years later in their adulthood.
   2. If minors have been in the news, then you can record that those newspapers have reported on them.
   3. If you must write about a minor who is only known through social media or privately, because that is unavoidably a part of otherwise notable current events, please do so with taste and without giving their full name, location, or other information that would identify them too much.
6. Current events. Even if something happened a year ago, that's current enough. We'd rather see them written than not at all. That's realistic for this project done in spare time by volunteers. We're not staffed by journalists on the clock to turn a scoop into a published article on the same day.
7. Content warnings. As much as possible, please try to keep your writing tasteful to a degree that a media censor would consider to be, at most, rated PG-13 or rated T for Teen. If an article needs to be about topics that should only be seen by adults, or which would be very disturbing to the average person, or inappropriate for the average person to view at work or school, then please preface it with a specific content warning, and hide it behind a cut tag. We encourage the use of content warnings here because it’s respectful netiquette for welcoming a wide range of readers on the internet. In particular, it’s because a significant part of the intended audience of this blog are plural systems, who are often survivors of trauma.
8. Emotional tone.
   
   1. A neutral tone is good, but you don’t need to adhere to it strictly. This isn’t Wikipedia. We consider some concepts to be neutral which some places see as leftist political stances, because these are simply necessary for everyone to live. For example, we say Nazis are bad, transgender women are real women, and disabled people have lives worth living.
   2. If you want to talk more about your personal feelings about current events, clearly mark your writings as an opinion article.
   3. Sensationalism is irresponsible journalism. No sensationalism about current events, especially with the explicit or implicit effect of driving readers to give up hope, passively accept media misinformation, turn to in-fighting, or physically injure themselves or others.
   4. The original post itself should basically perform the role of a news article, or a notification of news, not the opening of a debate (those belong on a web forum) or a vent post (those belong on a personal blog). If you want to discuss your emotions about a piece of news, you can do that in the comments to the blog post rather than in the blog post itself. You can disagree and debate in the comments.
9. Check your facts. If you’re writing about something that was in the mainstream news or that was circulating on social media, look it up on…
   
   1. fact checking sites such as Snopes.com and Reuters Fact Check, which will tell you if the story is a half-truth or an urban legend
   2. MediaBiasFactCheck.com, which will tell you the reputation of the media source in general, and whether it tends to be factually accurate. (Although MBFC is itself reliable most of the time, be forewarned that it occasionally has its own bias in regard to certain topics, particularly LGBT rights and certain religious groups.)
10. If in your journalism you discover a crime or other problems of similar gravity, please handle that information responsibly. Document the evidence thoroughly in your own private files. Consider your options to consult a lawyer and take it to the authorities, and whether making your findings public on the internet may be inappropriate to do with your information. A blog isn’t a courtroom and doesn’t have the power to act as judge and jury to determine the guilt of the accused.
11. Title your article in a way that summarizes it without misrepresenting it.
12. Cite your sources.
    
    1. Acceptable: at least link to each web page that your information came from.
    2. Good: at the end of your article, give all your sources as a bibliography or reference list in APA or another style of your choice.
    3. Best: for each source citation, add a link to its archive in the Wayback Machine, because we must assume that all links will die someday. Annotate your bibliography by writing a couple of sentences about each source. Note which piece of your information came from that source. Remark on how reliable that source appears to be or whether you noticed any errors in it. Mention that source’s reputation according to MediaBiasFactCheck.com.

IV. Subject matter


Otherkin News is about all sorts of alterhumans and topics of interest to them. Here are some examples of topics that you are welcome to write blog posts about for Otherkin News. This section gives a lot of examples because we hope to inspire more people to write for this project and for you to understand what a wide variety of topics we welcome.

1. News which came from outside of the alterhuman communities but is relevant to them
   
   1. Most importantly, record any coverage in news, magazines, radio, documentaries, books, podcasts, academic articles, or other media about any sorts of alterhumans (publicity)
   2. News about animals and mythological beings, such as performance art pieces, research about mythology, legalities, scientific discoveries, and newly published history
   3. News about prosthetic limbs, virtual reality, and body modifications of sorts that would be relevant for alterhumans
   4. News about phantom limbs, dissociation, reincarnation, and other experiences that are often relevant to those of alterhumans
   5. News about changes to social media sites and web hosts that could have an impact on alterhumans who use these to share their creations and socialize with one another
2. Current events within the alterhuman communities.
   
   1. Results of surveys of the alterhuman communities
   2. Round-ups of links to the newest essays, web-sites, forums, mailing lists, and other creations in alterhuman communities
   3. Obituaries for members of the alterhuman community who recently died
   4. Closures or migrations of alterhuman forums, mailing lists, or websites
   5. Describe what happened at a recent convention, gather, meet-up, or other community event, with a focus on the details that will be useful to historians later, without doxxing anyone. For example, date, location, staff, the subject matter of presentations, and who presented them
   6. The history of how a new controversial discourse topic or flamewar recently emerged and expanded beyond one forum or site for alterhumans
   7. Fact checks for urban legends and other misinformation about alterhumans, whether this is circulating inside or outside of our communities
   8. If something happened in the communities a few years ago, but its story hasn’t been told yet, then that’s recent enough to write about in here. We would rather see someone write about an otherkin gather that happened two years ago than have no story about it at all. Ideally, make sure that it’s not being misremembered by collecting sources to cite, interviewing some people who were there for those events, or asking them to proofread your post to see if it’s how they remember it
3. Advertisements of certain kinds are acceptable here, if they are posted only once, if they are clearly marked as advertisements rather than news, and if they are for something that was created entirely without the use of generative AI.
   
   1. Upcoming events, such as conventions, gathers, and meet-ups for alterhumans. However, don’t ask people to use the comments to publicly reveal where they live
   2. Casting calls for documentary videos
   3. Surveys for alterhumans to take
   4. Make a call for submissions to an anthology, game jam, or other collaborative project about alterhumanity
   5. Fundraisers to support a project about alterhumans or a cause relevant to alterhumans
   6. Your own finished projects about alterhumans  

V. Subject matter that isn’t suitable for posting to this blog.  

1. Most news that is strictly about the furry fandom would usually be better placed elsewhere, because there are several blogs with a better specialty in that, such as Dogpatch Press. 
2. Advertisements that are repetitive, scammy, or not particularly on topic may be handled as spam. This may result in your account no longer being allowed to post here.
3. Fundraisers for individual alterhumans– such as medical GoFundMes– could overwhelm this blog if we allowed them, if our timelines on Mastodon are any indication. We encourage you to create another Dreamwidth community to share those instead. However, at the end of any news post that you write here, it’s all right to give a link for readers to tip you, for example, at your Ko-fi.
4. Posts that resemble a personal vent or a diary entry belong on one’s personal blog instead.
5. Posts that themselves look as though they came from a flamewar belong on a discussion or debate forum instead.
6. Please don’t make posts here to introduce yourselves or make casual conversation. These also belong in a discussion forum instead.

VI. Change log.

• Version 1. 2025 April 19. Posted these rules for the first time.
• Version 1.1. Some cleanup later that day.

References


Alt+H (September 21, 2017). What does ‘alterhuman’ mean? Alt+H (blog). https://web.archive.org/web/20230908220250/https://blog.alt-h.net/post/165592493965/what-does-alterhuman-mean

Arethinn (September 6, 2021). “A brief(ish) history of the word ‘otherkind’.” Mythsong. https://www.mythsong.net/history/wordhist.html

Carmenta (2015 November 1). Dreamwidth. Carmentalis (blog). https://carmentalis.tumblr.com/post/132342130218/dreamwidth

Clegg, H., Collings, R., & Roxburgh, E. C. (2019). “Therianthropy: Wellbeing, Schizotypy, and Autism in Individuals Who Self-Identify as Non-Human.” Society & Animals, 27(4), pp. 403-426. doi: https://doi.org/10.1163/15685306-12341540

The Dragonheart Collective (2023 October 18). Safety in Alterhuman Spaces. https://dragonsroost.neocities.org/essay/edu/SafetyInAlterhumanSpaces.pdf

Dreamwidth (n.d.). Frequently Asked Questions. Dreamwidth. https://www.dreamwidth.org/support/faq

House of Chimeras (June 21, 2021 a). A Timeline of the Fictionkin Community, Version 1.0. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1w4vGsWkiGPjYtXvTe4PyCcZsPba1kb_p/view?usp=sharing

House of Chimeras (19 November 2021 b). A Timeline of the Therianthrope Community, Version 1.1. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jDmjl78hQ2BiQtzQMTV3yRQkrIgB9eUZ/view?usp=sharing

Kluft, Richard P. (1985). Childhood Antecedents of Multiple Personality. Washington, D.C: American Psychiatric Press, page 185.

Lio (2014 September 26). This will probably be my last post on semantics… Phasmovore (blog). https://phasmovore.tumblr.com/post/98482696958/this-will-probably-be-my-last-post-on-semantics

Lio (2023 February 19) Just for the record… XRDS (blog). https://x-rds.tumblr.com/post/709694807213211648/problemaddtic-thelunastusco-problemaddtic

Lio (2023 May 27). Anonymous asked… XRDS (blog). https://x-rds.tumblr.com/post/712949341799727104/i-dont-wanna-bother-you-and-i-guess-this-is-a

Manchester Metropolitan University (2021 February 9). Understanding Multiplicity. https://www.mmu.ac.uk/sites/default/files/2021-02/Understanding%20multiplicity.pdf

Poppy (January 24, 2023). “Quick guide to fictionfolk terminology.” Aestherians. https://aestherians.tumblr.com/post/707370073217695744/

Proctor, Devin (2019 May). On Being Non-Human: Otherkin Identification and Virtual Space. The George Washington University. https://search.proquest.com/openview/e156c24bf65c4efb0918a8db37433cce/

Purdue Online Writing Lab (n.d.). Avoiding Plagiarism. Purdue University. https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/avoiding_plagiarism/index.html

SASO Referees (2015 May 23). Guide: How to use Dreamwidth. Sports Anime Shipping Olympics 2017 (community blog). https://sportsanime.dreamwidth.org/3573.html

Scribner, Orion (May 25, 2024). A simple introduction to otherkin and therianthropes: Version 2.4.8. https://frameacloud.itch.io/simple-intro-otherkin-therian

Sivaan of Candlekeep (2025 February 18) Alterhuman is an umbrella term, not a synonym! LionDrakes (blog). https://liondrakes.tumblr.com/post/775848023623385088/alterhuman-is-an-umbrella-term-not-a-synonym

Solarbird (2018 April 28). Coexistence Alpha: a responsive mobile and desktop overlay for Dreamwidth. Life in the Convergence Zone (blog). https://solarbird.dreamwidth.org/1533020.html

Yarbrough, E., & American Psychiatric Association Publishing. (2018). Transgender mental health. American Psychiatric Association Publishing.