Len Park/OutWrite
This article was originally published in our Winter 2024 print, Freaks.
Content warning: queerphobia, including transphobia, homophobia, biphobia, anti-furry and anti-drag rhetoric, the use of the f-slur
When you think of furries, what comes to mind? Fursuits? Furry porn? People with cat ears being walked on leashes?
Comparatively, when you think of us queers, what comes to mind?
I want to preface this by making my intentions absolutely clear: I am advocating for furries.
“Why?” you might ask. I will put it bluntly: we are, in many ways, like furries — if not furries ourselves.
The way anti-furry stigma manifests is strikingly similar to past and present sexually-motivated constructions of queerness as an illness and a cause of moral panic.
In the same way that homosexuality and transness were deemed mental illnesses, identifying as a furry is pathologized under “species identity disorder” (SID), a diagnosis coined in a 2008 study led by Dr. Kathleen Gerbasi, a professor of psychology at Niagara County Community College. Her diagnostic framework centers on furries’ answers to two questions: “Do you consider yourself to be less than 100% human?” and “If you could become 0% human, would you?” Gerbasi describes furries who answered “yes” to both of these questions as “distorted unattained” in reference to a distorted sense of human identity and an unattained non-human identity, suggesting that “This type of furry has certain characteristics paralleling gender-identity disorder.” In a 2011 paper, “Furries and the Limits of Species Identity Disorder: A Response to Gerbasi et al.,” Dr. Fiona Probyn-Rapsey, a professor in the School of Humanities and Social Inquiry at the University at Wollongong, Australia, highlights how the classifications of SID described in Gerbasi’s findings are similarly problematic to that of gender identity disorder (GID). She points out how cisheteronormative assumptions of binary gender in the diagnostic criteria for GID are mirrored in Gerbasi’s diagnostic criteria for SID, asserting that SID “is based on unexamined assumptions about what constitutes ‘human’ identity and regulatory fictions of gender identity.”
A core stereotype is that being a furry is a fetish, mirrored by bigoted generalizations that suggest that gay men and bisexual people are particularly promiscuous. In a 2011 international online survey by Furscience, kinship, escapism, and entertainment rank higher than sexual attraction to furry content as motivators for engaging in the furry community. Still, it’s true that in addition to these motivations for their engagement with the furry fandom, “one-third of furries say that sexual attraction to furry content is a motivator of their participation.” Many accounts that discredit the apparent shock of this stereotype point out that “like with any other fan interest (video games, comics, etc.) there are sexual themes present.” Certainly, people get turned on by all sorts of characters. They might even have sex in fandom-cosplay getups. Humans, as animals themselves, have sex. Need I say more?
Further, politically conservative rhetoric groups furries with queer people in that they are “infecting the children.” In a clip from Joe Rogan’s podcast, Rogan states that an unidentified school “had to install a litter box in a girl’s [rest]room because there is a girl who’s a furry.” Republicans disseminated this claim between 2021 and 2022 in attempts to push anti-trans legislation. A Google search of “litter boxes in school” pulls up a handful of articles that find that this hoax is unfounded. Other anti-furry sentiments use language similar to anti-drag legislation from this past year. In an X (formerly known as Twitter) post by anti-trans internet personality Graham Linehan, Linehan writes, “Furries are grown men who dress as cartoon characters so children will trust and approach them.”
Crucially, the majority of furries are queer. According to a 2020 survey, only 10.1% of furries identify as “straight or heterosexual.” 12.5% of furries identify as transgender, 12.5% identify as non-binary, 4.2% identify as genderqueer, 5.6% identify as genderfluid, and 2.9% identify as agender. For reference, 0.5% of U.S. adults identify as trans.
Queer furries describe the fandom as a safe haven for them. In anecdotal accounts from a YouTube documentary entitled “The Fandom: A Furry Documentary,” queer furries express a deep sense of gratitude for the fandom offering them a place to be themselves. Specifically, trans furries note that the fandom gave them space to experiment with genderqueer expression before coming out as transgender. Without the fandom, they may not have felt supported enough to come out.
The furry community — deemed the furry fandom — offers a place for people self-identifying as furries to come together with shared interests and experiences. At its core, the fandom enjoys animal anthropomorphism — animals with human-like qualities — and anthropomorphic art.
Most beautifully, some furries share experiences of a sense of disillusionment with the physical body in a similar way to how I understand myself as non-binary. Within the online sources I researched for this piece, a key theme among therianthropes, also called therians, and otherkin — furries who feel spiritually or physically non-human — were expressions of deep, unapologetic “new post-human perceptions” that have been pathologized to “ruin the lives of many through the insistence on an obsolete paradigm.” For furries, this obsolete paradigm refers to the distinction that humans and animals are essentially different and that there are normative, human ways to exist that simply feel wrong to them.
For me, as a queer, working-class, self-diagnosed neurodivergent person of color, this obsolete paradigm captures everything: straightness against non-straightness, man against woman, whiteness against non-whiteness, rich against poor, able against disabled, beautiful against ugly, human against animal, normal against abnormal. My body and mind have been made into sites of power ruled by society’s definition of normal which suggests I am wrong because I am. But it is precisely because I am that I could never be essentially, existentially wrong.
The pushback against the inclusion of furries in queer spaces like Pride falsely asserts that there is an acceptable way to be queer, outlined by assimilationist politics that seek an impossible legitimacy from our oppressors. Anti-furry sentiment in queer spaces is often coupled with the exclusion of T in “LGBT” and the rejection of the reality of bisexual people (sentiments of which are expressed vehemently in online forums and articles). Because the fandom offers furries a safe haven for expression and community in the same way the broader queer community claims to do, it is hypocritical for queer people to perpetuate assimilationist violence against furries.
It becomes abundantly clear that the way being a furry pushes ontological boundaries is not only similar to but also deeply intertwined with queerness. As I’ve observed through my research, the freakish way that we (queer people and furries) exist is the reason why the stigma furries face is similar to the stigma against queer people. Furries, like queer people, push our understanding of what it means to be outside of white, capitalist, cisheteropatriarchal, colonial — so-called normal, human — ways of being.
Our understanding of what it means to be human is necessarily challenged by furries in the same way that queerness, once deemed a clinical abnormality, challenged existence in the preconceived norm of heterosexual, allosexual, male-plus-female reproduction. Furries are queer — queer as we understand queer to be non-cisgender and non-heterosexual, and queer as we ought to understand it: united in our existence on the margins of society.
Deemed subhuman, primal, morally reprehensible, worthy of institutionalization, worthy of being fagged, we — queers and furries — necessarily and freakishly exist outside of “human.”
Today, I unironically bark, meow, and howl like a freak — maybe even like a furry.
Credits:
Author: Jericho Tran-Faypon (They/Them)
Photographer: Len Park (They/Them)
Copy Editor: Gracie Bitting (She/Her)