Teenage Alter-Egos and Online Personas

“Greed, selfishness, too much spare time and access to the internet can have a curious effect on some people. And when you throw in the modern tendency toward whining entitlement and the perpetual broadcast of every thought, feeling and inclination, something truly weird emerges: people who demand to be regarded and treated as things they are self-evidently not, such as white girls advertising to the world that they are ‘mentally black’ and tortured musicians who advertise their ‘true’ Romany identity despite having no gypsy blood in their veins whatsoever. ... To understand this bizarre world of people who believe they are trans-species or trans-ethnic or trans-cultural, it is best to start with the marginally less weird world of ‘furries.’ Furries are people who have created a ‘fursona,’ a sort of animal character to which they relate and which in many cases they leverage as part of their sexual identity, normally to overcome self-doubt or self-confidence issues. ... Yet furries are merely a stepping stone between normal people and online cultures where people reject their real identity entirely, because they say there is a mismatch between their mental identity and their physical bodies. The largest of these subcultures, after trangenderism itself, is known as ‘otherkin.’ ... Like furries, otherkin often create online avatars which they hide behind, but instead of keeping their real selves separate from psychosocial or sexual imaginings, they seem to believe that the character they have created is a truer reflection of who they ‘really are.’ Some otherkins believe they are literally not human, while others believe that only their soul is non-human and that they are trapped in the wrong body. It can sometimes look like an unintentionally funny free-for-all. But whether you think you are a reincarnation of a Cherokee man-beast, you think you come from a long line of otherkin field mice or you think your soul flew in from a parallel universe (we do not jest), anything is permissible in the ego-centric world of otherkin. .... And otherkin can sometimes believe they are very strange things indeed. Dragons, werewolves, angels, demons, elves, cartoon characters. It’s amazing what alienation from mainstream society can do to the imagination.”

“Not White in the Head: The Tumblr teens convinced they were born the wrong species, sex and even race,” Breitbart.com, Jan. 16, 2015

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