remetheus

I personally see furry as inextricably linked to queerness because Fursonas are an implicit declaration of radical autonomy over one's own identity and how other people see you.

It's impossible to separate queerness from furry as long as that's the center of it.

Furry has ever been a space where you can make yourself a rainbow-haired hermaphrodite sparklevixen and not only will everyone accept that as your identity, some people are going to be into that, and you'll find them.

Furry also introduced me to the idea of non-binary pronouns, and we all accepted them without question. That's always been why I'm so confused to see transphobic furries.

You're existing in a space where people have been using five different sets of custom pronouns for hermaphrodite characters since the 80s, and you're complaining about someone deciding they're a girl? Make it make sense.

I generally do agree with this, but I would caution against taking this for granted. The reason why this particularly queer definition of furry won out is the result of early fandom battles where "lifestylers" who preferred this idea of furry won out over "fans" who saw the fandom as being less about the ability for radical self-description and more about how hot Minerva Mink was.

In some sense, that battle is far from over, not just because you still have those "fan" folks trying to relitigate the issue (see FreeFurAll), but because much as the battle for gay marriage often pushed aside the queer in favor of assimilation, there're the same pressures in furry where so much culture is dictated by reasonably well off furries in tech (this includes me, in full disclosure).

To make a comparison to race, being black surely didn't stop various black conservatives and right wingers from existing from Booker T. Washington to Bill Cosby to Ben Carson to Kanye West.

A position of queerness is one that must be continually reaffirmed because the ability for capitalism to pull in its own critiques is especially strong.