What Do All Alterhumans Have In Common?

Written by Max Biscuit-Machina on February 22nd, 2026.

(This used to be part of a reblog thread, but it's long-winded enough that I wanted to give it room to breathe. Check out Sora's blog though, he's got good thoughts!)

I recently read a post by my friend Sora (leo9ish, through-lines on Tumblr) about the way alterhumanity is often mistaken for a synonym of nonhumanity - and ve made an excellent point!

A lot of alterhuman identities seem to be viewed through the lens of species identity and apparent proximity to nonhuman identity.

People understand that being nonhuman makes you alterhuman, because otherkin and therians are the most recognizable part of the community - it's the most obvious way someone can be different from normal humanity, by not being the same species.

Unfortunately, this means nonhumanity is seen as the standard for other alterhuman identities to measure up to - the closer to nonhumanity someone is, the more accepted they are as an alterhuman. Put another way: the closer to humanity someone is, the less accepted they are as an alterhuman.

This is a problem, because most alterhuman identities are not nonhuman - they don't involve being a different species! But they're all judged against nonhumanity as a benchmark. It's something we've griped about before.

It got me thinking: if I'm not using species identity as a standard, how would I define an alterhuman identity? What do we have in common as a community?

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