You ever walk into a party and immediately realise everyone’s wearing matching jackets and speaking in a secret code you technically know, but not well enough to use without someone giving you that look like you just licked the punch bowl?
Yeah. Welcome to furry.
Now, don’t get me wrong—this isn’t some tortured yearning to be accepted. I’m not on my knees in the rain, begging to be let into the great warm paw-shaped clubhouse. I have a home already. A gorgeous, noisy, gloriously dysfunctional home made of trans girls with eyeshadow like warpaint, autistic disastergays who hyperfixate on vampire fiction, and people who use voice chat like a walk-in existential therapy booth. That’s my turf. That’s my crypt. I’m not looking to move out.
But sometimes I wander into furry spaces—forums, Telegram groups, Discord servers, the gaping glittering void that is Twitter—and I think: neat. Here are people who, statistically, should be a venn diagram circle directly overlapping mine. Trans? Neurodivergent? Online too long? Identity performance via stylised animal mascot? I should be able to vibe here.
Except I don't. Because here's the thing nobody tells you: in furry, you need a passport. A social ID card. A laminated character sheet that says “hello, I am this particular flavour of dog” with an attached resume detailing your commission history, suit progress, and favourite species-specific pronoun quirks.
I don’t have that.
I don’t have a badge name, or a pile of con selfies where I’m half-posed next to some LED-eyed deer in a crop top, or a Telegram sticker pack of my OC eating ramen and looking bashfully horny. I don’t even have a fursona that anyone knows. No ref sheet. No suit. No art. No pin badge of my character’s butt on a lanyard.
And without that? You’re just a civilian. An NPC. A cryptid lurking at the edge of the con hall who hasn’t unlocked the “speak to dog” dialogue tree.
I've lost count of the number of times I’ve tried to strike up conversation with someone in a space where we absolutely had stuff in common—same shows, same obsessions, same autistic tangents about fictional worldbuilding logistics—only for it to go dead silent the moment they realise I don’t have a fursona to show them. Like: “Oh, you don’t have a suit or an icon of a pastel hyena sniffing roses while wearing thigh-highs? Guess this chat’s over. Goodbye, outsider.”
I’m not exaggerating when I say that being furry-adjacent without proof is like trying to order coffee using interpretive dance. Everyone pretends not to see you until you start flailing hard enough to become meme-worthy.
It’s not that I don’t love anthropomorphic characters. I do. I have a whole feathered gothic disaster of a self-insert that I love to bits (hi, Lenore). But because I’m not known for her—because she doesn’t come with an art trail or a performance history or a glitter-printed badge—I don’t count. It’s like telling someone you’re a Star Trek fan and them going, “Oh yeah? Name every warp core.”
And it sucks. Because you think “oh, these are my people,” only to be met with this weird purity test of fur levels, like some strange gatekeeping Pokémon evolution chart.
The message I keep getting is: “Sure, you're trans and neurodivergent and queer and obsessed with your character... but you're not one of our trans and neurodivergent queers.” Like there’s some branded version of that experience you need to opt into, with a $2,000 suit minimum and a monthly Telegram subscription.
It’s especially infuriating when you're basically just trying to talk. Not sell art. Not promote anything. Not even chase clout. Just talk to other weird internet animals about shared interests, only to be iced out because your Twitter icon isn’t a soft-shaded lynx with bisexual eyeliner.
And now, honest to god, every time I see a cartoon dog avatar online I get this creeping sense of dread. Not because I don’t like them—but because I know I’m about to either be ignored completely, or get the digital equivalent of the suspicious side-eye you give someone who shows up to D&D night and says “what’s a d20?”
It’s gotten to the point where cartoon-animal avatars aren’t “people I can talk to” anymore. They’re a warning: this person won’t speak to you unless you speak their dialect of fur. And that? That’s weak sauce. That’s the mildest, blandest, room-temperature sauce you could possibly ladle over a community that prides itself on being weird and welcoming.
So yeah. I’m not saying I need to be crowned Queen of the Furries (that post is taken, and she’s very fluffy). I’m just saying maybe, maybe, we don’t need to treat identity like a digital passport that only gets stamped if your tail is visible in three-quarters view. Some of us are just trying to exist—queer, autistic, overly dressed, full of angst—and maybe, just maybe, we shouldn’t need a fursona tax ID to get a word in.
Anyway. If you see me standing awkwardly at the punch bowl of the Internet, it’s not because I wandered into the wrong party. I’m already home. I just popped by to see what the neighbours were up to.
And yes. I’m judging your fox icon. Just a little.
