I've been a part of the furry community for a number of years now, and I can say with confidence that a lot of us, myself included, are autistic. That's probably not surprising - the subculture is centered around cute, stylized animal characters, after all, and it's well-known for appealing to people who aren't comfortable in normal society.

I also had the misfortunate of spending a fair amount of time in communities that were rabidly anti-furry (mostly Something Awful), and this created a lot of self-hatred in me. For years before I came to accept that part of myself, I joined in on the anti-furry hate not out of any real conviction, but just because I wanted to be one of the "good" people and not one of the "bad" ones. It's not something I'm proud of, but it left me with a lot of insight into what motivates and drives anti-furries.

It's ableism. Homophobia, too, but also ableism.

Specifically, it's disgust and contempt toward autistic people. Show me an anti-furry community, and I will show you one where "sperg" and "autist" are common and accepted insults. They'll make a lot of noise about protecting children or protecting animals, as homophobes do, and they'll often cherry-pick examples of one furry doing something terrible and act as if every member of the community is responsible and supports it - again, as homophobes do. But it always, always comes back to ableism. When they aren't pretending to care about that, they're going the cringe culture route and mocking examples of furries being socially inept or standing out in unusual ways - in other words, traits strongly associated with autism.

If you ask them what they actually want from furries, if the answer isn't a grisly murder fantasy, it's always the same: they want us to be "normal." To give up the things we enjoy and conform to how an "average person" behaves. They believe that we have a moral and social obligation to never make them uncomfortable, regardless of the toll it takes on us, and they see fit to punish us to any extent for failing to do so.

Those of you who are autistic, or who keep up with autism news, might see where I'm going with this. Applied Behavioral Analysis is a form of training given to autistic children with the goal of making their behavior conform to neurotypical standards. The child's unique needs and comfort are considered irrelevant; all that matters is to make them conform.

An autistic person with enough life experience can eventually conform to neurotypical social norms with some degree of success. This is called masking, in which we try to suppress our symptoms and present ourselves as neurotypical. There are two problems with expecting autistic people to do this. The first is that it's simply beyond our capabilities to act neurotypical all day, every day, because we simply don't have the faculties to do so. A person with impaired vision, if they don't wear glasses, will fail to see some things. A person with a bad leg will not always be able to walk and run like a healthy person can. And an autistic person can't mask all the time. Even when we're successful, though, it takes a toll. Masking in autistic people has been linked to anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation. This is the price that ableist people demand we pay for their comfort and our own reduced (but of course, never completely relieved) mistreatment. These issues aren't just matters of hurt feelings, either. This shit actually kills people: autism can cut up to 30 years off your life expectancy.

I've seen a number of people claim that harassing and ostracizing furries isn't a big deal, and that furries are just "coopting social justice issues." As someone who's dealt with both anti-furry and anti-autistic sentiment, though, the former is very often just the latter behind a fig leaf.

  • hypercube [she/her]
    ·
    2 years ago

    I mean, yeah, I know a fair few otherkin personally. You talk as though that role is seperate from someone's own body, but that's clearly someone who's found a way to be more comfortable within their own skin. Hell, arguably you could put me in that bucket, furry stuff was how I figured out gender stuff a while back, as the collective fictional ritual we're talkin about allowed me to stop disassociating from from that part of myself, rather than start diassociating. In terms of esoteric beliefs about what one "really is", everyone who's condidered it holds an irrational, unprovable position - whether that's belief in a soul, computational theory of the mind, or whatever else. There is currently no provable scientific model of conciousness, and there probably never will be.

    Going to be annoying and answer your question with a question - why catagorically pathologise in the first place? I'd argue your average furry has a relationship with sex & sexuality about as fucked as your average normie, and the actual harmful issues are mostly the same (consent, objectification). You could ask the same quesiton of any sexual behaviour that doesn't directly serve reproduction. Weird sex stuff is, again, a constant in human sexuality. You can find a handful of bizzare animalistic sex dieties across ancient human cultures, far older than notions of pathology in the first place.

      • hypercube [she/her]
        ·
        2 years ago

        Interesting, but I don’t really follow

        It's a counter to what seems to be the main issue you have - referring to deep self-identification with furry stuff as inherently disassociative.

        You can have whatever religion you like, but let’s not pretend that all attempts at explaining consciousness are equally valid, including the ones that suggest categories of metaphysical substance that have never, ever been even indirectly observed but for some reason interact specifically with a tiny subset of material bodies.

        Honestly, as someone who leans towards the Most Scientific explanation of panpsychism, I also understand that to be a product of my worldview & current cultural beliefs, same as every other personal understanding of conciousness. Maybe not equally valid, but I'm hardly in a position to argue that anyone else's isn't valid.

        I never once defended “normies” and I think in one of my other comments made it explicit that I think most average people also are super fucked up

        Right, but you want to catagorically pathologise furries, which is why I draw these comparisons. My argument is that the main issues arise from hegemony - it feels like you're assuming what issues furries have without actually knowing any? From lots of experience of humanity in & out of the fandom, people's issues and trauma are largely the same & largely come from the same sources (capitalism & patriarchy, which obvs everyone on this website agrees are shit).

        Shit, if it was safe and easy to make someone anatomically into an anthropomorphic animal (given their enthusiastic consent), I’d need to seriously reconsider my position, because it kind of stops being dissassociative when you look at your actual face in the mirror and say “this is cool”. You know, so long as they don’t want to keep up a fiction that they were born of a dog with a bunch of dog siblings.

        This... feels like some kind of furry transmedicalism? Would appreciate if you could clarify what you mean by this.

        And apologies if you feel I've misrepresented you here, but, like, I don't know you? Only got this series of posts to go on, and so I'm taking the points as I see em.

          • hypercube [she/her]
            ·
            2 years ago

            Honestly, the main thing they had in common is that they both had hangups relating to constant sexual frustration on a level of intensity that I have otherwise only seen from straight men

            we've entered The Anecdote Zone here but that doesn't line up with what I've experienced. some furries are definitely Like That, some to the point of doing horrible shit. However, not in excess of straight, bi & gay guys, and also hetro & bi women I've known. The lesbians seem to have figured their shit out though, good for them

            Point is, I would never claim that it’s some independent “scourge” that needs to be fought against, and I expect the pathological elements to appear less as society eventually improves.

            so, again, why specifically pathologise it in the first place? Furries have issues that are also represented in society as a whole, and if society improves those issues would dissipate

            explaining what “furry transmedicalism” would be

            well, let me write out my interpretation what you said before - you believe people identifying with anthropomorphic animals is harmful as it is inherently disassociative, disassociative behaviour is inherently harmful, and therefore needs to be stopped. However, if new technology allowed them to become those animals you'd reconsider that position. Guess that's why I make the comparison - binary medical transition is Very New but weird gender stuff is Very Old, and the reactionary transmed position is that the Very New version is the only part of the human experience worth keeping.