Otherkin News

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.

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.

( Read more... )