It’s time to celebrate! Let’s come together to create something for the community. Whether you got scales, feathers, fur or otherwise we want to hear from you. What does draconity mean to you?

This zine will be a collection of pieces created by nonhumans and alterhumans about any aspect of draconity they feel called to share. Also, this zine imposes no set definition on what is or isn’t “dragon enough.” If you feel like the label applies, you’re included!

What Can I Submit?

Both fiction and nonfiction pieces are accepted. As long as what you have in mind fits the theme, it’ll probably be a-ok.

Off the top of our head, we’re thinking of:

Essays of your personal experiences
Short stories
Poetry
Mock advice columns
Alternative covers
Fictional advertisements
Comics
Recipes

We welcome you to think outside the box and share whatever inspires you about being draconic!

How to Participate

Fill out our google form to submit an entry.

A name you would like the piece attributed to
Title of your submission
Any content warnings that you feel are necessary for the piece
Any social media handle or personal website you'd like linked in the contributor section
A logo or icon for the contributor section

**If you would like to stay anonymous let us know

Submit the form multiple times for multiple entries. Members of systems are welcome to submit individually or collectively. Please let us know your preference when it comes to attribution.

Once the deadline has passed, these submissions will be put into the zine and it will be posted on itch.io as a free PDF.

Submissions are due by November 1st, 2025.

Submission Guidelines

Each individual may submit up to 3 works to be featured in Draconity. Comics and multi-image works count as one piece. Individuals within a system may each submit up to 3 works. All work must be your own! Anyone caught plagiarizing or submitting AI-generated work will be barred from entering Draconity and any future zines from us.

Written submissions and multi-part art entries should not exceed 10 pages. Please keep in mind the zine’s pages will be 8.5x11 and entries will be scaled accordingly to fit that size. We request all art submissions to be sent in either .jpg or .png file formats.

For stories that use multiple different fonts, we will do our best to preserve the general "feel" of your piece but cannot guarantee we will be able to use the exact fonts or sizes due to restrictions in what fonts we have access to, readability and overarching zine style.

Submissions Must Fit the Thematic Criteria of:

About draconity / being draconic

That’s it! Go wild.

As stated in the summary, we will not be policing what is or is not considered “dragon.” If you self-identify as draconic you count! No portfolio or prior zine experience is needed to be included either.

FAQ
Q: Where will the zine be hosted? What will it cost?

A: The zine will be hosted digitally on our itch.io and will be free to download.

Q: Is there a cap on submissions?

A: There is none, as long as the file doesn’t start getting too big for our computer we’ll do our best! If there are an unprecedented amount of submissions, we may have to delay the release. In the event that happens, we would communicate that through updates on our tumblr.

Q: Can I update my application after it’s been submitted?

A: Yes you may, as long as it’s done before the submission deadline.

Q: Can I rescind my submission?

A: Yes you may, as long as it’s done before the submission deadline. This is because once we begin work on the zine, having to remove content mid-way through would throw off the formatting of everything else after. Please take this into account before submitting.

Q: Will this zine allow NSFW entries?

A: No, nothing 18+ will be accepted.

Q: Can I submit already completed/published works?

A: Absolutely! It’s ok to submit past work that has been posted to your social media or website. Our only stipulation is that it cannot have been previously featured in another zine. This helps us keep each of our annual Draconity zines unique and distinct from one another.

Q: What is your timeline for the project?

A: Our submission deadline is November 1st, 2025. Our goal is to have the zine live by the end of the year. If something unforeseen happens and we are unable to make that deadline, we will post an update about it on our tumblr.

Q: I have another question!

A: Feel free to reach out to us at our email RuffledGryphgon(@)gmail(.)com with any other questions you have about the zine.

nova_dergs

Hunter the werewolf holding a sign that reads: applications open.

HowlCon is a virtual camping-themed convention for alterhumans and nonhumans! It will be hosted September 19-21, 2025 virtually on Discord. Our goal is to bring our community together for a weekend of fun and learning.

We are often so scattered across the web, we hope to serve as a gathering place for folks to meet others like themselves, make friends and generally have a good time.

Artist

Apply Now

Signing up as an artist is the best way to maximize the visibility of your commissions during the con. Artists are given exclusive access to post their wares in our artist alley channels. And, if they wish, to add art streams to our official con schedule.

HowlCon is not responsible for any sales that take place.

Panelist

Apply Now

Have an event you want to host? This is what being a panelist is about! From meet-ups, lectures, discussions, gaming together, arts and crafts time, and many more ideas we don't have the space to list. Your topic does not have to be explicitly about alterhumans or nonhumans.

We accept panels hosted live, pre-recorded and through text.

Applications close July 1, 2025.

Learn more about HowlCon on our website.

frameacloud

This blog post was written by Orion Scribner (frameacloud) on 2025 April 26 for Otherkin News, which is a volunteer run project. We welcome other people to submit articles about alterhumanity in current events. Learn more about this project and what we’re looking for.

An anti-furry bill will be heard early this week

Texas House Bill 54, which nicknames itself the "F.U.R.R.I.E.S. Act," has been scheduled for a public hearing on Tuesday, April 29, 2025, at 8:00 AM (Texas Legislature). This is a very early stage in the bill's progress toward becoming a law: it is not yet a law, and this hearing alone is not enough to make it become a law. Eighteen other bills about public education that will be heard during that session as well. Don't let the sensationalism of this bill distract you from the others: sometimes legislators intentionally write outrageous bills not only to satirize the issues they genuinely care about, but to distract attention away from other bills that they hope will pass into law unnoticed (Jones 2024). The government web page at the first link tells where people can submit comment or testify, where to see a live video broadcast of it. Common wisdom in the furry fandom warns to take caution in talking with the media or bringing other forms of publicity. Be aware that the bill author had said that he "expect[s] the subculture to show up in full furry vengeance at the committee hearing" (Bahari 2025). This suggests that he is looking forward to it being bait for an embarrassing spectacle.

Here's a recap of this bill and the urban legend behind it

In March, Republican Representative Stan Gerdes filed Texas House Bill 54 (TX HB 54, formerly TX HB 4814). Here is the state government's page about the bill, and here is their text of the bill itself. Calling itself the F.U.R.R.I.E.S. Act, the bill proposes an amendment to the state constitution to ban public schools from allowing students to do anything on its list of "non-human behaviors." The bill would impose tens of thousands of dollars of fines on faculty for allowing those behaviors, section 6(f), found on page 10. It would redefine abuse to include letting children think that those behaviors are societally acceptable, section 5(1)(A), found on page 7. Gerdes claimed he wrote the bill in response to an incident in the school district of Smithville, which is 45 miles away from Austin and has only 1,885 students. He didn't describe the incident, and journalists found no sign of it there (Bahari 2025; Villarreal 2025). The Governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, publicly spoke in favor of this particular bill, saying that these non-human behaviors were one of his reasons to take government funds away from public schools, using the money for some parents to send their children to private schools instead (Wermund 2025; Wermund and McKinley 2025).

Some of the activities described in the bill never happened in real life. For example, it forbids children from getting surgeries to make themselves look like animals, or using litter boxes in school, in section 2(a)(6), found on pages 5 through 6. It's the eleventh bill that Republicans in the US have sponsored in the past three years based on the litter box urban legend (Scribner 2025 March 18). The legend has been debunked by Reuters Fact Check, PolitiFact, and Snopes (Reuters, 2022; Czopek, 2022; Palma, 2023). Invented and popularized by Republican politicians and public figures in 2021, the urban legend says that public schools in the US have been providing litter boxes for students who identify as animals, which it calls furries. Journalists confirmed that has never happened. Only one district-- that of Columbine High School-- had litter in its emergency supplies for if classrooms were locked down without restroom access for many hours during a school shooting, along with other last-resort options for maintaining some rudiments of cleanliness and dignity while surviving unimaginable conditions (Kingkade et al 2022). That had some media attention in 2017 (Garcia 2017). In real life, use of litter boxes is not characteristic of the furry fandom. Nor do furries typically identify as animals (Plante et al, 2016, pp. 113-114). It has been decades that sexists have made grotesque comparisons between transgender restroom access and animal-people demanding to use something other than toilets, but it is no coincidence that the change from joke to urban legend happened after the 2020 Supreme Court decision G.G. v. Gloucester County School Board in favor of transgender-friendly restroom policies in high schools.

Why are Republicans doing this?

There are a variety of reasons why Republicans are spreading urban legend and why they're proposing laws based on it. The purpose of the urban legend and the bills is to satirize transgender students who ask to use the right restrooms for their genders. Another of its purposes is to justify defunding public schools in favor of private schools. Defunding public schools would make it impossible for some children with severe disabilities to go to school at all (RA Staff 2025 March 6).

Though the bill specifically names some activities that no students have done, it has other aspects that are worded so broadly that it would also apply to a range of behaviors that are normal in children's pretend play, teacher-guided learning activities, and hobby clubs (Codega 2025; Fields 2025). Most children play at being animals or engage in some form of what could be considered role-play as part of education or entertainment. Do Republicans have a vendetta against that, and if so, why? For one thing, fascism and other very controlling government ideologies disapprove of play. Controlling ideologies misinterpret play as only a distraction and diversion. There is little care for its importance for development, learning, discovery, and enrichment. Instead, fascists prioritize molding youth to conformity and obedience in utilitarian purposes in war, labor, and reproduction, with scarcely any life outside of it. Any hobby not in service to the structure is seen as a threat to it, because exploring outside of or making exceptions to the paradigm may lead to questioning it. Instead of approaching unfamiliar ideas with curiosity, thinking is fended off by means of shallow yet emotionally sensational reactions of either derision or outrage.

For another thing, sexists try to misrepresent transgender people as playing make-believe, saying that a transgender child is no different than a child pretending to be an animal one afternoon on the playground. Sexists say that gender confusion is a temporary phase that people shouldn't be encouraged in, should grow out of, or be forced out of by conversion therapy, rather than being allowed to socially transition. This is contrary to everything science knows about transgender people. Transgender people are who they say they are, allowing them to be themselves saves their lives, and obstructing that is needlessly destructive to their survival. The council of the world's largest psychological association overwhelmingly decided for a policy that supports transition as medically necessary and the healthiest choice for transgender people of all ages who desire it (APA Council of Representatives 2024). It also has a policy that recognizes conversion therapy as abusive and ineffective (APA Council of Representatives 2021).

In their urban legend and anti-furry bills and what they use them to justify, we see many values of what now calls itself the American Republican party. Republicans such as Governor Abbott show us that they oppose education for people other than the wealthy. Republicans are against the survival of youth who are different because of being queer, disabled, or other reasons. They oppose young people engaging in hobbies or playtime. If any of this situation feels undesirable or discouraging to you, the end of one of my previous articles about this bill has a section about what you can do to make positive changes to the world around you. There will be an opportunity to speak up about this bill this week. If you do, please make sure you are well-informed and careful.∎

Previously...
Here is a list in reverse chronological order of some of our previous posts on Otherkin News about TX HB 54 and other anti-furry bills in the US:

* 2025 April 19, our second article about TX HB 54: A Roundup of News Coverage of Texas’s F.U.R.R.I.E.S. Act.
* 2025 March 18, our first article about TX HB 54: Texas Governor Wants Constitutional Amendment to Punish “Non-Human Behaviors” in Schools
* 2025 January 18: Mississippi and Oklahoma propose laws against students who identify as nonhuman animals
* 2024 March 24: One anti-furry bill died, the other two wait to be heard
* 2024 February 25: One of the anti-furry bills might become about religion in schools instead
* 2024 February 18: Republicans introduce a 7th anti-furry bill and work to undermine student freedoms on a wider scale
* 2024 February 9: Will Oklahoma Call Animal Control on Students?
* 2023 April 24: Proposed amendment to Montana net censorship bill would ban transgender and transspecies people
* 2023 March 14: A formerly anti-alterhuman but still anti-transgender bill will be heard Wednesday
* 2023 February 22: In US, three anti-transgender bills also oppose alterhumans; similar recent Supreme Court cases

frameacloud

This blog post was written by Orion Scribner (frameacloud) on 2025 April 19 for Otherkin News, which is a volunteer run project. We welcome other people to submit articles about alterhumanity in current events. Learn more about this project and what we’re looking for.

Previously, we wrote an in-depth article about the F.U.R.R.I.E.S. Act, a Republican proposed constitution amendment that proposes to criminalize allowing “non-human behavior” in public schools in Texas, which has been supported by the Governor. You can read it here. If you aren’t familiar with this news story yet, please read it first so that you can understand this one.

One more thing I noticed after I wrote my article is that the wording of the two F.U.R.R.I.E.S. Act bills isn’t completely identical after all: one of them has a typographical error in it. The version filed as Texas House Bill 4814 (TX HB 4814) says the F.U.R.R.I.E.S. Act stands for Forbidding Unlawful Representation of Roleplaying in Education, missing the final word of the initialism. The version filed as Texas House Bill 54 (TX HB 54) ends the initialism with Educational Spaces. I had assumed that its author, Republican Representative Stan Gerdes, must have filed the bill a second time because of this error, instead of correcting the introduced bill text afterward. However, in a post to his Facebook on March 14, Gerdes wrote that the bill

“now has the support of Governor Greg Abbott and Speaker Dustin Burrows, who recognize the importance of keeping distractions out of our classrooms. Speaker Burrows has reassigned our legislation as House Bill 54, a low bill number that signals its priority status in the Texas House! I’m grateful that our leadership is taking this issue seriously and ensuring that Texas schools remain places of learning, not roleplaying. I’ve appreciated the conversations I’ve had with my own Smithville ISD Superintendent on this issue—our educators should be focused on teaching, not managing classroom disruptions from kids pretending to be animals. This is common sense. Let’s get it passed.”

Given that the bill is associated with treating an urban legend as though it’s happening in real life, anything else he says about his bill is reasonable to view with doubt. Whatever the reason for the two different bill numbers, the bungled initialism is the one that most of the news articles repeat. At least one news source ends the initialism as “Education and Schools,” which doesn’t appear in either of the bill texts. I’m also skeptical of exactly what conversations Gerdes had with the Smithville ISD Superintendant, if any, for reasons that show up later in this post. I don’t recall seeing Burrows say anything about the bill, either.

Here is a round-up of some more of the media coverage about and response to the bill since I last wrote about it. This is a reference list, sorted alphabetically by surname of the author, with my own annotations about the accuracy of each article and any new information it contributed.

Bahari, Sarah (2025 March 17). Texas bill would ban ‘furry subculture’ from public schools. The Dallas Morning News. https://www.dallasnews.com/news/texas/2025/03/17/texas-bill-would-ban-furry-subculture-from-public-schools/ Archived 2025 April 8: https://web.archive.org/web/20250408185746/https://www.dallasnews.com/news/texas/2025/03/17/texas-bill-would-ban-furry-subculture-from-public-schools/

Media Bias Fact Check (MBFC) says that this Pulitzer Prize winning newspaper for a region of Texas has a right-center bias and high credibility. This article accurately says that the litter box rumor has been debunked, and that the bill is connected with Republican efforts to use taxpayer dollars for private schools, though it doesn’t bring up that this means defunding public schools or the connection with satirizing transgender students. This article adds important new information about the story: some written statements about the bill were provided directly to the Dallas Morning News for the above article from the legislator, Rep. Stan Gerdes, and a spokesperson for Gov. Greg Abbott’s office, Andrew Mahaleris. Bahari reports, “Gerdes acknowledged furries soon might show up at another place: the Capitol in Austin. ‘I fully expect the subculture to show up in full furry vengeance at the committee hearing,’ he said in a statement, adding that he will not tolerate theatrics during the legislative process.” Sounds like Gerdes meant for the bill to be bait for a spectacle. The same statement also claims that “he wrote the bill in response to an incident in Smithville ISD, but he did not elaborate. Smithville is about 45 miles southeast of Austin. Neither Gerdes nor the school district immediately responded to a request for more information Monday from The Dallas Morning News.” Over a month later, there still has been no public comment from that school district to substantiate Gerdes’s claim.

Billson, Chantelle (2025 March 26). Texas GOP lawmaker introduces Furries Act after falling for the litter-boxes-in-schools hoax. PinkNews. https://www.thepinknews.com/2025/03/26/stan-gerdes-texas-furries-act/ Archived 2025 April 2: https://web.archive.org/web/20250402063947/https://www.thepinknews.com/2025/03/26/stan-gerdes-texas-furries-act/

PinkNews is an online magazine focusing on LGBTQ+ pop culture for the UK and worldwide. MBFC says it has a left bias and high credibility. That may have been true once, but sadly, PinkNews has started using generative AI in their process for writing their articles, judging by a flag that appears on the end of some of the web addresses that they linked to in their article: /?utm_source=chatgpt.com. This reveals that PinkNews used the genAI ChatGPT as though it was a search engine for discovering those links. PinkNews also gives an inaccurate history of how the litter box urban legend arose and spread, giving the wrong dates and crediting the wrong people. PinkNews says the legend started in the early 2000s and only credits its popularity to a single deleted tweet from a random sports coach in 2023. This is very far away from the facts: the legend was invented decades later than that, in 2021 and 2022, and was very visibly popularized by a number of Republican politicians and public figures. The fact-checking sites Reuters, PolitiFact, and Snopes have all covered this history as part of debunking the urban legend. If PinkNews had been even partly overseen by a human who cares about writing accurate news articles, they would have proofread their machine-generated story against at least one of those fact-checking sites.

Bollinger, Alex (2025 March 24). GOP governor tells rally that kids are using litterboxes in classrooms. The crowd agreed. LGBTQ Nation. https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2025/03/gop-governor-tells-rally-that-kids-are-using-litterboxes-in-classrooms-the-crowd-agreed/ Archived 2025 March 26: https://web.archive.org/web/20250326051627/https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2025/03/gop-governor-tells-rally-that-kids-are-using-litterboxes-in-classrooms-the-crowd-agreed/

LGBTQ Nation is an online magazine in the US that specializes in queer-positive news. MBFC says it has a left bias and medium credibility because it doesn’t label its opinion articles and uses loaded words. LGBTQ Nation has had several pieces on the litter box urban legend. This article focuses on that aspect of the context of the bill, and especially on how a number of Republican politicians and public figures have promoted the urban legend during the past few years, and that its purpose was to criticize transgender students having access to public school restrooms. Otherwise, this article doesn’t add new information about the bill.

Codega, Lin (2025 March 19). A Texas conformity bill could impact tabletop roleplaying games in schools statewide. Rascal. https://www.rascal.news/texas-furries-act-tabletop-roleplaying-games-in-schools/ Archived 2025 March 20: https://web.archive.org/web/20250320225725/https://www.rascal.news/texas-furries-act-tabletop-roleplaying-games-in-schools/

Rascal is a site for news about role playing games and culture, run by three people. Rascal doesn’t have an entry in MBFC. Although it’s a small news source, this is an especially well written article that was cited in the article by Them.us. It offers some original insights to the story from a couple of lawyers, and looks at the bill from the angle of being part of another moral panic, similar to what happened in the 1980s when the Satanic Panic spread urban legends about Dungeons and Dragons being dangerous. A ban on role play is a ban on a part of the Constitutionally protected freedom of expression in public schools. One lawyer, Tess Lynch, compares cat ear headbands with the black armbands in the landmark case about students’ freedom of expression, Tinker v. Des Moines, which is the same thing that my partners Page Shepard, House of Chimeras and I said about it in our convention panel about anti-furry bills a couple of years ago. The other lawyer, Noah Downs, says that the bill text is worded in such a broad way that it could ban or criminalize school clubs for Dungeons and Dragons and many other play activities organized or approved of by teachers.

Esguerra, Vanessa (2025 March 20). A Texas bill could ban ‘furries’ from public schools—yes, really. The Mary Sue. https://www.themarysue.com/a-texas-bill-could-ban-furries-from-public-schools-yes-really/ or https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/a-texas-bill-could-ban-furries-from-public-schools-yes-really/ar-AA1BjM4r Archived 2025 March 23: https://web.archive.org/web/20250323101320/https://www.themarysue.com/a-texas-bill-could-ban-furries-from-public-schools-yes-really/

The Mary Sue is a feminist online magazine for women about geek culture. MBFC says it has a left bias and high credibility. It focuses on fact checking what the furry fandom is really like, as part of the magazine’s interest in fandoms, but only barely implies that the bill has an anti-LGBT context.

Fields, Alyssa (2025 March 17). Furries, Meowing in School Now a 'Radical Trend,' According to Lawmaker. The Dallas Observer. https://www.dallasobserver.com/news/texas-bill-aims-to-eliminate-furries-in-schools-21926996 Archived 2025 April 9: https://web.archive.org/web/20250409081416/https://www.dallasobserver.com/news/texas-bill-aims-to-eliminate-furries-in-schools-21926996

The Dallas Observer is a newspaper established in 1980 and appears to have a left bias, focusing on local businesses and lifestyle. It doesn’t have a listing in MBFC. The above article was cited in several other news sources because it has an interview with a member of the furry fandom, Andrew Kaiser, about what he thinks of the bill. Kaiser had been active in the fandom in Texas, but he’s one of many LGBTQIA people who move out of that state to flee conservative politics. Kaiser explained that since the fandom is known for having many LGBTQIA people in it, “any legislative discussion or any Republican talking points regarding furries are considered as a proxy attack on that [LGBTQ+] community.” Although the furry fandom has its sexual aspects, much of it is carefully kept separate from that, and animal characters and role-play are normal in children’s media and play. Kaiser pointed out that many conservative bills that are supposed to protect children from seeing anything remotely associated with sexuality are really “a disingenuous attack on people that [conservatives] don't like.”

McCormack, Caitlin (2025 March 17). Texas bill aims to ban barking, meowing and other ‘non-human behavior’ in schools to tackle furries trend. New York Post. https://nypost.com/2025/03/17/us-news/texas-bill-moves-to-ban-non-human-behavior-in-schools-to-eliminate-furry-trend/ Archived 2025 March 17: https://web.archive.org/web/20250328092550/https://nypost.com/2025/03/17/us-news/texas-bill-moves-to-ban-non-human-behavior-in-schools-to-eliminate-furry-trend/

MBFC says the New York Post is a newspaper with a right-center bias and medium credibility. I notice that the New York Post is a tabloid that has a consistently transphobic slant in its reporting, judging by the headlines in its transgender tag. This is relevant because this bill arose from anti-transgender urban legends. This is a poor article with no new scoop to offer of its own, and which fails to mention that there is no truth to the Republican politicians’ claims about furries disrupting schools. The New York Post treats the litter box urban legend as though it was fact.

Mion, Landon (2025 March 19). Texas lawmaker proposes bill targeting furries; measure seeks to ban 'non-human behavior' in schools. Fox News. https://www.foxnews.com/politics/texas-lawmaker-proposes-bill-targeting-furries-measure-seeks-ban-non-human-behavior-schools Archived 2025 April 6: https://web.archive.org/web/20250406225521/https://www.foxnews.com/politics/texas-lawmaker-proposes-bill-targeting-furries-measure-seeks-ban-non-human-behavior-schools

MBFC rates Fox News as a questionable source. Interestingly enough, even this article by Fox brings up that the litter box rumor is a debunked urban legend. However, Fox only says that the rumor “circulated online,” which is far less visibility than it demonstrably has had, even in this same article, where Republican politicians are promoting it as part of their platforms. Fox otherwise focuses on Gerdes and Abbott’s claims about furries being problems in schools. This allows the article to give the impression that there could be partly some substance to the claims about furries, even though they’re well-known to be baseless. It mentions that Abbott talked about “the furry issue as a motivating factor to allow private school choice vouchers,” but doesn’t explain that the vouchers would be made by sending taxpayer dollars away from public schools. Fox gave just enough of the facts to almost but not quite criticize Republican politicians or say something false.

Qureshi, Arshi (2025 March 20). TEACHER'S PET: High school students identifying as cats & using litterboxes & leashes in class target of new crackdown with $25k fine. The US Sun. https://www.the-sun.com/news/13822175/texas-wants-ban-furry-culture-school/ Archived 2025 April 11: https://web.archive.org/web/20250411123606/https://www.the-sun.com/news/13822175/texas-wants-ban-furry-culture-school/

MBFC says the US Sun is an online-only tabloid with a focus on sensational news, a right bias, and mixed factual reporting due to failed fact checks and promotion of misinformation. The Sun outright says that the litter box urban legend is true, and fails to mention that it has been consistently debunked.

Ramirez, Juan Carlos (2025 April 6) Legislature should not focus on furries during current session. North Texas Daily. https://www.ntdaily.com/opinion/legislature-should-not-focus-on-furries-during-current-session/article_91a6ee7c-1f8c-4561-a665-5753a64b78bb.html Archived 2025 April 19: https://web.archive.org/web/20250419214919/https://www.ntdaily.com/opinion/legislature-should-not-focus-on-furries-during-current-session/article_91a6ee7c-1f8c-4561-a665-5753a64b78bb.html

Established in 1916, North Texas Daily is a student paper of the University of North Texas. MBFC doesn’t have an entry about this news source. Although this is an opinion article, it does well at summarizing various news sources related to this story. The author’s stance is that the bill distracts from real issues that lawmakers need to address about schools in the state. It doesn’t get into the context of Republican opposition to public schools or LGBT rights.

Riedel, Samantha (2025 March 26). Texas Republican Introduces Bill to Address the Nonexistent Problem of Furries in Schools. Them.us. https://www.them.us/story/texas-republican-legislation-furries-in-schools Archived 2025 April 10: https://web.archive.org/web/20250410001653/https://www.them.us/story/texas-republican-legislation-furries-in-schools

Them.us is an online magazine for LGBTQIA people, which MBFC rates as having a left bias and high credibility. This article is an accurate summary of the context around the bill. It also points out that the bill is "likely to fail as its predecessors have … not least because Texas legislators have filed over 10,000 bills in the 2025-2026 session so far.”

Villarreal, Daniel (2025 March 13). GOP legislator files bill to stop ‘furries’ from using litter boxes in schools. LGBTQ Nation. https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2025/03/gop-legislator-files-bill-to-stop-furries-from-using-litter-boxes-in-schools/ Archived 2025 March 14: https://web.archive.org/web/20250314064854/https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2025/03/gop-legislator-files-bill-to-stop-furries-from-using-litter-boxes-in-schools/

Another article from this online magazine. This is a good summary, focusing on the spread of the litter box urban legend among Republican politicians. In regard to the Smithville school district that Gerdes had said had a furry incident, this article notes that the district “serves only 1,885 students … [and no] known news reports covered the alleged incident.”

Villegas, Patti (2025 March 18). Texas Lawmaker Unleashes F.U.R.R.I.E.S. Act: No More Barking In Classrooms. The Dallas Express. https://dallasexpress.com/education/texas-bill-would-ban-furry-behavior-in-schools/ Archived 2025 April 19: https://web.archive.org/web/20250419215048/https://dallasexpress.com/education/texas-bill-would-ban-furry-behavior-in-schools/

MBFC says the Dallas Express was founded in 2021 and has a right wing bias and medium credibility. This is a poor article because it fails to mention that the litter box rumor has been consistently debunked by fact-checkers as an urban legend, which is a crucial part of this news story. It makes it sound like the politicians are responding in a reasonable way to a bizarre youth fad. The Dallas Express selectively quotes the furry who was interviewed in the Dallas Observer to make it sound like he’s normalizing these behaviors in schools, instead of any of the parts where he said that it’s not happening like that.

Generally, what we see in this round-up of news articles is that right-wing news sources vary in what degree that they will admit that the Republicans who support the bill are basing it on a debunked urban legend. Meanwhile, left-wing news sources vary in how much they get into the context of the bill to explain what Republicans are getting at. If any of these articles make you feel concerned or unsafe, please read my previous article about the bill and focus on the part about things that you can do, such as writing to your elected representative, or building solidarity with your local community.∎

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This post tells about the Otherkin News project, the code of conduct for participating in it, and the style guide for submitting news articles to it.

I. About this blog

Otherkin News is a collaborative, volunteer-run blog for sharing news for otherkin, therianthropes, fictionfolk, plural systems, and all sorts of alterhumans. We’ll talk about current events in our communities, and discuss newspaper articles that are about us. You can post links to news articles you've found that talk about otherkin, or new fictionkin essays that you or others have publicly posted. You can advertise here about your surveys of therianthropes, and your calls for submissions to alterhuman essay anthologies. You can share news that you've found that aren't about alterhumans but that you think are relevant to the interests and experiences of many of us. Everyone is welcome to subscribe and to submit articles to this blog.
Otherkin News is a community blog hosted on Dreamwidth, a social blogging platform. That means this blog isn’t a place where only one user posts, it’s a place where many users can post, similar to a web forum. Certain members of the community have a moderator role. Here is the official FAQ about Dreamwidth communities.
You don’t need to have an account on Dreamwidth to be notified of updates to this community. If you have an RSS feed reader, such as Feedly, you can paste this link into it to subscribe to our RSS feed: https://otherkinnews.dreamwidth.org/data/rss Or, if you use Mastodon, you can subscribe to this automated feed of it. A community moderator also manually links to the posts on Tumblr and on their personal Bluesky, if you use either of those social media platforms. Although we make these options available, we recommend that you read the posts on Dreamwidth itself, so that you don’t miss out on updates to individual posts and the discussions in the comments.
If you choose to use a Dreamwidth account to comment or post to this community, and you’re new to using this platform, then here are some resources that you can explore about it to make your experience better:
1. Carmentalis’s guide to Dreamwidth for Tumblr users is a brief overview of what this platform can do
2. SASO Referees’s guide on how to use Dreamwidth, which focuses on how to join a community and post to it
3. You can install Solarbird’s custom theme that makes DreamWidth work well on mobile devices.
4. Dreamwidth’s official FAQ is very thorough about all of its features.

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nova_dergs

Pixel art gif of a spell being cast on a book and text appearing.

Join the Fictionfolk Webring

Are you fictionfolk? Do you have a personal website? We'd love to have you join our webring!

We've have yet to see anyone make fictionfolk webring, so we're filling the gap ourselves. Learn more on our website. We have more info there on what we're doing, how to join and even links to the resources we used to build everything.

What is a webring?

It's basically a collection of websites, that you can cycle through and view via a widget all the sites put up. This means, that by using our webring, you can easily browse through a bunch cool websites made by fictionfolk without having to scour the internet! Neat!

If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to us.

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Summary: In the US, Republicans have introduced the third and fourth bills this year that would ban students from being furries in public schools, with a pair of identical texts introduced as Texas House Bill 54 and HB 4814. Called the F.U.R.R.I.E.S. Act, these bills propose to amend the Texas Constitution to prohibit students from displaying “non-human behaviors” at school, to call schools that allow it abusive, and to punish the schools with expensive fines. Texas Governor Greg Abbott spoke approvingly of the bill and claimed it was in response to schools supposedly letting students behave as animals and use litter boxes. That was a debunked urban legend that Republicans invented in 2021. The purpose of the urban legend and the bills is to satirize transgender students who ask to use the right restrooms for their genders, and to justify defunding public schools in favor of private schools. Republicans oppose education for people other than the wealthy, and oppose allowing LGBTQIA people to exist. Below, find out more about what these bills mean and what you can do about them.

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nova_dergs

Hello, everyone! We're Nonhuman Notions,

a free, community-run, email newsletter for a wide variety of nonhuman identities including therians, otherkin, fictionfolk, and more. Our goal is to support and share art, writing, and other projects from the nonhuman community.

Nonhuman Notions accepts visual art, poetry, photography, and essays documenting, describing, and encapsulating what it means to be and live as nonhuman. While the focus of the newsletter is on nonhumans, we strive to support and share surveys, zines, community events, and other news that have to do with the AHPI community. The newsletter currently consists of three sections: art and photography, writing, and the community howl.

Submissions will be opening soon!

Interested in learning more?

Follow us on social media.

Subscribe or sign up for updates!

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For the third year running, Republicans in the US have once again continued to write "anti-furry bills." On January 17, Republicans introduced Mississippi House Bill 1060 (MS HB 1060), which you can see for yourself on the state government's site, though you may need to enable Javascript if your web browser doesn't display it properly: https://billstatus.ls.state.ms.us/2025/pdf/history/HB/HB1060.xml Currently, this is the bill's official description, as written by its sponsors:

"Gender dysphoria; require school personnel to notify parents of student who request to be referred to as different gender or nonhuman."

Emphasis added. Furthermore, the sponsors wrote it with this summary:

"An Act To Require School Administrators, Teachers, Counselors Or Other Personnel Of The School To Provide Written Notification To The Parent Or Legal Guardian Of Any Student Identifying At School As A Gender Or Pronoun That Does Not Align With The Child's Sex On Their Birth Certificate, Sex Assigned At Birth Or Using Sex-segregated School Programs And Activities Or School Facilities That Do Not Align With The Child's Sex Assignment At Birth, Within Three Days Of Becoming Aware Of Such Conduct Or Request By The Affected Student; To Provide That No School Personnel Shall Be Disciplined Or Suffer Any Unlawful Reprisal For Refusing To Acknowledge A Student By A Preferred Gender, Pronoun Or Animal Species That Is Inconsistent With The Child's Sex Assignment At Birth; To Prescribe The Legislative Intent; And For Related Purposes."

Emphasis added. Despite what the description and summary says, the bill text itself doesn't mention either of the topics that I emphasized here. This leaves it an ordinary example of legislature proposed to discriminate against transgender students in public schools. This is a common pattern in anti-furry bills, where an early version of the bill mentions students who identify as nonhuman animal species, to try to attract attention, and then the sponsors delete that part later so that the bill can focus on their real intentions against transgender students. Republicans mean for the temporary inclusion of that topic to satirize transgender students and make a comparison that they see as absurd. It's a reference to an urban legend that Republicans circulate, where supposedly schools that let transgender students use the restrooms they want are also providing litter boxes in classrooms for students who are furries. That urban legend has been debunked by the fact-checking sites Snopes and Reuters.

The bill was sponsored by these eleven Republican Representatives: Charles Blackwell, William Arnold, Randy Boyd, Larry Byrd, Carolyn Crawford, Jim Estrada, Greg Haney, Stacey Hobgood-Wilkes, Donnie Scoggin, Joseph Tubb, and Beth Waldo. These are some of the same authors as a similar anti-furry bill from last year, Mississippi House Bill 176, which was also written by the same Blackwell, Arnold, Boyd, Byrd, and Scoggin, plus Dan Eubanks and Jimmy Fondren.

[Edited to add] Another new one is Oklahoma House Bill 1327, by sole sponsor Justin Humphrey. This is basically the same as his bill from last year, Oklahoma House Bill 3084, still proposing that students who identify as animals should get picked up from school by animal control. He specializes in introducing bills that sound bizarre to attract attention, and later he cleans them up so they'll pass into law. He prefiled it on December 30th so that it will be introduced on February 3.

Anti-furry bills similar to these began in 2023 with North Dakota House Bill 1522, Oklahoma Senate Bill 943, Indiana Statehouse Bill 380, and a proposed amendment to Montana Senate Bill 544. 2024 had Oklahoma House Bill 3084, Mississippi House Bill 176, and Missouri House Bill 2678. No anti-furry bills have yet passed into law as such. Fellow volunteers and I have been reporting on these in the Otherkin News blog all along, which you can read in the tag for that purpose. Don't like this bill? If you're a US citizen, voting is only one of your powers to shape the laws that you live under. In the recording of my polycule's panel about anti-furry bills, skip to the timestamp 23:44 to hear what ordinary citizens can do. In the written script of our lecture, see Slides 21 through 25.

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During the previous two years, Republicans in the US have penned "anti-furry bills." These come from Republicans rumoring that schools also provide litter boxes for students who believe they are animals. The rumor has been debunked by the fact-checking sites Snopes and Reuters. Anti-furry bills oppose what the legislators variously and inaccurately describe as people who are furry, anthropomorphic, transspecies, identifying as animals, or having the "perception of being any animal species other than human". Sometimes the text of the bill itself uses those words, and sometimes the legislators only spell that out in interviews. The bills are based on the satirical urban legend about litter boxes, not on the behavior of any real people. The purpose is to satirize transgender students' requests to use the correct restrooms in schools. Republicans care about this as part of a vendetta against public schools and LGBT people.

The bills began in 2023 with North Dakota House Bill 1522, Oklahoma Senate Bill 943, Indiana Statehouse Bill 380, and a proposed amendment to Montana Senate Bill 544. 2024 had Oklahoma House Bill 3084, Mississippi House Bill 176, and Missouri House Bill 2678. No anti-furry bills have yet passed into law as such. Fellow volunteers and I have been reporting on these in the Otherkin News blog all along, which you can read in the tag for that purpose. I expect to see Republicans propose some more anti-furry bills this year, too. Here is the first relevant bill for 2025 that I've found, though it is not specifically what I would categorize as an anti-furry bill.

New York Senate Bill 723 would make it be a class B misdemeanor to wear a mask and/or costume in public places. It describes these as "deceptive wearing of a mask" and "disguised by unusual or unnatural attire." It would be a crime even for people who are doing harmless activities, such as "loiter[ing], remain[ing] or congregat[ing] in a public place with other persons so masked or disguised while engaged in a protest, rally or other public assembly." The explicit purpose is to make it more difficult for peaceful protestors to maintain any anonymity.

Today, one common tactic of protestors is "Black Bloc," in which all the protestors cover themselves in sunglasses and black clothing from head to foot. They hide their body shape as well as hair and faces as much as possible. Because Bloc makes the whole group look uniformly similar and anonymous, it makes it more difficult for police to identify an individual for later legal punishment or single someone out for immediate brutality. Covering one's skin and eyes as part of Black Bloc also gives some protection from pepper spray. If Black Bloc is banned, protestors will be more vulnerable to injury and police violence. If common attire of protestors is criminalized, then the bill could be used to some degree to limit or effectively ban peaceful protest, which is a First Amendment right. For centuries, disguises have played a role in how protestors protect their anonymity, show who they're together with, or invoke cultural symbols and beliefs (Leslie Feinberg, Transgender Warriors, pp. 75-80). In American history alone, disguises were a part of the famous protest that led to the US becoming an independent nation in the first place: the Boston Tea Party in 1773.

If your city in the state of New York requires permission from the police or other authorities for entertainment events, then Senate Bill 723 would require you to specifically get permission for people to wear disguises to the event, because it makes an exception for those. The bill also makes an exception for attire worn for religious reasons.

This bill could have an impact on other sorts of gatherings. It leaves itself open for various sorts of people to be considered to be wearing "unusual or unnatural attire." It doesn't specifically mention people who wear costumes and masks as part of hobbies such as fursuiting, cosplay, and quadrobics, but it could have an impact on them. There are other bills that oppose transgender people in much more explicit ways, but couldn't this one also be stretched to be used against people whose outfits don't conform with their assigned gender?

The bill was prefiled on January 8 by Republican Senators Steven Rhoads, George Borrello, Patricia Canzoneri-Fitzpatrick, Jack Martins, Mario Mattera, Dean Murray, Peter Oberacker, William Weber, and Alexis Weik. Here is the bill on the New York Senate government website: https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2025/S723

If you care about costuming hobbies as well as the First Amendment right to peaceful protest, what can you do about this bill? My partners Page Shepard, House of Chimeras, and I have presented a convention panel about that. In the recording of our panel, skip to the timestamp 23:44 to hear what ordinary people can do about bad bills. In the written script of our lecture, see Slides 21 through 25.

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The Kremlin-aligned Safe Internet League is an organization for censoring the internet in Russia and educating the public about risks they may encounter there. The State Duma Committee on Family, Women and Children helped establish the organization in 2011. The League’s Ombudsman is Irina Volynets. In the spring of 2024, Volynets said that the furry fandom and quadrobics are both dangerous hobbies. She said that furries dress as pigs and eat from troughs. (Later, a furry explained to the news that they don’t do that.) Soon afterward, Volynets claimed to have received death threats from quadrobists, which she said shows they’re generally hostile. The League doesn’t plan to ban cartoons for having furry characters. Instead, they want to ban quadrobics and furry fans for encouraging “crazy” behavior and having direct connections with LGBT. Russia bans LGBT for allegedly being an extremist movement.

At the end of the summer of 2024, Russian pop singer Mia Boyka humiliated a small child for expressing an interest in quadrobics. Boyka derided the cat-masked child to tears on the concert stage in front of a booing audience. Boyka then posted a video clip of that to her TikTok, asking her followers what they thought of quadrobics. The child’s parents filed a police report, because they hadn’t consented to Boyka doing any of this. The child had been brought on stage because she had gotten lost at the concert so her parents could come find her. Other celebrities and authorities scolded Boyka for her cruelty. Yekaterina Mizulina, head of the Safe Internet League, wrote to the Prosecutor’s Office of the Russian Federation that she thought that what Boyka did was unacceptable treatment of a child, even though she didn’t support quadrobics either.

In September, soon after Boyka’s video clip went viral, Russian Senator Natalia Kosikhina proposed banning quadrobics. The Senator claimed that the sport was dangerous because supposedly, quadrobist teens attack and bite people who visit parks. So far, I haven’t found names, dates, or proof that those sorts of attacks actually happened. State Duma deputy Svetlana Bessarab says the ban is unnecessary, because the Code of Administrative Offenses would cover any bad behavior that could develop in connection with the hobby, whereas the hobby itself is a healthy form of play.

Something consistent across the articles that I read about this is that they describe quadrobics as a fashionable hobby among children and teens, derived from normal ways that smaller children play, and connected with the furry fandom. They don’t mention therianthropes.

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Therianthropy Day is held every year on the first full moon of November. This year, in 2024, that falls on Friday the 15th. According to NASA, this also happens to be a supermoon, which means it's slightly brighter than usual.

Why that date, and what is the history of that holiday?
Therianthropy Day commemorates the first Howl, which was held 30 years ago in November 1994. A Howl is when therians meet up together in person. That was a year after the first therians started to meet up together online in November 1993. Therians first proposed commemorating it as a holiday on that date in 1996. Based on that history, in 2016, Muninn the Raven proposed observing it as Therianthropy Day, though the first posts and community poll about it attracted little attention. I think the holiday finally really caught on in 2021, when I first saw many therians posting on social media about fun things they were doing for it.

What are therians, anyway?
* If therianthropy is a new idea to you, or you want to explain it to others who are unfamiliar with it, this essay is a quick and easy to understand introduction to it. It's available in several languages already, and more translations would be great.
* Learn more about the history of the therian community by reading the Timeline of the Therian Community written by

houseofchimeras.

What can we do for Therianthropy Day?
* I've seen therians celebrate it by wearing gear (for example, a necklace with the therian symbol, or clothes with pictures of their species), meeting up with their therian friends, and howling at the moon.
* Enjoy some indie games and zines about therianthropy from this hand-curated itch.io collection. Some therian highlights from that: SlumberDragon's zine of self-care tips for animal folk,

who_is_page's therianthropy-inspired solo journaling game Wolf In Man's Clothing, puppygirlbelly's interactive story I Am Dog(s), and Digital Freegans's zines THERIANARCHY and BEAST PUNKS.

Are there days for other sorts of alterhumans too?
There are. Alterhuman Day commemorates when Lio of the Crossroads System coined that word on September 26, 2014. Otherkin Day is on July 9, commemorating when the word was coined in 1990, though

arethinn has found that the word's origin is a little more complicated than that. Plural Events says that Plural Pride Day is the third Saturday of July, and Plural Acceptance Week is that week.

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In November 2024, The Sol System's Alterhuman Writing Challenge asked alterhumans to "finish and publish at least one piece of writing a day, on your platform of choice [...] about or in connection to alterhumanity". This has inspired some alterhumans to post to their own Dreamwidth blogs and to the Alterhuman Community group on Tumblr.

Many different writing challenges emerged this November for a reason. Until this year, the most popular writing challenge was National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). People all over the world would push themselves daily to try to start and finish writing a 50,000 novel within the thirty days. The nonprofit organization for NaNoWriMo marred its 25th anniversary by announcing support for people using so-called artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms to write their novels for them. That take was unpopular because it would defeat the purpose of the challenge, among other reasons. Former fans organized many alternatives and resources for DIYing their own writing activities without AI or that nonprofit organization. These indie writers use other word count trackers, such as Track Bear. They use various other writing challenges, such as the one above.

AI-generated fiction story texts are problematic for many reasons. Their body of text comes from writers whose works were used without their permission. Training software in this way counts as fair use, but the output can end up being similar enough to the originals to result in copyright infringement and is recognized as plagiarism. Even text generation for bots such as ChatGPT requires such an absurd amount of electricity that the fad for AI is contributing to an energy crisis. Even though it has always been difficult for creative people to make a living, people who imagine that they can turn AI generated fiction into easy money have sent overwhelming quantities of it to magazines, wasting the time of the editors. Personally, I find no appeal in reading a story that hasn't had any heart put into its choice of words. Often, it's plain that no person even oversaw or proofread them.

Whatever you write for the Alterhuman Writing Challenge, you can proudly label your creations as "Alterhuman Made, Not AI-Generated" or "Nonhuman Made, Not AI-Generated" with these icons that Nova designed earlier this year. These were inspired by other graphics for labeling one's creations as having been made without AI. For example, Hinokodo's "Human Made" (released in December 2022, I think these were the first of these sorts of labels) and Lone Archivist's "Made By Humans" (August 2023). These earlier designs are good, it's just that their wording doesn't focus on calling out that its point is that it is free of AI generation, and doesn't align with how some of us creators want to describe ourselves. Both of those use human hand prints, so Nova's alterhuman/nonhuman spinoff of them uses paw prints.

If you have an account here on Dreamwidth or can take a minute to create one, yesterday I created a group,

alterhuman_writing. That community account is a place for us to share our essays, poetry, and other creative writing about being alterhuman. This month's Alterhuman Writing Challenge inspired the creation of the group, but it will continue to be a place for posting our writings all around the year.

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In Finland, between May and September, newspapers published many articles on therianthropes. The papers are Iltalehti (Evening Newspaper), Ilta-Sanomat (The Evening News), Yle (Finnish Broadcasting Company), and MTV Uutiset (Commercial Television News, no relationship to the MTV channel in America).

These articles show a hobby popularized among children and teens on the social media app TikTok, where therians exercise on all fours (quadrobics), imitating animal movements. With practice, they can jump high and land on their hands, and other challenging feats. Therian quadrobicists hand-make and wear a certain style of upper-face animal masks to express themselves and protect their privacy on the informal video-sharing app. Some other common accessories are a tail made of yarn or fur, fastened to their belt. Some wear sneakers painted to look like paws, or take their shoes off while exercising. They practice making animal vocalizations. The therianthrope community is multi-generational and has existed since 1994, but this set of practices– quadrobics and masks– are a new development among the youngest generation of therians. While some of these young self-described therians say that being an animal is an integral part of who they are, some others firmly say they don’t, and simply enjoy it as a creative hobby, which is another difference from previous generations of therians.

Therian children who express themselves in these ways have been becoming visible in some schools in Finland. Although this hasn’t been a big problem, school officials have started setting boundaries about it to make sure that class won’t be disrupted by students wearing masks or making animal noises. Students need to wear shoes outdoors and take them off inside the school, which means that kids who take off their shoes to play outside will track mud onto the floors, and dirty other children's socks. Before this school year started, the principals of the schools in the cities of Oulu and Joensuu sent messages to parents banning students from these behaviors in class, along with other sorts of costumes and toys. This brought public attention to therians. In the past couple of weeks, the newspapers followed up on that by interviewing teen therians, parents, public figures, locals, and child welfare experts. Aside from a few opinion pieces and some reasonable concerns, nearly all of these express a positive attitude toward therians and give accurate information about what they are. This shows that young quadrobicists have been successful at building a good image for therians, because parents and others who work with children like it when kids do crafts and play outside together.

I don’t know Finnish, so I’m having to access these articles with the help of machine translation. That’s not a proper translation. One challenge I’m aware of is that Finnish doesn’t have the words he or she, so the machine translation alternates between them arbitrarily, with no clue of what would be correct for that person in English. In the following annotated bibliography of the articles, I’ll do my best to figure out a probably correct translation of their titles and give a summary, but be aware that nuances may be confused or lost.

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nova_dergs

My Gender is [NOT] Human. Huge scaly coils of a serpent which are the same colors as the xenogender flag cover the entire page.

Xenogender: A gender that cannot be contained by human understandings of gender; more concerned with crafting other methods of gender categorization and hierarchy such as those relating to animals, plants, or other creatures/things.

This zine is a collection of artwork, writing and more created by alterhumans and nonhumans to express both their species identity, gender, and how they intersect. While this zine has an xenogender slant, everyone who had something to share about how their species and gender overlap were encouraged to submit pieces!

Speaking of which: Thank you to everyone who submitted works! It means a lot to us that others think our project is valuable and are willing to use their time and ability to be a part of it! The community is so talented and varied, we hope this zine serves as a comfort for anyone who feels alone in their alterhuman and gender identities.

We created this zine to be an accessible pdf. Every entry is bookmarked for easy browsing, every image contribution is accompanied by alt text and we’ve done our best to battle against Adobe Acrobat's reading order to make sure it was logical! We’re also rather proud of figuring out how to make the content warnings also be links - so skipping ahead is only a click away.

Download it for free here!

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A Greek statue of the Winged Victory, rendered in a vaporwave aesthetic. She is a woman wearing a draped garment. Her wings glow blue. The header text says Alterhuman and Nonhuman Body Parts Sensation Survey. The footer text says 18+ only, open until July 6, 2024.

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Content warnings: Rated G. An urban legend that describes an unsanitary situation. Sexism against transgender people, including attempts to prevent them from going to school or using facilities, and outing children to their parents. A straw-man version of furries being used to try to discredit transgender people, in a way that could cause trouble for people who identify as nonhuman.

In the USA, so far this year, Republicans have proposed three pieces of legislation that are opposed to furries or people who identify as nonhuman. That’s something they started doing last year, inspired by an urban legend about litter boxes in public schools, which they made up in parody of transgender students asking to use school restrooms. We’ve been ending up calling these “anti-furry bills” as we keep track of them in our Otherkin News blog. Furry isn’t the accurate word, but it is the word that Republicans use in the urban legend and usually in the bills too. Every once in a while, I’m checking on the status of the bills, and trying to see if there are any new ones. Here is the update for this week.

1. Oklahoma House Bill 3084 (OK HB 3084) “Schools; prohibiting certain students from participating in school curriculum or activities; effective date.”

Background: We wrote about this bill in detail in a previous Otherkin News post. The bill says that furry students should be taken out of school by animal control. Its only sponsor (writer) is Justin Humphrey (he/him). This seems linked with his opposition to LGBTQ people, as well as his efforts to legalize animal fighting. Later, Jim Olsen (he/him) took over as principal sponsor of the bill. He proposed changing it to have the same text as an unrelated bill of his, one requiring public school classrooms to display the Ten Commandments.

Update: The bill’s current status hasn’t changed since our last update. It’s still at 25% progression toward becoming a law. Its text hasn’t changed from what it was originally, so it's still about furries.

2. Mississippi House Bill 176 (MS HB 176) “Gender dysphoria; require school personnel to notify parents of student who request to be referred to as different gender or nonhuman.”

Background: This was introduced at the same time as the first bill. As we previously wrote about it, the bill is mostly against transgender students in a way that could put them in real danger. It would require schools to out transgender students to parents, and to allow faculty to not accommodate any student who “identif[ies] at school as a gender or pronoun that does not align with the child's sex on their birth certificate, other official records, sex assigned at birth, or identifying as an animal species, extraterrestrial being or inanimate object.”

Update: This bill’s current status is dead! Hooray! It died in committee on March 3. When a bill dies, that means that it won’t progress toward becoming a law.

3. Missouri House Bill 2678 (MO HB 2678) “Prohibits students from engaging in ‘furry’ behavior while at school”

Background: We previously wrote about this bill. The bill says to pull students out of school for being furries or purporting to be animals. The bill’s only sponsor is Cheri Toalson Reisch (she/her). This appears to be connected with her opposition to transgender people as well as her efforts to undermine public schools in favor of charter schools.

Updates: This bill hasn’t changed or moved forward. It’s still the same as it was when it was introduced. A hearing hasn’t been scheduled for it, and it’s not on a House calendar.

-

About the writer: This blog post was written by Orion Scribner (they/them), who has been a community historian and archivist for more than ten years.

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Content warnings: Rated G. Mentions of abortion and transphobia.

Summary: Checking for updates on this year's three anti-furry bills in the US. None of them have progressed. The bill for calling animal control on furry students has a new sponsor. He wants to rewrite it. It would instead become a duplicate of his bill that says classrooms must display the Ten Commandments. The bill hasn't changed yet, so it's still an anti-furry bill.

I just checked for updates about the current status of all of the proposed laws (bills) in the US that are about furries or people who identify as animals. Anti-furry bills aren't based on anything that anyone in real life is doing: not participants of the furry fandom, not children pretending to be animals in the playground, and not people who really do identify as animals. Republicans say they wrote these bills because of an urban legend that schools provide litter boxes for students who identify as animals. According to fact-checkers Reuters and Snopes, no schools have ever done that. Republicans made up the urban legend and bills in parody of transgender students asking to use school restrooms. On the Otherkin News blog, we have previously written about all three of the anti-furry bills that are active, which you can read here and here. I searched on LegiScan to see if Republicans have introduced more anti-furry bills since then, but I didn’t find any new ones.

Two of the bills haven’t had any action since we posted about them before. Those are Mississippi HB 176 and Missouri HB 2678. They’re both still at 25% progression toward becoming laws. Their state government sites don’t say that hearings have been scheduled for them.

Oklahoma HB 3084 is also still at 25% progression, but some things have been happening with it. This is the bill where Republican Representative Justin Humphrey (he/him) proposed that students who are furries should be taken away from school by animal control. As of the 15th, the bill added a second sponsor, Republican Representative Jim Olsen (he/him). Olsen took Humphrey's place as the principal sponsor. Some other bills that Olsen sponsors are against abortion (OK HB 1537, HB 3013, and HJR 1046), and to allow children to not get vaccines (HB 2963 and HB 3249). Last year, Olsen sponsored some anti-transgender bills (HB 1011, HB 2177, and HB 2186).

On the 19th, Olsen proposed an amendment to HB 3084, the anti-furry bill. You can read his proposed amendment on Oklahoma’s site, or read it on a third-party site, LegiScan. This amendment would delete the entire text of the bill and replace it with an unrelated text. The text of this amendment is the same as another bill Olsen sponsored this month, HB 2962. It would no longer be about furry students at all. Instead, it would propose a law requiring public school classrooms to display the Ten Commandments. That would be unlikely to pass. In the US, public schools are government establishments, which prohibits them from displaying religious materials like that. I don't know what the advantage would be of duplicating the same text in two bills, or changing the topic of a bill so much. At this time, Olsen’s proposed amendment hasn’t been accepted. The bill’s current text is still what Humphrey originally wrote about furries.

On the 21st, the bill was withdrawn from the Rules committee. Then it was referred to the House Appropriations and Budget Education Subcommittee Committee. They haven't voted on it. I don’t see that they have scheduled a hearing for it. I'll keep watching for whatever happens next.

About the writer of this blog post: Orion Scribner (they/them) is a moderator on the Otherkin News blog.

frameacloud

Content warnings: Rated G. An urban legend that describes an unsanitary situation. Sexism against transgender people, including attempts to prevent them from participating in sports and using facilities like everyone else, and attempts to stop them from transitioning.

Summary: In 2023, Republicans began to propose laws (bills) in the US that would be against people who identify as animals. They base these on an urban legend that says schools provide litter boxes for students who identify as animals. Republicans made up that legend in parody of transgender students asking to use school restrooms (Scribner and Sol, 2024). The newest of these bills is Missouri House Bill 2678 (MO HB 2678). It’s the third such bill in 2024, bringing the historic total of these bills up to seven. This bill was written as part of a Republican effort to undermine public schools (which can’t ban transgender students from using the right restrooms, and students have First Amendment rights) in favor of religious charter schools (where students aren’t protected in those ways). The following blog post is a seven minute read.

What the Missouri bill says

Missouri House Bill 3678 (MO HB 2678) has the title “Prohibits students from engaging in ‘furry’ behavior while at school.” You can read this bill and see the latest actions on its official site, the Missouri House of Representatives, or on a third-party legislation tracking site, LegiScan. This bill was introduced this week, on February 13th, and read a second time on the 14th. It would add a law into the Revised Statutes of Missouri (RSMo). It would go in the part of the state laws about education, in Chapter 167, titled “Pupils and Special Services.” It would say:

“A student who purports to be an imaginary animal or animal species or who engages in anthropomorphic behavior consistent with the common designation of a ‘furry’ while at school shall not be allowed to participate in school curriculum or activities. The parent or guardian of a student in violation of this section shall remove the student from the school for the remainder of the school day.”

The same as the other bills like it, this bill is based on an urban legend, not on anything that was done in real life by students, furries, and/or people who identify as animals (McKinney, 2022a). This bill's wording looks like it was based on a bill from another state, Oklahoma House Bill 3084 (OK HB 3084), or its predecessor last year, Oklahoma Senate Bill 943 (OK SB 943). It shares their inaccuracies: though there are real people who identify as animals, surveys show that most furries don’t, and the dictionary definition of the word “anthropomorphic” means resembling a human, not resembling an animal (Scribner and Sol, 2024).

Who wrote the bill, and what is its context with that author’s other motivations?

The Missouri bill’s only sponsor (writer) is Cheri Toalson Reisch (she/her). She is a Missouri Republican who has supported anti-transgender bills in the past. One of those is MO SB 39, which would ban transgender students from participating in their gender’s sports division (both in private and public schools, up to and including in colleges and universities). Another one is MO SB 49. It would bar minors from accessing gender transition related surgeries or medications, removes adult coverage of hormone replacement therapy and any gender-affirming or transitioning surgeries from the Missouri Medicaid program, and denies prisoners and inmates access to any surgeries related to gender transitioning. She described both these bills as a “great move in the right direction,” and has been vocally critical that they were not harsher (Central MO Info, 2023).

Reisch is familiar with the urban legend started by conservatives of students using litter boxes in school bathrooms. She has posted about it on Facebook, telling her constituents that it is actively happening in Missouri and accusing the Columbia school district of taking part in it, stating “This is happening in Columbia Public Schools also. Yes, the janitor has to clean the litter box” (McKinney, 2022a). That's never happened. Schools say they have not been providing litter boxes to students in this way, and even deny that they have had any students identifying or behaving as animals, according to reliable fact checking resources (Reuters, 2022; Palma, Snopes, 2023).

Reisch has a history of being especially critical of the Columbia school district, which is one of the largest and most successful school districts in the state (McKinney, 2022b). She’s used this urban legend to attack the district’s legitimacy. This may be because Reisch prioritizes independently-run charter schools over standard public schools. Earlier this year, she sponsored MO HB 1941, which would allow for charter schools to operate within the Columbia school district without the district’s sponsorship.

Why are Republicans criticizing public schools and favoring charter schools?

In the US, the normal types of schools for children up to about age 18 are called public schools. Families don’t have to pay for their children to attend them. They represent the ideal that everyone growing up in the country should have equal access to school, regardless of income, class, race, religion, or ability. Because public schools are government establishments, the US Constitution protects the students’ rights there. The First Amendment of the Constitution protects the freedom of speech and religion of everyone, and that’s for students in public schools, too. In the landmark 1969 case Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, students sued because they had gotten suspended for wearing black armbands to protest the Vietnam War. The Supreme Court decided that it would be as tyrannical to prevent students from expressing political opinions within public schools as it would be in any other government establishments. The Court said students don’t “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.” In 1948, McCollum v. Board of Education had decided that public schools can’t give religious instruction during the school day. In 1962, Engel v. Vitale decided they can’t make students pray (Pew Research Center, 2019). Public school dress codes often aren’t as fair as they should be, but for the most part, their students can wear what they want and what their parents allow.

In contrast, what are known as charter schools in the US are privately owned, so they’re allowed to have requirements or education goals which would be considered a violation of the First Amendment. Some of them have religious affiliations and may be owned or operated by religious organizations. This can affect the way the school is run. For example, Oklahoma charter St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School has planned Catholic religious instruction classes, and the school’s active and intentional participation in what it refers to as “the evangelizing mission of the Church” (Fitzpatrick, 2023). Charter school dress codes can be much more strict. They are often segregated by gender stereotypes, forcing girls to wear skirts and boys trousers, no exceptions. This has been challenged in some places against specific schools, such as in North Carolina earlier this year in a lawsuit against the Charter Day School Inc (Chung, 2023). These challenges are the outlier and not the norm, however; gender-segregated dress codes are still a very common practice for charter schools overall. Charter schools also require applications and choose students based on random lottery systems. However, studies find that charter schools are more likely to ignore parents inquiring about the enrollment process if the student has a disability or other special needs (Darville, 2018). Unlike public schools, they don’t welcome everyone.

The freedom of expression in public schools is important for transgender students. In 2020, the case G.G. v. Gloucester County School Board decided in favor of transgender-friendly restroom policies in high schools. This precedent helps protect transgender students’ rights in public schools, but doesn’t apply to charter schools. During the course of the case, the Conservative Legal Defense and Education Fund told the Court why to decide against transgender rights. In an effort to invalidate transgender people, the Fund compared transgender people to otherkin. The Fund used the word “otherkin,” and described them at length, mostly accurately but derisively (Brief Amicus Curiae, 2017, G.G. v. Gloucester Cty Sch Bd). This case was part of what inspired the Republicans to later make up the litter box urban legend. We don’t know if that particular brief inspired the legend too.

Republicans may be promoting charter schools because this would give them greater control over impressing their views about gender, religion, and politics on young generations. They may be undermining public schools because the separation of church and state limits their power to do so there. The urban legend and these bills are part of that.

Background about all of the furry bills and the urban legend that inspired them

To learn about this year’s first two anti-furry bills, read our post about them from last week (Scribner and Sol, 2024). That post also summarizes the four anti-furry bills last year, and the litter box urban legend. For further information about those aspects, you can watch our lecture about last year’s bills and what you do about bad bills (Chimeras, Scribner, and Shepard, 2023), and watch Chimeras’s lecture about the litter box urban legend (Chimeras, 2022).

What happens next with Reisch’s anti-furry bill?

The bill is at 25% progression toward becoming a law. The House heard the bill twice, but it hasn’t been voted on. At the time that we write this blog post, they haven’t scheduled the bill’s next hearing.

About the writers of this blog post

We are Orion Scribner (they/them) and N. Noel Sol (she/they), a couple of dragons. We never write articles with the assistance of procedural generation or so-called artificial intelligence (AI), and that type of content isn’t allowed on Otherkin News.

References

“Brief Amicus Curiae of Public Advocate of the United States, U.S. Justice Foundation, and Conservative Legal Defense and Education Fund in Support of Petitioner.” Gloucester County School Bd. v. G. G. ex rel. Grimm, No. 16-273, 2017 WL 192454 (Jan. 10, 2017). http://files.eqcf.org/cases/16-273-amicus-brief-public-advocate-et-al/

Central MO Info (May 19, 2023). “Representative Toalson Reisch Disappointed in Senate’s Version of Trans Bills.” Central MO Info. https://www.centralmoinfo.com/representative-toalson-reisch-disappointed-in-senates-version-of-trans-bills/

Chung, Andrew (June 26, 2024). “US Supreme Court turns away case on charter school's mandatory skirts for girls.” Reuters.

https://www.reuters.com/legal/us-supreme-court-turns-away-case-charter-schools-mandatory-skirts-girls-2023-06-26/

Darville, Sarah (Dec. 21, 2018). “Want a charter school application? If your child has a disability, your questions more likely to be ignored, study finds.” Chalkbeat.

https://www.chalkbeat.org/2018/12/21/21106398/want-a-charter-school-application-if-your-child-has-a-disability-your-questions-more-likely-to-be-ig/

Engel v. Vitale, 370 U.S. 421 (1962). https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/us-supreme-court/370/421.html

Fitzpatrick, Cara (Sept. 9, 2023). “The Charter-School Movement’s New Divide.” The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/09/charter-schools-religion-public-secular/675293/

G.G. v. Gloucester County School Board. 972 F.3d 586 (4th Cir. 2020). https://casetext.com/case/grimm-v-gloucester-cnty-sch-bd-8

House of Chimeras (Aug. 12, 2022). "Litter Boxes in School Bathrooms: Dissecting the Alt-Right’s Current Moral Panic." OtherCon. https://youtu.be/WVjXOmN2IlU

House of Chimeras, Orion Scribner, and Page Shepard (2023). “Litter Box Hoax 2: Legislature Boogaloo.” OtherCon 2023. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsXy_ctC4Jc&t=1425s

Legiscan. MO HB 2678. https://legiscan.com/MO/bill/HB2678/2024

Legiscan. MO HB 1941. https://legiscan.com/MO/bill/HB1941/2024

Mccollum v. Board Of Education, 333 U.S. 203 (1948). https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/us-supreme-court/333/203.html

McKinney, Rodger (Aug. 25, 2022). “State Rep. Cheri Reisch criticized for 'unwarranted' claim that CPS students use litterboxes.” Columbia Daily Tribune. https://www.columbiatribune.com/story/news/politics/elections/local/2022/08/25/state-rep-cheri-reisch-criticized-for-unwarranted-claim-that-cps-columbia-students-use-litterboxes/7895082001/

McKinney, Rodger (Feb. 6, 2022). “State Rep. Cheri Reisch states 'Columbia sucks' when referring to public schools in education hearing” Columbia Daily Tribune. https://www.columbiatribune.com/story/news/education/2022/02/06/cheri-reisch-states-columbia-sucks-when-referring-to-cps-in-education-hearing-mo-leg-basye/6662719001/

Missouri House of Representatives. MO HB 2678. https://house.mo.gov/Bill.aspx?bill=HB2678&year=2024&code=R

Missouri Senate. MO SB 49. https://www.senate.mo.gov/23info/BTS_Web/Bill.aspx?SessionType=R&BillID=44407

Missouri Senate. MO SB 39. https://senate.mo.gov/23info/BTS_Web/Bill.aspx?SessionType=R&BillID=44496

Palma, Bethania. (January 30, 2023). “How Furries Got Swept Up in Anti-Trans 'Litter Box' Rumors.” Snopes. https://www.snopes.com/news/2023/01/30/how-furries-got-swept-up-in-anti-trans-litter-box-rumors/ Archived on March 30, 2023.

https://web.archive.org/web/20230330232007/https://www.snopes.com/news/2023/01/30/how-furries-got-swept-up-in-anti-trans-litter-box-rumors/

Pew Research Center (Oct. 3, 2019). “Religion in the Public Schools.”

https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2019/10/03/religion-in-the-public-schools-2019-update/

Reuters Fact Check (October 18, 2022). “Fact Check-No evidence of schools accommodating ‘furries’ with litter boxes.” https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-furries-rogan-litterbox-idUSL1N31J1KT Archived February 13, 2023.

https://web.archive.org/web/20230213110524/https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-furries-rogan-litterbox-idUSL1N31J1KT

Scribner, Orion, and N. Noel Sol (Feb. 9, 2024). “Will Oklahoma Call Animal Control on Students?” Otherkin News. https://otherkinnews.dreamwidth.org/92680.html

Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, 393 U.S. 503 (1969). https://openjurist.org/393/us/503

houseofchimeras

Summary
News reports claiming that a transspecies activist protest took place in Berlin, Germany in September 2023 is inaccurate. These fictitious stories are based on misinformation and assumptions made regarding a real video and of photographs taken of an event that took place in Berlin. The real event consisted of a gathering of people who partake in puppy play.

( Read more... )

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Otherkin News is a collaborative, volunteer-run blog for sharing news for otherkin, therianthropes, fictionfolk, plural systems, and all sorts of alterhumans. You can join and post here about current events in our communities and newspaper articles that are about us. The person moderating this is

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