you should've aimed for the neck >:}

I was raised with and by cats all my life. They are family, I am one of them. Even though I can't purr and my paws are so much bigger than theirs I understand them and they understand me.

until you aren’t following the mainstream media’s beauty standards,

until being yourself means not following human norms,

until you aren’t physically capable of expressing your identity.

Not all of the community has the privilege of age and/or a safe environment to be themselves ‘whenever and wherever’.

It’s unfortunate that social media latches onto representations of alterhumanity that appear as ‘harmless kids activities’. And if you are an adult, there needs to be a specific way of expressing your therianthropy that aligns with the harmless, docile, aesthetic nature of expression that is so common amongst younger therians.

Therian = someone who identifies as an animal (sometimes you'll see this defined as earthen animals only, but this is historically not necessarily part of the label - if it's animalistic, it qualifies)

Otherkin = someone who identifies as nonhuman (be that animal, plant, sapient nonhuman people, object, concept, etc.)

Connotatively (ie, in terms of associations and cultural nuances), there are some cultural distinctions as well. The therian and otherkin communities actually arose completely independently, and only later started interacting so closely that in many ways they've nearly merged.

The otherkin community originates from a few separate groups of elves, namely the Silver Elves and the Elf Queen's Daughters, both of whom originate somewhere in the 1970s (exact dates often difficult to pin down) and which then led to the Elfinkind Digest, a mailing list originally intended for elves but which quickly expanded to other nonhuman beings, within which the term otherkind (which would rapidly become otherkin, as far as I can tell due to typographical errors that accidentally got preserved in the lexicon) was coined to avoid the inconvenience of having to write elfin-/dragon-/orc-/hobbit-/etc-kind constantly within the Digest. The influence of these groups and communities has meant the otherkin community has always had heavy influence from New Age and neo-pagan philosophies, and has always leaned toward spiritual explanations - though certainly never exclusively.

The therian community, on the other hand, originates from a messaging board called alt.horror.werewolves, often abbreviated to AHWW within the therian community these days, in the early 1990s. While this messaging board was originally a fansite for werewolves, at a certain point people started turning up who felt themselves to be (were)wolves under the skin, and gradually that kind of discussion took over much of the board. (Not just wolves, either - some of the earliest weres I remember seeing in logs include a bat and, of course, the now-famous werePontiac.) If you've ever seen animal-people, particularly older ones, calling themselves weres instead of/in addition to therians, this is why - that was the original word we used for the concept. Culturally speaking, the therian community has always been very focused on the concept of shifts because of these origins - it is, if I'm not mistaken, where the otherkin community adopted that terminology from. The therian community also tends to be more focused on the animality of being non-human - which is why these days that's usually used as the primary distinction between otherkinity and therianthropy.

An upcoming anniversary in the otherkin community: On July 9, 2012, the word “otherkin” will have been coined 22 years ago. It was coined in the Elfinkind Digest, a mailing list which is active to this day. On that date in 1990, one participant, Torin, used the word “otherkin” as a variation on the earlier word “otherkind.” Both phrases were casually improvised as an abbreviated way of referring to people who identify as other kinds of creatures.  

(Source: Elfinkind Digest #71. The archive of this document is still extant, and I have read it. Thanks to the mailing list moderator R’ykandar Korra’ti for making this primary source available to me while I was researching our community’s history book, the Otherkin Timeline. Thanks to Torin for permission to share this information.) 

Right now, the word “otherkin” is nearly 22 years old. That means that any otherkin who are currently in their teens weren’t even born until after the word had been coined. There are lots of otherkin who have considered themselves to be otherkin, of a kind, even years before the word had been coined. Detractors sometimes claim that otherkin is merely a passing fad popular among youth, but this is evidently not the case.