Kinfluid

Kinfluid, also called fluidkin, is an experience where one is polykin, but their identity within being otherkin changes. Many polykin experience feeling one kintype the strongest at one point in time, then after some time passes a different kintype becomes stronger felt and the previous one falls in intensity. This is in contrast with other polykin who experience their kintypes in tandem or as hybrids. Kinfluidity may also be experienced as one feeling nonhuman some of the time and human the rest of the time, or feeling nonhuman in waves. Those who are not polykin and only identify as one kintype may experience kinfluidity and may call themselves kinfluid if they experience fluidity between their kintype and humanity, though it is much more common among polykin. Many polykin who experience this do not label it as kinfluidity, seeing it as just a facet or being polykin or otherkin in general.

History of the term

The term fluidkin showed up around at least 2015, being seen in the Smogon forums in June of that year in a thread populated by troll spam and offensive jokes. The Smogon user who used it, and the users who talked to them, seems to have been joking about identifying as "Nazi Pikachu" or "Pokemon Hitler", and at this point in the thread there are anti-Semitic jokes and slurs. It gained traction in the following years, seeing use in 4chan's /tg board in 2016 to mock users of the microblogging site Tumblr and later on in a deadhorseinterchange forum in 2017 to joke about an anti-sjw content creator being a transfeminine otherkin. It was used to mock transfeminine people, nonbinary people, and otherkin, while also deriding users of the blogging site Tumblr.

It is not known when the term kinfluid was first coined, but its earliest known use in otherkin spaces on Tumblr was in May of 2014 when user asraith posted to advocating for unity between one's humanity and kintypes. A few months later, Tumblr user panthegenderfreak posted several times about experiencing a sense of genderlessness when feeling shifts, and talked about using or considering using the term kinfluid or other terms such as polymorph to describe that feeling, though these posts went unnoticed. Later, in 2015, Tumblr user radicaldudeposts-blog made a post complaining about LGBTQ+ and otherkin users of the blogging site, using the term kinfluid to mock genderfluid and otherkin people. An anonymous ask was sent to the tumblr blog ask-pride-color-schemes in 2017, asking if there was a term for a gender that is fluid alongside kin shifts and that if there weren't any good words they might use kinfluid to describe themself. A moderator of the blog, named Tath, responded to the ask saying that the anonymous user could use kinfluid, as Tath had never heard of any label covering that feeling.

In 2018 the term kinfluid was recoined by an unknown user to describe a kingender that is "fluid between kingenders" or "that is rapidly fluid due to being connected to one's kintypes". A flag was later designed for it by Tumblr user emojiselfpronouns, and later a second flag was designed by Tumblr user nebularomantic. In emojiselfpronouns's original post coining buns flag, they mentioned that kinfluid was already a term meaning "having multiple kintypes and shifting between them", and noted the term was not in popular use enough to impact kinfluid being picked up to describe a new kingender term, but that it might pose a problem anyway and suggested kingenderfluid, kindigender, and kindifluid as alternatives. This indicates that kinfluid was already being used within the otherkin community by some members to describe shifting between kintypes within 2018, enough to cause ambiguity between the two definitions and warrant emojiselfpronouns proposing alternate terms for the kingender experience.