Did the furry fandom helps you discover your gender? Did it help you feel more welcome?
For me personally, being a furry helps me to cope with dysphoria for years before my egg cracked. I used to imagine that I’m an anthro animal all the time to cope with dysphoria before I even knew what dysphoria was.
And aside from a few trans communities (like r/egg_irl), the furry fandom also exposes myself to queer people and queer media in general, which in retrospect might help me sympathize with them more instead of hating it like what most people do.
I’m so glad that this community is very accepting towards people of all sexualities and gender. Being trans in this fandom generally feels pretty safe, at least safer than most other fandoms. Thank you so much.
I always felt so welcome in furry circles, to the point where finding out someone is a furry basically makes them 100% safe to talk about subjects like being trans around them. It seems like with other groups, like video games or art or different hobbies, being in the same circle and getting to know someone doesn’t mean they won’t turn into an ass if they find out you’re LGBTQ+. Furries just seem so much more open and extremely unlikely to be opposed to how someone identifies, you know?
As for myself, I always found myself (FtM btw) using female fursonas until I was pretty sure I might be trans, and made my first male sona. It felt really good. I also just have mostly male characters and sorta always did, so maybe that shoulda been my first hint lmao. Honestly surprised I never had a male sona “just because” before I found myself.
The fandom really helped me with exploring my fender identity for a long time before I transitioned.
Yeah, I explore my gender identity separately from the fandom, but the fandom isn’t a bad place for experimentation
The furry community helped me to make friends and branch out from a very sheltered upbringing. It gave me a place where I knew I could be myself, and really let me section off the parts of me that weren’t safe to express at home. It has been a good half a decade since, and I live with much better people and can really be myself.
I had to do a bit of exploring to figure myself out, but I couldn’t have done that without having a place to be queer without fear of judgement or rejection.
I’m actually transspecies, instead of gender – and being a wolf does affect my gender, too. I’m male in a wolf way, not in a human way. 🐺
[feral here!]
– Frost
I can relate. I often feel the same way about me being transspecies, but I’m more of an anthro than a feral.
The first LGBTQ+ person I ever ran into online was a transmasc furry artist. I had already been in the furry fandom for a short while before seeing his content. It wouldn’t be for another relatively-short while that I would realize my actual gender. However, had his art not been seen by me, it is possible my story would have been completely different. His art was my first introduction to characters with body types outside the gender binary. Oh, and his art style is amazing. I wish I could remember his handle.
Now, I’ve found on Discord that MANY LGBTQ+ people I have ran into over the last 6 years of my Discord use have been furries.
As for what gender my original 2018 sona was: In a sense, it reflected that I was completely not hyperbinary but also a trans girl, at least in comparison to who I am now as a nonbinary person not beholden to the gender binary. This sona even used neopronouns, something I myself did not really use for myself at the time. It’s a topic that is quite a feffadoo (a neologism I coined from the magic number of my program BWTC32Key) given that even looking at my notes app from back then on my oldest Android device (it was used as an interim device during SD card upgrading of my main phone and my main backup) provided me with more questions than answers. Looking at some writing files around a year prior on my Dropbox also prompted more questions than answers on the same topic. I can’t say for certain as to what my degree of binary trans status was back then, but I can say what it wasn’t. I wasn’t at all hyper-binary. I would say that the furry community was where I ran into a large amount of the binary being escaped from.
In fact: the ey/em in my neopronouns exists because of ey/em being used by one particular fursona out there that totally related to me and is also an ambonec (both and neither binary gender, which is essentially what I am, even now.)
Oh and the entirety of my fursonas are nonbinary.
Now when it comes to gaming on Valve games… That community often wasn’t the nicest to non-cishetmono people. I have plenty of stories on that topic, which I will spare you from. Meanwhile, the furry sites and community, even back in those times (2018), had a large amount of LGBTQ+ content and creators, which is a good thing.
As for other things: I did use my sona as a test bed for neopronouns (as detailed earlier). Oh, and the concept of a shy and sensitive inner male sona did apply in very late 2017 or so. In a sense, this sona harked back to one of the more intriguing characters by the furry artist I mentioned earlier who I can’t remember the name of.
Also, I grew up in a sheltered upbringing, and the furry fandom let me be myself. To this day, I use technology and the internet as an escape from my real life.
I will ALSO say that I’m an otherkin. Oh, and as for my fursona species: it’s a Pokemorph of Mew’s Shiny form (Mew is a shy genderless shapeshifter Pokemon).
TL; DR: The furry community was VERY formative to my journey.
For me, being furry and being trans were two different, separate things at first. As I discovered my inability to tolerate make-up, the ability to wear a fursuit head become really important for my gender presentation.
I tried to do Animegao kigurumi at first, but it was not for me, I did not want to be an anime girl. Although some tricks I learned from it are helping me with body shaping for my furry presentation since I do partials instead of full suits.
So in the end, being furry and being trans are separate for me, but being furry is helping me present better as trans.
Ever since I was a teenager I’ve been using fursonas as a method of exploring my identity, even before I knew what a fursona was or that identity was even a thing you could explore. I had my “outer” sona, the cool, powerful, masculine fox who had a cynically detached attitude but still tried to protect others. Then there was the “inner” sona, the secret realer me, who was still male (because I thought he had to be) but ended up being very feminine in appearance and personality. Shy, caring, sensitive, small and cute…
When I joined the fandom, it was my first encounter with actual members of the LGBTQ community and positive depictions of same. Lurking in r/furry showed me that they were just regular people and that most of the stuff I had been taught about them was lies. Also, the femboy foxes were cute. Like, really cute. “I want to be them” cute. Maybe that was what I am?
Then I ended up in a conversation with a trans furry, a bunch of crazy stuff happened IRL, and one day I had a sudden realization: I’m not girly, I’m just girl, and my strangely feminine arctic foxboy (now fox-enby) sona was trying to tell me this all along. I never would have discovered any of this without the furry fandom.
