It's so alarming to me that prominent people in far-right circles continue to swear that they "heard from a friend" whose child's school allowed children to "identify" as furries and even use litterboxes in lieu of regular bathrooms.
It's been so thoroughly debunked at this point, both from within the fandom and from beyond, including news outlets and a dedicated Wikipedia article, yet it persists.
The reason it's so alluring has already been spelled out by many: it serves as a thinly-veiled proxy against the LGBTQ+ community, not only because they comprise a majority of the furry fandom, but because the hoax co-opts the "identifies as an 'x'" trope, implying that the slippery slope of self-identification has already led to this end. As society starts to see anti-LGBTQ+ hatred more clearly for what it is, its opponents fall back to ridiculing smaller subcultures, capitalizing on the fact that many consider the groups "weird" and thus will believe any terrible thing said about them.
When an urban hoax continues to spread despite clear evidence to the contrary, and the people spreading it are angry right-wingers already convinced that their country and way of life are under attack, the risk of "stochastic terrorism" climbs with it.
There is a very real danger in the fact that far-right influencers are connecting these dots for their audience. If what they say is true, that the LGBTQ+ community is conditioning the youth of tomorrow toward a path of deviance and depravity (to be clear, it isn't), then it follows that the furry fandom, itself loathed for those same reasons, would be the epicenter of this danger to society. With their audiences as large as they are, there's a nonzero chance that someone just unhinged enough, just angry enough, just worked up by their tactics enough to do something terrible is watching, and sees this rhetoric as their marching orders.
So, how do we respond to this? I'm of two minds on that. On the one hand, we should absolutely take common-sense security measures to protect our events, meetups, or any time we're all in a shared space. On the other, for us to exist in a state of fear would fulfill the objectives of the very people spreading these hoaxes. We should be loud and assertive, not only in our condemnation of open hate against our community and the greater LGBTQ+ community, but against the entire notion that our community is an unhealthy one.
The furry community means different things to different people, but I see it as an inclusive social support net for a broadly diverse coalition of people, giving us moments of escapist relief from a world that is increasingly challenging to live in, strengthening our social and emotional well-being in the process. It is far from perfect, but at its core it is benign, and I would much rather have it than be without it.