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Furry fandom is benign. If your children get involved in furry fandom, the worst that can happen is that they get mixed up in inverting Laplace Transforms. Yes, there is Yiff, and Bad Dragon, but humans are obsessed with sex; human social life is equally obsessed with sex outside of furry fandom. Keeping them out of the fandom provides zero protection.
One example of the fandom keeping it sane is Fox Dad with its gentle self-mockery reminding everyfur not to take it too far. And notice that fursuits are removable. What frightens parents about transgenderism is that it encourages changes that are permanent. Or take a moment (or an hour and a half) to enjoy the Anthrocon 2023 fursuit parade which is taking place inside the convention center. I'm tempted to argue that there is no backlash because the fursuits are so cute, but I'm missing the point. It is inside the convention center not in the street! The normies are not going to reject something that they never see. Furry fandom doesn't have a toaster fucker problem because it is really just Beatrix Potter and Peter Rabbit.
That's true, and the seriousness of the policy disagreements are definitely part of the pressures making transgender politics so prominent in public discourse; not just that they are permanent, but that they're permanent in ways likely to be undesirable outside of the axioms and assumptions of the movement.
I think my argument is more that FoxDad can happen even (arguably especially) in communities with a lot or even revolving around 'toaster'-fucking, and this kinda puts a fork into the thesis from the greentext.
That said, I do think that people can and do treat benign communities as dangerous and harmful.
I was there, watching usenet and VCL-era wars over a zebra pool toy inflationist. Furries absolutely were a matter of serious controversy, believed to be self-modifying their sexuality in ways that directed them to same-sex attraction (probably wrong direction of causation) or made real-world 'healthy' sexuality difficult or impossible, in ways that can't be changed back, and in ways that made us a threat to innocents or even animals. There's still social conservatives circles doing that sorta thing, today; there actually been a recent mess in about (nonsexual) furry teenagers in schools. And some of the lesser-known stuff can modify you in even weirder ways -- I've got more respect for therians and therian self-modification than most people here would, but I'm not convinced mirror-dwellers are doing their brains any good.
((It might even literally be the specific target for this greentext: there's a long-standing meme in the fandom about protogen, a fantasy cyborg species, as toasters. Though the timeline is tight enough that it probably isn't, at least not that directly.))
There's a fair argument that they're wrong, for furries, and I'd agree with you. I could point to LGBT spaces that consider themselves self-criticizing, or where they keep the more prurient stuff moderately out-of-sight. ((Or rare places where a furry or furry group insufficiently policed the private behavior rules, or where public behaviors are accepted and should be acceptable: there are absolutely out-of-convention-center-doors fursuit parades. And bowling events.))
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I must strenously and vigorously disagree with this assertion and state that this is not true. There is a reason that even a kissless, touchless virgin robot considers a furry to be a lower stratum on the freak totem pole. And have done so, for the past twenty years, and indeed back in the primordial internet where people lingered on Usenet, and before that BBSs.
Furries are everything that conspiracy theorists allege about the illuminati: weirdly connected, absurdly wealthy sexual deviants who have secret societies which have sex parties on the regular.
OTOH it also goes to show what the conspiracy theorists get wrong about it all: furries don't do all this weird stuff to create control networks for nefarious global guidance projects etc. but because it's fun and gets their rocks off.
Por qué no los dos?
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As a former employee of a convention center adjacent hotel which hosted an annual furry event, I can attest that imo the furries are better-than-average tippers.
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Midwest FurFest had to shut down their free HIV testing clinic early, because demand was higher than expected.
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But it is fundamentally a sex (or sex-adjacent) thing, like crossdressing (and its more permanent cousin, transgenderism) is. This is why there is sex stuff for the convention-goers to know of. And sure, things can be both benign and sexual, but that depends on your surroundings (Japan and its relationship with loli works the same way).
And if you accept the above, you run straight into the landmine of "kids shouldn't have a sexual bone in their body until the Approved Age", so discussing the fact that they're related in the open is just giving ammunition to your enemies (and now you know why some countries don't have a truth defense against libel).
On the contrary, this provides a lot of protection for the fandom (it's not about protecting kids). Which, given that the fandom mostly consists of the male gender [the demand for sex crimes from this demographic far exceeds its supply], is something that it requires (as opposed to the transgenderism fandom, a gender who by contrast has the social license to not only freely and openly support, but actively force, child participation).
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