• plural they/them/themselves

ScavengerFox
@ScavengerFox

I'm not sure if it's a generational thing as I've mainly noticed this happening with people around my age, but god damn, so many of my friends have just become so open, unchained and unashamed when it comes to their furriness recently. More and more it feels like that innate anxiety of being openly furry has eroded in so many of us, myself included, to the point where it's practically nonexistent. You know how we used to be all like, "Yeah, I'm a furry, pretty cringe huh? Haha! Yeah..." Granted, we're still like that to an extent, but I feel like the degree to which we try to restrain that side of us has diminished significantly. Like yeah, we still acknowledge our weirdness, but in a much much more positive way I feel.

There's still a lot of us who look to the approval of normies like we'd literally die without it, and I certainly used to be one of those people, but I feel like quite a lot of us are finally saying "Fuck that noise." We don't need their approval; never have, never will. The opinions of queerphobic cishets are about as important to us as the approval of fucking mosquitoes sucking the blood from our veins. Fuck them. Fuck them all.

I could be just projecting here, or maybe I'm looking at too small of a sample size to be able to accurately gauge whether or not this is a trend within the fandom itself or merely a trend amongst my friends and acquaintances, but nevertheless, I can't help but comment on what I see unfolding before my very eyes. More furries, myself included, are going to furmeets. Wearing furry-made attire in public. Saturating their social media feeds with more furry content than ever before. We just feel much more present, both as a community and as individuals.

We are everywhere. Some people like to think of the fandom as a white-collar hobby for STEM majors but there are furries from all walks of life, and it's so, so much more than a "hobby" for us. I won't harp on too much about the kind of community we've built; others have done a much more eloquent job of that. I will say this, though; there's something that we're starting to admit now that I feel like we were all just a little bit too scared to say before. Maybe it was because we thought that it's cringe, childish, embarassing or just plain foolish, but whatever inhibition was preventing us from talking about this openly seems to finally be going away. Hell, if you're too scared to say it, I'll just do it for you; cuz you're probably thinking it right now:

We don't want to be human.


caymanwent
@caymanwent
This post has content warnings for: personal thoughts re: furries and furriness.

Unambiguous-Robin
@Unambiguous-Robin

As a trans furry, I do relate to Scavenger's post. I don't take it to the literal extent I've seen a lot of furries take it, but I also feel like I'd be more comfortable if I weren't human. I'm not happy with humanity. I create furry art because I don't like the implications that come with characters being human.

But I get not wanting to shut other people out. The most important aspect of furrydom to me is that it's a representation of the idea that everyone should be able to be themselves (with the usual caveat of "so long as it doesn't hurt anyone" and I'm not here to get into a long discussion of what that means, so please take it in good faith). For a lot of people, "being yourself" means "being human". I encourage that as much as any other aspect of being yourself.

I also relate to the idea of "being human" meaning "being yourself in all the complex and artistic ways that humans are capable of being." That used to be my primary definition of what "human" means, when I was younger. So Cay, I want to say I feel like I understand where you're coming from as well.

But as a trans furry, I was forced to face another aspect of humanity growing up, and it was that aspect that made me so afraid to be honest with myself that I didn't even know who I was until far too late in life. And it wasn't any other type of animal that made me feel that way. It was humanity.


It may be that humans are uniquely capable of creating art in ways most other animals couldn't even comprehend (or so it's easy for us humans to assume), but I believe it is also a fundamental aspect of human nature to fear humanity's potential to do this. I believe it is a fundamental aspect of human nature to gather into paranoid herds and rely on each other to establish and maintain predictable patterns, because we depend on these so much as humans, too. And we depend on these to the point where we get angry and dangerous towards anyone who breaks these patterns--to anyone who becomes a strange, artistic individual.

I don't believe all humans act this way, but I do believe that when humans do act this way, it is because they are relying on human instinct. If anyone breaks away from this behavior, it is because they are breaking away from their human instincts. Becoming something more than just human, perhaps even other than human.

I get that it's tempting to define "humanity" as only its more positive traits, because it's tempting to think that humanity as a whole is capable of doing better, and it's tempting to think that we are fundamentally good just by nature of being human. But that, too, is part of that herd instinct talking, that instinct that tells you it's best to seek safety in numbers and trust in the safety and predictability of each other.

And I believe that instinct is also telling you to believe that if someone is drawing a line between furries and normies, it's the furries that are doing it, and not the normies. But for me, I don't see Scavenger drawing that line; I see Scavenger recognizing that this line was already drawn by humans, and knowing which side of the line she and her friends fall under.

I see the line, too, and I don't think it's the non-furries who want to accept all people's individuality with open arms. I think it is furries who want to do that, and stating the existence of the line isn't a rejection of anyone who would do that, it is a proud proclamation of being willing to accept anyone who would do this--humans too, believe it or not.

I feel similarly about the divide between queer and non-queer, as well. I have felt vastly more comfortable in queer spaces than in non-queer spaces, and it's not because I hate non-queer people as an inherent thing. I do, however, hate people who use cishet "normality" as an excuse to silence queer people, to discourage people from being queer, to insult people for being queer, to push queer people into their own isolated groups, and to reinforce the idea that this inherent, instinctual rejection of their fellow living beings should be a part of what being "cishet" means.

(And when I say "fellow living beings" instead of "fellow humans", that is intentional, too.)

And as a result, I see being "queer" as having some level of understanding that this separation shouldn't exist, because being "queer" is just being everything that being cishet isn't, because cishet people have been the ones to reinforce that separation. And yet, this doesn't stop cishet people from joining queer spaces, and it doesn't stop me from liking and feeling comfortable around the cishet people who do; it just means that I recognize that these individual cishet people have also made the individual choice not to reject people for their individuality in this way, and have recognized that one of the best ways to live out that choice is to choose to be with queer people, and to even celebrate queerness along with us.

And queerness, itself, I believe, is even a rejection of the idea that being cishet should be a bad thing in and of itself; a rejection of the idea that it should be defined by all the awful things that so many cishet people are currently reinforcing with the label. But part of rejecting that notion means acknowledging that "cishet" nonetheless currently is associated with all those things, and refusing to be those things for oneself.

So Cay, I think my ultimate point is that I agree with your underlying desire for people to love each other and work together and accept each other, but the way I do it is from seeing things from a perspective that is more similar to what Scavenger describes in her post, which might seem... paradoxical to you, on some level? And maybe it is paradoxical; I find a lot of aspects of living are. But hopefully I've managed to make it make some sense to you.


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in reply to @caymanwent's post:

One thing that really opened my eyes to a greater sphere of empathy was spending time in Second Life back when it was a bigger thing than it is now.

Despite personal computers having been around for a while, the World was still adjusting to online life in the mid-2000s. Questions abounded regarding screen time, what was healthy and what wasn't (questions that have largely fallen by the wayside because we all have the Internet in our pockets now).

People being people, screen time was seen as a valid attack against disagreeable opponents. Simply put, if you spent all your time lost in game worlds like Everquest, or metaverses like Second Life, you were a loser who sucked too much to learn how to interact socially with other people in the real world.

I believed that, too, until I stopped trolling, and started talking with a few regulars in Second Life. They were disabled to the point of being bedridden or house-locked. Their social experience was solely through this early metaverse, partly because it let them live their fantasy of not being disabled, but mostly because no one in real life wanted to be friends with them.

Anyone with a disability knows all too well how easy it is to simply get left behind, because everyone else can go on that hike, or can take that cross-country road trip. For sure, if abled people were asked if they would be inclusive of those with different abilities than them, they would say they would be inclusive, but when they do try to engage, the reality of it all sets in, and more often than not they drift away.

I think what we are seeing is a lot of trauma responses to localized environmental stressors. There are furries who are ostracized purely because of this hobby, and in some parts of the world (the United States especially), the line between queer hate and furry hate is so blurred that it's more useful to consider them one and the same, so it makes sense that people on the defensive would consider being furry a legitimate identity--and... well, they're right? I'm not even sure many of them chose that for themselves; that identity was forced onto them over something that brings them simple joy, and rather than sacrifice that hobby, they realign their own self-image, because really, why give that up because of a bunch of assholes?

And that was observed in your own musings. "Queerphobic cishets" is a specific qualifier, and are a legitimate concern to queer communities. Mind that not all furries (or queers for that matter) have easy access to people who aren't bigots, or who understand and accept neurodivergency, and they have nowhere else to turn to other than their own community where there's at least a guarantee of basic understanding.

I get that that it can be frustrating for a person who is just here for the art to be adjacent to deeper furry identities, but not everyone in the fandom is having a fun time, and many absolutely do rely on it for social connection because there's literally no other option for them. This is also a broad brush to use, and I'm sure that many furs can benefit from "interacting with the normies", but I'm definitely aware of a not-insignificant number whose reality very much is "us vs. them", and for those furs, I sincerely hope they'll find the peace they so desperately deserve sooner rather than later.