AskTransgender

As far as I can tell, species dysphoria, otherkin, and related ideas are not related to gender dysphoria and natural variation in sex and gender. They are radically different, and we can't conflate one with the other (just like we wouldn't say trans-racial identity is similar or related to transgender identity).

I think the reason you might run into hostility is that the anti-trans movement tries to conflate transgender identity with otherkin identities. The public at large already has trouble accepting a transgender identity, despite the scientific evidence and the established cross-cultural and historical record of transgender identities, it strikes most people as wrong - even the idea of transitioning itself is considered immoral to the majority of Americans even as the majority signal support for gender affirming care. In that context, conflating trans identity with something even harder for people to accept (the idea that someone is authentically a different species, i.e. is not a human in their identity / mind) is a win for the anti-trans movement, who primarily want to show that trans people are illegitimate, indefensible, contrary to nature / reality / truth, and are in some way mentally delusional or ill because of their identity.

Matt Walsh, the far-right anti-trans activist, interviews Naia Okami in What is a Woman, his anti-trans "documentary." Naia is a part of the furry community and is a trans woman and identifies as a wolfkin, here is a clip I found.

Largely this kind of rhetoric is successful at convincing people that transgender identities are illegitimate.

We know even just transgender visibility generates harm to trans people, like from this interview with the trans legal scholar Florence Ashley in The Scientific American:

Trans culture is more visible today than it has been in the past. Does that help, or is increased visibility stirring up the anti-trans movement?

Florence Ashley: Visibility is very much a double-edged sword. There are good sides to visibility, of course. It helps people realize that they're trans. You have more access to trans narratives, which gives you more space to understand yourself, and that's very positive. But at the social and political level, it has been quite negative. We're seeing a lot more people who vehemently hate trans people, who are even willing to harm trans people. Whereas people who are favorable to trans people largely just leave us alone. And a lot of reforms that we were able to achieve with relative ease, in a less visible manner, are now being rolled back.

The trans backlash and moral panic is partially due to the increased visibility and exposure of the public at large to trans identities, and the right-wing anti-trans activists know they can push that alienation and moral panic further by connecting and conflating transgender identities with people who identify as other species.

All this said, even if the trans movement might have some pragmatic reason to maintain a level of respectability with the public, I don't want to ignore that respectability politics has a lot of downsides. Respectability politics is the idea that some within the community are more respectable than others (i.e. more palatable to the public), and this often leads to pressure for only those respectable elements to be considered valid or legitimate and to receive publicity and support. Undesirables are identified and ostracized from the group to protect the more respectable minority.

This is precisely how you end up with a concept of transgender people that you commonly see in the media: that trans people immediately and always knew their gender identity, that they communicated their identity as soon as they could speak, that trans children refuse to live as the gender they were assigned and insist to live the other way, and so on. (This narrative was on full display on The Problem With Jon Stewart a couple years ago, here is a clip.)

This narrative does describe some trans people, and notably it describes the trans people the public are most likely to have sympathy for, but it leaves a lot of trans people out of the picture (consequences of this include many trans people never realizing they are trans, and others being gatekept by others and being told they aren't trans). And even worse, the clinical guidelines for trans healthcare started with gatekeeping rules that aimed to maintain that kind of narrative about trans people. The Harry Benjamin rules were aimed at total integration of trans people into cis society, for example by suggesting trans people lie to cis people about their trans identity, to concoct false stories about a childhood they never had, and to even move to another town or city where nobody knew them from pre-transition.

So while we can't ignore the rhetorical and political impact that trans visibility has in generating backlash, we also can't ignore the nightmarish gatekeeping and oppression that results from an overly zealous focus on respectability. This is precisely what fuels transmedicalists and enbyphobia - which does result in people who have entirely legitimate gender identities and rights to gender affirming care to be mistreated or ostracized within their community and excluded from potentially life-saving care by medical gatekeepers.

All this to say, whatever problems there are with respectability politics, this does not make transgender identities and otherkin identities the same. There is an overwhelming medical and scientific consensus that transgender people exist, have valid identities, and that trans-affirming healthcare is safe and effective. There is now a significant body of evidence that explains the causes of gender dysphoria, as well as an extensive record of trans identities throughout history and cultures.

As I understand it, this is not the situation with trans-racial and trans-species identities. We are not in the same epistemic position with these other identities, we do not understand why people have trans-species experiences, we do not have the same evidence about the best ways to approach those identities from a clinical perspective, we do not even have a model for thinking about how a human could possibly know what it is like to have other-animal experiences. The philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote a famous paper called What Is It Like to Be a Bat? which poses problems about the limited capacity for human minds to comprehend other minds, for example to know what it is like to actually be a bat - who have consciousness but have perceptual experiences and qualia that humans will never be able to experience themselves precisely because they are not bats. Nagel's point is that human cognition allows us to try to imagine what it is like to be a bat (flying, navigating by sonar, eating insects), but this never allows us to actually experience what the bat experiences.

There is a lot to unpack about a claim that someone has a non-human mind inside a human body, and that situation is quite different (in terms of evidence, plausibility, etc.) than claims that a trans woman has the mind or identity of a woman. (It is not surprising to read that otherkin are seen as a kind of religious movement, and the animal identity for many otherkin is explained in terms of a spiritual experience.)

So while it's easy for me to say that otherkin and similar identities should be tolerated and respected out of simple principles of politeness, I do think they are unrelated to transgender identities and should not be conflated.

While I am not inclined to immediately assume you are trying to mock transgender identities by claiming to be trans-species, I also understand why trans people especially would be sensitive about this in a time of extreme anti-trans backlash and when trans-racial or trans-species identities are being exploited by anti-trans activists to de-legitimize transgender identities.

Online it is especially difficult to tell when someone is intentionally trying to undermine or corrode trust in transgender people, and it can be hard sometimes to discern a well-meaning and genuine otherkin person from a troll who is using an otherkin identity as a wedge, demanding the same tolerance, understanding, and validation in trans spaces as transgender people ask for, while knowing that otherkin identities generate disbelief, aggression, and are used to weaken support for transgender folks. Most otherkin are not trolls, and the overlap between otherkin and transgender identities is strong (especially since the transgender community has larger numbers of neurodivergent and plural people, which overlap heavily with otherkin identities).

tl;dr

• otherkin identities aren't related to transgender identities,
• we should tolerate & respect otherkin people engaging in good faith (i.e. not trolls),
• hostility towards otherkin from trans people in particular is probably due to otherkin identities being weaponized by anti-trans activists to whip up moral panic about transgender people.