This is a surprisingly interesting question that I will probably now fail to do justice to.

If one of my male work colleagues expressed a desire to be a woman, and went through the process of trying to authentically look and behave like one, it would be weird, but it wouldn't be unprecedented. I have other work colleagues who are female. They communicate, socialise and locomote in essentially the same fashion. In the grand scheme of things it wouldn't be that much of a difference. Society would not collapse if every Steve became a Stacey and every Stacey became a Steve.

If one of my work colleagues expressed a desire to be a zebra, and went through the process of trying to authentically look and behave like one, that would be a problem. My workplace makes no accomodation for zebras. They'd have trouble with both the stairs and the lift. They couldn't read the employee handbook. They don't have knowledge of technical infrastructure, and even if they did, they lack the faculties for me to ask them to help me fix a server.

Zebras are not people. We can't collaborate with them as entities of legally equal status for mutual benefit. We don't even collaborate with them as entities of legally unequal status because they're not all that useful. Our society has no zebras in it.

If you say "I'm a zebra on the inside" while chilling with a Frappé in Starbucks, wearing shoes and telling the time and distinguishing human facial features, you're not performing zebrahood in the same way a transsexual performs another gender. You're just someone who says they're a zebra. Society doesn't have a way to accept that sort of person.

I have never before heard of "otherkin" or "soulbounders." There are dozens of comments here by people who apparently have, but I'm still inclined to think that my state of ignorance is more typical.

To the extent that there are systematic neurological differences that account for transsexuality, there are physically plausible means whereby a more male brain could develop in a female body and vice versa (the fact that both sexes produce both estrogen and testosterone to varying degrees, and it may happen (I propose no specific mechanism) that someone's brain might develop with more influence from the one that doesn't match the one that's controlling the development of their physical sex characteristics, etc.). But there's no plausible way that a human brain, in its early stages of development, could end up entangled with the information necessary to make it somehow inherently (say) a pony mind, let alone a unicorn mind. Most of the people who claim otherwise seem to argue that point based on spiritual nonsense and not much else.

Though honestly, it's not like I'd have any problem with it if we had the technology to turn a human body into a unicorn body and some people chose to make use of that. I certainly couldn't agree that there's any meaningful sense in which a person's true neurological self could actually be inherently unicorn rather than human, but I don't really consider that a necessary justification for allowing someone to live in the body they're most comfortable with.

One possible view is that the entire notion of "X identity" is broken, and things like "gender" and "species" are simply not applicable to minds. Anyone who thinks they got a "female mind" are wrong, regardless of if their body are male or female, because such a thing dosn't exist.

Another thing one could argue for is that there are no qualitative differences, but that there are objective classifications based on statistical correlation between physical and mental traits. This seems to agree with your intuitions: In a Turing test you can probably distinguish females and males in which case most transsexuals hopefully come out as the gender they consider themselves do be, otherkin that are not brain damaged come out as humans on account on being able to read or type in the first place, and fae is inapplicable because you cant find any real fae to run the test with.

A third view is that identity is just a set of suggestively named tags a mind can apply to itself, and every mind if free to chose what it wants. By this view "goth", "plumber", "female", "gay", "brony", "ratioanlist" and "black" are all the exact same type of label, and a pink-skinned person with a male body in white clothes who likes females, have never watched my little pony, and cant fix a leak if her life depended on it are able to call herself all those things and should be able to expect evrypony to treat her like it. While this is counter-intuitive and has obvious drawbacks, there are strong social reasons to consider this view.

I use all these definitions in different kinds of situations depending on context, and probably end up confusing them quite a bit. Having different words for them would probably be useful.

For practical purposes, assuming the first interpretation when someone says "identity" naively, and then using somehting like "apparent identity" (hard to find somehting politically correct there) for the turing test one and "presented identity" for the labels one might work. More suggestions on that welcome.

People generally respect doctors. Medical intervention can lend legitimacy to a condition.

Cisspecies representatives of nonhuman creatures have not stepped forward to speak about what their internal experience is like such that humans claiming to really be those species on the inside may be shown not to be making shit up.

If they did, it would be an empirical question whether your human-shaped Klingon-minded person reported experiences relevantly similar to regular Klingons.

Mostly, my way of dealing with these sorts of questions is to accept that category memberships exist in categorizing minds rather than in the things being categorized. Which means that when I ask whether Sam is a man or a woman or a male or a female or a dolphin or etc., I'm asking two questions:

• What are my criteria for membership in the categories man, woman, male, female, dolphin, etc.?
• How well does Sam match those criteria?

Of course, other people may have different criteria for membership in those categories. So the question arises of how we address those disagreements.

That's not a simple question, and I won't try to answer it here. But I do think it's helpful to understand that they are social question, like similar questions about categories like wife and husband and citizen and employee and etc.

Asking about whether Sam is really a man or a woman or a dolphin (or a wife or a husband or a citizen or an employee), as though there were some fact of the matter outside of the categories we agree on, can confuse that understanding.

If I had to place bets I'd say being transsexual is much more like being otherkin than it is like being a member of the opposite sex who has a misshapen body. I'd also happily bet that being homosexual is much more like being into BDSM or the various fetishisms than being in possession of the mechanism of attraction a member of the opposite sex typically has for one's own sex. Why? Because extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and "being a woman in a man's body" is an extraordinary claim without compelling evidence and the concept of a "sexual orientation" is also an extraordinary claim without compelling evidence. There are also clear parallels - and even overlap - between the various different communities that make categorising transsexualism and homosexuality with pursuits such as BDSM, fetishism, etc, compelling.

I don't intend any of this in a derogatory way. It just seems like there's a general explanation for all these things in terms of sexual development and the various sorts of interests it can lead to - some more encompassing and life-changing than others - that doesn't require the addition of mechanisms that would legitimise certain outcomes over and above others (i.e., the idea that a male-to-female transsexual is genuinely a woman in some sense whereas an otherkin or animal roleplayers are not genuinely what they might take themselves to be). It's also worth noting that there isn't even agreement within communities. Some transsexuals will identify strongly as male or female, some will identify as a third gender category or a special category of male or female, and so on. Equally, among the gay community you find all sorts of identifications, including those who strongly identify as having a sexual orientation in every way equal to heterosexual orientation, those who identify as straight men who have sex with men, those who merely take themselves to be indulging a kink, etc. There are differences among cultures, eras, and so on.

It's taken a lot of hard work to get to the point where homosexuality and transexuality (transexualism?) have been accepted at all, and transexuals especially are still at risk for being murdered.

I can think of two reasons why the political work has been done on sexual identity but not on species identity. One might be that people with marginalized sexual identities have more in common with each other than people with marginalized species identity have with each other, so organizing is easier for the former. The other is that various sexual identities aren't as distant from mainstream experience as various species identities, so what's being asked for is more comprehensible.

The work hasn't yet been done to convince any significant fraction of the general public that identity as a human is a thing which can be loosened up without disaster resulting, though I think the increase in respectability of science fiction and fantasy could be establishing a basis for the acceptance for otherkin.

I haven't heard of any sf set in a future where otherkin are accepted as people with normal variations of mind-- in other words, the tech for becoming an animal is no better than what we've got now, though plastic surgery is feasible and there might be some close-to-current tech sensory augmentation. Becoming a fantasy creature is visually easier, but other traits are mostly impossible. [1] I think that's a pretty cool premise.

This seems to be an argument that issues of publicly permissible identity are as much a political process as they are a rational look at a pre-existing universe.

[1] I talking with someone who found that the wolf ears on their Elfquest costume actually amplified sounds. It makes perfect sense-- all that matters is the shape-- but I was still delighted with the accidental intersection between fantasy and physics.

What is it about gender identity that separates it from fringe subcultures like otherkin, soulbonders, and whatever else?

Transsexuals have found a way to integrate themselves to the point that they can "pass" as their chosen identity, and that pretty much forced society to deal with it, either by declaring them "fakes" or by accepting them. Otherkin don't seem to generally suffer nearly the same degree of dysphoria, and can't presently manage to "pass" as a dragon.

The idea that gender is intrinsically derived from sex is not culturally universal, either. Quite a few cultures have male-bodied females, or female-bodied men. In most major English-speaking countries, you have to undergo transition if you're a male-bodied female and want to be respected as such.

Conjecture: identifying as a dragon is purely a matter of self-image, whereas identifying as a woman also carries an element of social role.

Our society already has established patterns for how women are treated, and a person who chooses to publicly identify as female is, in part, choosing to be treated in the way that society treats women.

On this analysis, a person who identifies as a cat in the sense of liking milk and saying mew would fall on the otherkin side of the line, but a person who wants to be treated as a domesticated pet would fall on the transsexual side of the line.

Here is a theory I have heard about the physical basis of transsexuality. I don't know if there is any evidence for it, but it does not sound impossible.

There are differences between the brains of men and women; there are differences between the bodies of men and women. These are physical differences, resulting from differences in the physical development process. (Thus far is uncontentious.) Transsexuality is what happens when the brain develops according to one gender and the body develops according to the other. This is what produces the experience that transexuals describe as being of the opposite gender to their body.

As I understand it, transsexuals have genuine neurological differences from their "biological gender". Certain features of their brains are structured in ways usually present only in the opposite sex. In this sense, they really are another gender "on the inside".

That said, I personally would try to accommodate otherkin if they consider themselves "really" a species that can easily map to a lifestyle. For example, If an "elf" wants to get surgically-altered ears, live in a cottage in the woods, caring for plants or whatever, that would be fine with me and I would strongly object to mocking them or trying to force them to live a normal life. If they believe they are a reincarnation of an elf from another dimension, I might try to persuade them that reincarnation is bunk, perhaps using the example of all the other people who claim to reincarnations of historical figures. But I would avoid referring to them as "human", except when it was clear that I was referring to biology.

I would guess that otherkin will become more accepted in transhuman environments where their bodies can match their claims.

I would be much more accepting of someone with wings calling themselves an "angel" than a regular human, I think.

Comparing furries/otherkin etc. with transsexualism is normally something you will hear as an attack from people that do not accept transsexualism. I guess you're just thinking about the issue very deeply and trying to understand all aspects of it.

In any case there is much medical research confirming transsexualism, although I don't know if causes are known/understood. The claims of a given otherkin need to be taken into account individually but if someone claims to be a mythical being in spirit there is obviously no genetic (or even scientific) basis for this.