‘orthohuman’: an emerging antonym to ‘alterhuman’, and its antecedents

this is one of those things that i can easily imagine being lost to time in 10 years if i don’t record it now, so that’s what i’m doing! when ‘orthohuman’ inevitably becomes the accepted antonym for ‘alterhuman’ (and i think it will) i'm sure we’ll all want to look back on how that happened.

so this post exists to document early uses as i see them pop up as well as some surrounding context and prior attempts to create words to do this job. the fact that a few people have independantly settled on ‘orthohuman’ now is a good sign that it’s a term that makes sense, and that’s why i think its use will increase. let me know if you've seen it, or any discussion of other terms, elsewhere!

instances of the word in use

• december 15th, 2021: mord, on the movie ‘Wolf’ also impacting non-alterhuman transgender people.
• ca. august 2022: me, talking about some of my experiences of body dysphoria as a pluran/extranth, again compared to non-alterhuman transgender people.
• april 11th, 2023: mord uses the term discussing this video on the alt+h discord server — “[...] obviously getting back in touch with your hunter gatherer programming is not the same as getting in touch with your inner nonhuman animal but they are both getting away from orthohuman drudgery".
• december 26th, 2023: a formal definition post by coining-stars. this post also references another person using it (good job for citing your sources!), but i can't view the link because that blog is set to login-only.
• march 4th, 2024: otherhearted-culture-is uses the term in relation to ‘normal’ degrees of liking and relating to animals, debating if otherheartedness can include them too.

history and context

so mord is convinced he's the person that first came up with ‘orthohuman’ in this sense. he's clearly the first person to appear on this list. but we can't say for sure! as he told it, it evolved on the alt+h discord after multiple discussions about what to call non-alterhumans, but the single instance of the word we actually found when we searched for it is the one included above.

there was repeated discussion of what to call non-alterhumans in the discord, and it's possible that it was a sort of seed for this. in any case, the discord conversations we have preserved show us how people decided that we did need a word for this, why, and what didn't work.

to start with, the question of what to call people who aren't otherkin or therians or some other nonhuman subculture is most definitely not a new one. if you were elfae or adjacent, you might like ‘mundanes’. draconics were partial to ‘greggils’. of course, most people just used ‘humans’. this doesn't really work for the alterhuman community though, because lots of alterhumans are human (we remember that, right?). ‘non-alterhuman’ also immediately presents issues because there's a difference between alterhuman as a descriptor and alterhuman as a community or personal label. we're looking to describe people who have no experiences which could be considered alterhuman whatsoever, not all the nonhumans and plurals and whatevers who reject the term for themselves.

the prevailing term in the discord for a while was “hegemonic human", which it seems like marron just popped off the dome at some point. and it pretty much plugged that gap right up until the server closed! it was agreed, however, that that wasn't super catchy. that might have affected both my and mord's choice to reach for a one-word term, because “hegemonically human transgender people" is so cumbersome that it's kind of silly.

maybe ortho- came by a process of elimination because a lot of these prefixes — cis/trans, hetero/homo, allo/a — had already found their pairs. alter- doesn't have a direct antonym, because it specifically means an opposition to or a variation on the thing in question (we remember that, right??). ortho-'s antonym is typically taken to be hetero- (as in ‘heterodox') but since The Straights already took that one, its partner is conveniently free!

it just makes sense, to me. it clearly makes sense to a lot of people, because as far as i can tell at least two of these originations occurred independantly of each other. i don't want to use the word ‘coining’. i didn't write this post to make sure someone is credited, because i don't think that's the important part of what's happening here. i want to document an idea in motion, and the multiple people who have propagated these seeds by actually using them, because that's where the real life of a term is.

check back in with me in ten years and we'll see how big it is then!