so fucking much of puriteen bullshit is
"oh no you are TOO WEIRD, and if I am linked to people like you I WILL LOOK BAD you should be removed from this fandom because I think fandom dynamics here will work the same as in the media properties I like"
they have to clean up. They have to purify. They have to make it acceptable
internalized because fandom dynamics demand that orthodoxy, and fandom spaces are in
platforms
where acceptability, internal and external are enforced
and it is so much just the aesthetics of things
which is also why there's so much "aestheticization" of queer identities.
The person has to fit the label, the labels are strict prescriptive definitions
why so many hate messy ones
why transphobes and exclusionists hate "queer" so much
they want everything to be cleanly defined. This camp here, that other camp there.
A lot of it is wanting safety, control over spaces. Being uncomfortable at messier people without their exact same categorization hangups
So furry puriteens seem to deal with it as a purely aesthetic aspect.
They like certain types of representation there. Certain "vibes"
So when they get to see others be furry in ways that are not like that
they recoil. They accuse. They attack.
Because they perceive THOSE as being too weird.
And they can fuck RIGHT OFF. I didn’t spend my life being a bullied freak just to let these twerps push me around.
(Before we go in, we hate the term "puriteen" since it implies a whole "darn kids" thing we hate, and the bulk of people I've seen who fit the worst of this label tend to be in their early 20s and seemingly identify as children. However, we'll use it here for the sake of brevity and consistency).
Honestly the best way to describe so-called puiriteens is if the worst of pride discourse somehow incarnated as a group of people. And like pride discourse, the worst of them seem to have mostly vanished in the shadows of the net when the great trans panic began in earnest last year; probably not a coincidence.
In my experience these are people who hyper-internalized cultural capitalism, push for assimilation, and fetishize this idealized version of childhood innocence to such a distorted extreme that they could legally be called L*bs of T*kT*k (y'all know who I mean, not taking any chances of them tracking this down).
Let's address these point by point.
The hyper-internalization of capitalism
Capitalism eschews community in a more traditional sense, atomizing people and making it so that the only thing that can fill that space is consumption. However, people are still social creatures, so they form pseudo-communities around that product, particularly entertainment (which is growing increasingly powerful as a psychological painkiller agent to endure capitalism getting worse).
This leads to them treating fiction as a kind of hyper-real thing that in their collective minds eye is the most indicative attribute to the type of person they are. That the kind of fiction they enjoy has the most moral and psychological weight as to who they are as a person.
Not only that, this applies to what specific way they enjoy fiction, and like my past abusers they will distort anything that doesn't favor their narrative of the "good" kind of enjoyment of something to be akin to direct responsibility for the worst social ills. In fact, if there is not a social ill to disavow this or that ship, they will invent one (keep an eye on this point, I'm going to come back to it).
While I'm not going to go in to the "does fiction impact reality" take here (the answer is "yes, but that's also not the whole story and people are often hyper-reductive with the question"), the problem is that they give too much weight to that impact.
In some ways they are a reverse of what Jack Thomson said about game nerds in the early 2000s. The big moral panic was that people will see the fantasy of games like GTA 3 akin to reality and start shooting people since they can't distinguish the difference. The so-called puriteens are the other way around. Using GTA 3 as a universal standard, they see playing and enjoying the game morally equivalent of doing and endorsing the things within it (even though it's abundantly clear you are playing as the villain). They see actions taken in fantasy to be akin to actions taken in reality.
This is a culturally capitalist way of thinking. To give such extreme weight to consumption. Plus if you look at the history of queer and trans communities, so much of our shared collective exploration of our identity and trauma has been rooted in exceptionally messy shit. There's a reason why messy as fuck games that are on many a so-called Puriteen DNI list like Saya No Uta, Needy Streamer Overload, and The Coffin of Andy and Leyley resonate strongly with a subset of traumaqueers; and it's not necessarily because they approve or fetishize the so-called problematic content.
(This also falls under the false idea that activism through consumption > material action; but that's a whole separate post)
A lot of this is because during the apex of the tumblr era (more on that below) fandom and the budding return of leftism fused. Now it's good to be aware that all action is political, but they go to extremes and put false equivalency (particularly of moral weight of actions) on what fiction you consume and how with very real social issues.
Remember when we said that if they didn't have a social ill to disavow a ship they'd have to invent one? Well it's time to take that pin out.
One of the main reasons the great age gap panic of the late 2010s and early 2020s happened was because of the infamous Voltron: Legendary Defender fandom. The term "shipping wars" had a very real implication of violence that the second word in that phrase entails. Klance shippers were particularly intense, some of which threatening to break the show runners hands if they didn't canonize their ship. The rival ship was Sheith, and the worst of the Klance shippers needed valid grounds to disavow them. They said "one is 18 and the other is 25, the age gap is bad." That became such a meme that it leaked out into greater left culture and got distorted further.
This shit is personal to me because we transitioned in our early-mid 30s, and due to various factors of abuse we had to undergo our Queer Adolescence in our late 30s. However around that time there was this free floating idea that being over 25 is innately predatory, and queer and trans community should be something one "ages out" of.
This is particularly embittering because we were forced to grow up fast due to having rather bad helicopter parents (see below for more details). We finally had a chance to have a "childhood" but because of this wave of ageist rage and demonization of anyone over 25, we were forced to do so a second time; and that can't be taken back.
(Honestly with queer and trans communities being more trauma focused rather then identity focused these days, we're wondering if Queer Adolescence is even possible; but that's besides the point).
Assimilationism and respectability politics
This is an old problem that existed before the so-called puriteens, but one they are the most emblematic of its modern incarnation. Like the burned furs and the warriors of the internet (you know, the ones who basically caused LJ to implode via strikethrough and boldthrough circa 2007), they have this whole idea of "you know, things wouldn't be so bad if we stopped being so weird" idea.
They see identity and community as discrete, atomic categories falling under a very specific set of rules, and the best way forward is to have them assimilate with western capitalist culture and maintain small tent politics for the supposed safety of those within. This is where their abject hatred of bi-lesbians comes from.
This is just tumblr at its worst all over again.
For those unaware, a decade ago tumblr was starting to hit its peak and the baby left there was very...malformed. There was this push for what in essence was neo-segregation and hyper-separatism and for the supposed sake of safety, small tent politics. This really messed up the trans community at the time (which was undergoing a major shift since the so-called tipping point 2 years prior). This is why truscum was so powerful back then and "not trans enough" was considered a valid argument.
This shit is personal to me since this pushed me in the closet for 3 more years, and it was OVERWHELMINGLY embittering to see our other friends come out as trans because it felt like they were "breaking the rules" and being cheered for it when we were flat out told we weren't allowed to when we were in a similar position to them.
This kind of assimilationism is what made pride discourse such a nightmare historically. This kind of "don't bring your het perceived partner and don't be weird at pride" sort of thing. This is also the same mentality that caused people to demonize Isabel Fall.
Supposedly this is about safety, but the only safety this buys you is "our enemies will kill other queers first." You will be on their chopping block eventually, even if you are "one of the good ones" right now.
Anyway, let's go on to the last one.
Fetishization of childhood innocence
This one in particular messes me up. This pearl clutching, Helen Lovejoy-esque "think of the children" spiel.
Maybe its a generation gap, but growing up the suppression of queer and trans identity to the point of tacit justification for bullying people who were even vaguely perceived as such was justified precisely by "protecting the children." And look at the latest rhetoric trying to justify the genocide of trans people, it's the same playbook.
This shit gets PARTICULARLY personal since it mirrors the core mindset as to how my parents, school, and psychologist all collectively abused me as a child. Our parents were helicopter parents with anxiety and abandonment issues, and in order to assuage that they justified all kinds of abuse in the name of my safety, secretly wanting me to remain a forever child. That was one of the core foundations and key through lines to justify the hell we endured growing up. They weren't protecting me, they were protecting their own comfort and perception of what I might be feeling. As somebody who survived exactly abuse that was a product of exactly the kind of shit they see as a golden age and ideal parenting, FUCK ALL OF THAT!
I am willing to give this part a bit of grace even with the intense trauma above (and another coming below). A lot of this mentality formed as a collective reaction to the predator problem at conventions reaching such an extreme point in the 2010s it finally got noticed and at least somewhat dealt with (although not enough so). They thought the people who were supposed to protect them failed them, and they don't want that replicated. To that point I heartily agree, but their solution was exactly wrong.
And speaking of generation gaps, this sort of thing in particular is something people justify by saying that others should "just know" these things, as though they should come as an innate function of growing up. However, as something of an elder trans, that is very much not the case.
Kai Cheng Thom (who learned this lesson the hard way after being viciously attacked for pointing out increased trends of sexual conservatism in our community during the peak of the so-called puriteens modern influence a few years ago) rightly called out that the generation gap is very real; that there was a shift of "freedom to" to "freedom from" in terms of priorities. More concretely, a shift from liberation to safety.
However, none of that excuses this reactionary tendencies and justified abusive behavior in the name of supposedly "protecting the children." I don't think its a coincidence that their rhetoric about grooming that made pride month a nightmare every year was lifted in verbatim when the great trans panic began.
On top of that, part of "childhood innocence" is being able to explore shit on your own terms. That includes trusting them to handle their own shit. Hyper-sheltering them and using them as a vicarious proxy to soothe your own trauma leads to abuse of the same people you are supposedly protecting, as we said we FUCKING LIVED IT.
We're willing to give some grace on this topic. Both because a lot of this came from places of very real trauma and some unfortunate fuckery in the past that needed to be dealt with better. However, that grace only extends to "I'm willing to give you extra space to learn and grow past this" not "you have free license to abuse people in the name of your assimilationist reactionary culturally capitalist bullshit."
