(question permanently open i think)
i've seen the concept referenced several times, including one person asserting that it's the(ir) definition of being a furry to begin with
and i feel like i wanna try it but i don't know where to start or what it even is really
This is actually kind of a short post for me because I don't have all that much to say that can't be said in a youtube video or three which presentations directly from the researchers (which the title of this repost is referencing the title of the ground-breaking research that furry psychology science owes its entire life to).
Anyway read on if any of this sounds interesting I guess :)
I've been in this fandom for like 15 years and I still don't know what a furry is sometimes.
As far back as 2007, the psychology literature that's been established put together a 2x2 chart of types of furry. The big paper was penned by Gerbasi, et. al. who attempted to thread together psychology and sociology research (a common multi-discipline approach for first-line research), and I gave a 30 minute long presentation on this to the excitement of the dean of the psychology program at my community college (I know incredible accolades). This was fresh content in 2012, because developmental perspectives on queer identity was just getting a proper foothold in psychiatry literature. Furscience, aka the International Anthropomorphic Research Project (IARP) has been running various studies. You can check out some of their older Demographic research presented by Dr. Courtney "Nuka" Plante on youtube.
Anyway, back to the original question of "I'm a/an [x] animal"; In that earlier A to Z study, the authors penned a rough yes-no matrix of:
Do you Feel less than 100% Human? (Yes / No)
Would you become less than 100% human if you could (Yes / No)
As you can imagine, the fandom mostly is No / Yes, rare hold outs of No / No (those are peeps around to date the furs), very rare Yes / No; and our minority of hold-outs of Yes / Yes are usually where the Therians/otherkin/etc live. Qualifications for the fandom participant status (by the literature's general assessment) is broadly about self-endorsement. Choosing to identify as a furry is basically the line that has to be crossed to count. I find that a lot of people start out insistent they're not a furry, then they sorta just sheepishly slide in and go "yeah actually, uh, here's my fursona". Often times the queer identity and social elements grab people by the neck like it's Scorpion's Whip from Mortal Combat. I met a guy in the same community college I presented at who was an ex-furry who was very miserable, and now they're happily a bisexual purple femboy fox (and no longer an alcoholic, proud of him for 3 years of sobriety during some of the harshest shit to hit our generation).
The way we get this sort of research started is kind of an under-discussed topic, it mostly involves trying to convince normal people that there is some kind of really out-there claim you can demonstrate with publisher-friendly buzz terms or 'surprising new research'. I still claim credit for violently murdering CloudCuckcooCountry's furry science podcast[Note 1], as their first episode started with this same 2007 research, and was full of lots of very worth-while errata-deserving information. If you don't know anything about how research is proposed, funded by grants, and published (like the hosts of the now deleted podcast) it can seem pretty gross how loaded the language is by basically being two-parts "oh my god look at these weirdos" and one part "but actually they're just gay". Sometimes it can feel like you're trying to self-evaluate your own weirdness from an extremely awful, kind of eugenics-like perspective, and sometimes the researchers themselves need to add your exact perspective to their team to actually find good methods. It's haaaaaaaaaard.
[Note 1]: In a later Twitter DM exchange from last year, I apologized for this now completely erased Tumblr exchange (I was purged in 2018). The feller involved remembered that exchange but didn't cancel the podcast because of it, as obviously the field in 2017 was a lot narrower and there wasn't much material since the hosts were not researchers themselves. A shame really, I wish I ever had the credentials and functional neurology to do something like that myself.
Okay wrapping up with the actual point:
Anyway what I think folks mean by "being an animal" is that they are built differenttm, it really is gonna change in specifics from person to person. I have a bit of an evolutionary biology background so the term I prefer is "cartoon dinosaur" when referring to myself in that kind of way. Humans are already animals, but I think the turn of phrase is to outgroup the rest of humanity from the furry fandom's often queer and neurodivergent population. The Fandom is increasingly a concentration point for trans folks (self included), and it's actually getting scarily common to see someone enter the fandom because they're gay/lesbian, and then after a few years become transgender. I did some illustrated commentary from my own brief research into the topic recently into some of the recently discovered implications about how Autism, Transgender Identity, Hormone/Endocrine Disorders, Intersex Conditions/DSD's overlap with historical exposure to Coal Dust pollution, which feels like a plug but I assure you its relevant. Certain populations of industrialized countries are historically significant portions of the cultural contributors and thought leaders responsible for how we got to the Furry Fandom in the first place.
The furry fandom is full of a lot of specific demographics that make it historically a very unique phenomena that is tied very closely to North American cultural attitudes of individual expression, free commerce, and cultural identity erasure leading somewhat to Queer Theory. There's a really noteworthy connection between having one's ethnic/cultural status utterly destroyed being part of how furries self-select into fandom identity, but it's really hard to get into when I've already talked about research psychology. Historical sociocultural analysis of White Anglo-Saxon Protestantism and its ramifications for North American U.S. Whiteness and Male-Dominant Hegemony seems like a distant topic, but that's basically the population of Furries until about 2010 when we finally started to properly diversify. I wanna talk about this exact topic more and reference some of my other writing but I get very angory, very verbose, and very disrespectful (to myself and others, esp. U.S. social conservatives). There's a cute shape-shifter here who basically does everything I do but better and less spicy. I am a spicy chicken nugget, I might upset your stomach :c
Food for thought though, if any of this sounds interesting :)
