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It all started with an article in the Mississippi Free Press by Nick Judin.
Ridgeland Mayor Gene McGee is withholding $110,000 of funding from the Madison County Library System allegedly on the basis of his personal religious beliefs, with library officials stating that he has demanded that the system initiate a purge of LGBTQ+ books before his office releases the money.Ridgeland Mayor Demands LGBTQ+ Book Purge, Threatens Library Funding
The mayor goes on to tell the reporter, in response to being asked if he even has the legal authority to withhold the money from the library system, “I don’t know that I do or do not. But right now we’re holding the money.”
The executive director of the Madison County Library System made it clear that withholding these funds (roughly 5% of their annual budget) would negatively impact the library, the services they provide their community, and whether or not their staff members would lose their jobs.
In short, Mayor Gene McGee was illegally withholding funds that had already been approved from the budget, and thereby holding library employees’ livelihoods hostage, unless they complied with his demands to purge the public library of “homosexual materials” that were incompatible with his private religious beliefs.
The director then explained to the mayor that the library system, as a public entity, was not a religious institution. “I explained that we are a public library and we serve the entire community. I told him our collection reflects the diversity of our community,” Johnson said.Apparently, the mayor was unmoved. “He told me that the library can serve whoever we wanted, but that he only serves the great Lord above,” she finished.
Ridgeland Mayor Demands LGBTQ+ Book Purge, Threatens Library Funding
Enter, the Furry Fandom
I was first made aware of this news story because of its inclusion in a viral Twitter thread about Maus being banned in Tennessee.
https://twitter.com/JuddLegum/status/1486470195036270600
Everything in that Twitter thread is terrible. Banning books about the Holocaust is suspiciously aligned with the Holocaust denial playbook used by neo-Nazis and the alt-right. (It’s almost like alt-right recruitment tactics are effectively neutered by prior education, and they feel threatened by the public being informed.)
But the addendum to the thread about the Ridgeland mayor stood out to me as an egregious violation of the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. The blatant homophobia couched in terms of religious faith only made it more personally vexing, but my eye was more drawn to the amount of money being withheld from the library.
$110,000? Sure, that’s not nothing to sneeze at, but the furry fandom has raised more in a weekend before. If we put our minds to it, surely we could match the deficit for this library and effectively tell Mayor Gene McGee to fuck off with his outdated prejudiced worldview.
So, with that in mind, I looked at the library’s website for a means to donate. I ended up on this page, which included a form to print out and mail in with a check. This was a bit of a nonstarter because, like most young tech workers, I don’t actually own a checkbook. So I decided to contact the library asking for an electronic means to contribute.
I’d like to donate money (i.e. as part of the Friends of the Ridgeland Library program), but I don’t have a checkbook. Is there any way to donate electronically?
Their response (available with full headers, for establishing authenticity):
Thank you so much for reaching out. We are overwhelmed by the public support.Funding donations for the Ridgeland Public Library may be made payable to Friends of the Ridgeland Public Library with “Ridgeland Funding” on the memo line. Send to Friends of the Ridgeland Public Library / 397 Highway 51 / Ridgeland, MS 39157. Funds may be donated online at
https://www.fundlibraries.org/ridgelandbookbanningor via Paypal topaypal@mcls.msPlease indicate the gift is for “Ridgeland Funding”.Thank you for your interest in our story and for standing with us against censorship. Your support is appreciated beyond measure.
Tonja Johnson, Executive Director, Madison County Library System
Overwhelmed? You haven’t seen nothing yet.
Equipped with an electronic means to contribute to funding the Ridgeland Library to offset the amount of money Mayor McGee was illegally withholding, I turned to a bastion of Chaotic Good energy: Furry Twitter.
https://twitter.com/SoatokDhole/status/1486708632041443330
https://twitter.com/SoatokDhole/status/1486708634688106496
The non-profit collecting the funds (Friends of the Ridgeland Library) had set an initial fund-raising goal at $2,500. I decided to start strong with a $500 donation, and shared a link to my tweet with a few friends with larger audiences than me.
https://twitter.com/SoatokDhole/status/1486710991203098632
I’m not very good at social media marketing, so I have a modest Twitter following. However, some of my friends are somewhat influential in the furry fandom, and gladly shared it with their friends and followers.
Within an hour of my tweet, the fundraiser already looked like this:
However, things were quickly about to accelerate beyond even my expectations.
The Fundraiser Reaches Escape Velocity on Day One
After less that one day from my inaugural tweet, the fundraiser had reached Over 9000 dollars.
Additionally, when I was looking through the backers’ comments, I noticed someone remarkably not a furry had already contributed.
https://twitter.com/SoatokDhole/status/1487000926237954048
Ray Mabus (Governor of Mississippi, 1988-1992) wasn’t the only Mississippi politician to notice the fundraising effort.
Over that weekend, infamous homophobic mayor Gene McGee also noticed us (remember him?), and decided to respond in the only manner appropriate for American politicians.
https://twitter.com/SoatokDhole/status/1487882614824488963
More Than a Furry or LGBTQ+ Issue
Although the fundraising effort was largely popularized by the furry community (which is significantly LGBTQ+), and although the stated motive for the Mayor’s actions were deeply prejudiced against LGBTQ+ people, it would be incorrect to say that the fundraiser was limited to being merely a furry issue, or even an LGBTQ+ issue.
What Mayor McGee aimed to accomplish was an attack on everyone.
An elected official trying to selectively ban queer materials from a public library solely because of his private religious beliefs is both abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press and an establishment of religion in one fell swoop. This is a double-whammy of a violation of the First Amendment.
A lot of furries donated, especially in the beginning. And a lot of LGBTQ+ folks donated, of course.
But so too did a lot of straight people. And so, too, did many self-identified conservative Americans.
Because regardless of demographic labels, or the party affiliation on your voter identification, a public official extorting a public library to purge books you dislike or else suffer the consequences of having approved funding illegally withheld is such deeply contemptible behavior that most of us can agree that it must not be tolerated.
It’s important to recognize that the reason this issue resonated with so many people outside of our communities is because it’s abundantly clear to everyone what Gene McGee is doing is wrong. Violating the First Amendment is among the most un-American things an elected official can do. Furries just got the ball rolling.
An International Perspective
Some of the people who donated to the Ridgeland Library fundraiser live abroad. It may be worth exploring the question, “If the core problem was that McGee’s attempt to ban queer literature is un-American, why would people outside America contribute too?”
The right to free speech isn’t a uniquely American ideal. Article 19 of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights says:
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, December 10, 1948
It turns out, freedom is a damn good idea, and good ideas are infectious.
The Fundraiser Get Noticed By the Media
Shortly after I noticed that Gene McGee had blocked me on Twitter, Dexter Thomas from VICE sent me a Twitter DM to set up an interview. We talked for over an hour about the mayor, the library, the furry fandom (and our past fundraising activities), and how this story had unfolded.
Quick aside:
There has been a tense relationship over the years between furries and the press. A lot of people in our community are hesitant to talk to journalists because of poor treatments in the early 2000’s that treated furries as scandalous (rather than a vibrant, participatory online community).This hesitance was likely exacerbated by the “Furries and the Media” panels at Anthrocon by the Anthrocon chairman, which basically told everyone, “Don’t talk to the press” in response to this history of yellow journalism. It’s a sensible defensive move, given the atmosphere at the time.
That being said: I don’t follow orders from anyone.
VICE in particular has historically been respectful in their coverage of our community. (Every linked word goes to a different news story.)
VICE published Dexter’s story the following Wednesday: Furries Are Leading the War Against a Book-Banning Mississippi Mayor.
And then this happened:
https://twitter.com/SoatokDhole/status/1488938921425838082
Shortly after talking with Dexter Thomas from VICE, I was interviewed by Keisha Rowe of Mississippi’s Clarion Ledger, who wrote an article titled Furries raise money for libraries after mayor threatens to withhold funds due to LGBTQ+ books.
Keisha’s article subsequently earned a score of over 50,000 points on the r/nottheonion subreddit and made the front page of Reddit.
Somewhere along the way, the story of furries leading the charge to raise money for a library being extorted by the local mayor was covered by LGBTQ Nation, AV Club, Boing Boing, PinkNews, QNews, and The Saturday Paper (postscript). The latter two are Australian; this story had gone International.
Not included in the above list are the news outlets that decided not to mention furries in their coverage of the fundraiser: Mississippi’s WJTV, The Hill, Los Angeles Blade, etc.
Was the Campaign Successful?
Update (2022-02-12):
We successfully raised the $110,000 that Mayor Gene McGee was withholding from the Ridgeland Library with 3 days to spare. The final donation that put it over the goal was a doozy too:
Original text follows (struckthrough):
As I write this, the fundraiser is 92% funded, with over $100,000 raised from over 2,300 backers, and there are still 5 days left (out of the original 18 day runtime) to cover the rest.
Even if we don’t manage to raise the last several thousand dollars in time, we’ve already contributed enough to make a difference. This will ensure the Ridgeland Library in Madison County, Mississippi can offset the funding deficit caused by Mayor McGee.
At the very minimum, we’re certainly already far more successful than the libraries professed to hoping for when the fundraiser when live:
Update on Sunday 2/6 – We did not think it would be possible, but because of all the support coming in from folks around the country we are raising the goal to $110,000 for the library. It is so important that the library can fight this threat without worrying about operating funds. Thanks for making a difference.Campaign Description
If you’d like to donate to the Friends of the Ridgeland Library to help them reach 100% of their goal in anticipation of February 14, the link to the fundraiser is:
https://www.fundlibraries.org/ridgelandbookbanning
Clarifications
A few misconceptions have cropped up throughout this fundraising campaign, so I wanted to take a moment to briefly address each of them.
What the Fundraiser Buys
The mayor of Ridgeland almost certainly does not have the authority to withhold money without approval from the board of aldermen. What he’s doing is extremely illegal, and everyone expects him to eventually have to surrender the money.
However, it may take some time for a decision to be reached.
What the fundraiser does is allow the library to keep operating, and providing vital services to the community, while the mayor’s extralegal behavior is being debated with the board of aldermen, or in the courts.
Until the appropriated funds are disbursed, without community support, the library would be forced to reduce their services and lay off staff. If this happened, everyone would lose.
Libraries are the backbones of communities: Beyond the obvious benefits they provide, libraries are one of the first stops many people make to escape poverty because they provide critical Internet access and job skills trainings for the people in the area they service.
Ergo, the long tail of consequences for McGee’s bigotry is difficult to estimate, but he’d almost certainly use DARVO tactics and blame any negative effects on the librarians for not complying with his unconstitutional demands.
If Mayor Gene McGee was planning on a war of attrition against the librarians of his city, up to his inevitable loss in court, donating to the fundraiser effectively denies him this tactic. It also saves a lot of innocent people from suffering, including (but not limited to) the library staff.
When the funds are disbursed, the extra infusion of cash from thousands of people will only allow the library to better serve the community. There’s no downside to supporting a public library.
On Game Theory and Interdimensional Chess
Several commentators on Reddit and Twitter have objected to this fundraising initiative because it might lead to perverse incentives wherein local politicians use outrage-fueled fundraising to justify slashing budgets, so they could spin it as a new cost-saving measure in line with conservative talking points.
I can understand why people think that (see: life insurance companies recommending people start GoFundMe campaigns when they need life-saving treatments), but it’s a relatively low risk. See above.
What would be a cause for concern is if McGee somehow loopholes his way into being permitted to egregiously violate the First Amendment. On this matter, should it go that far, we simply have to trust the competence and commitment of the courts to make the right call.
The Origins and Authenticity of the Fundraiser
Early on, some Twitter users raised concerns that the fundraiser was illegitimate, or a fraudulent cash grab. I anticipated this sort of reaction, which is why I published the full headers of the email I received from Tonja Johnson.
This is a computer forensic argument for authenticity. In order to falsify a DMARC header, I would need to have privileged access to their mail server (which would be a different, and possibly more severe, felony).
Beyond that, several journalists independently verified that the fundraiser was legitimate by contacting the Madison County Library System and inquiring about it. Mississippi Residents have a clear and simple way to verify this information without having to trust their mail servers: They can simply ask about the fundraiser in person.
The fundraiser itself was set up by EveryLibrary, a 501(c)(4) social welfare organization registered in the State of Illinois. I had no hand in the fundraiser’s creation; nor did any other furry (to my knowledge).
Aftermath
Note: This section was added on 2022-03-28.
Earlier this month, the Madison County Journal published a braindead editorial in the opinion section, authored by “The Editorial Board” (which consists of only two people: James E. Prince III and Michael Simmons), which claims that Mayor Gene McGee wasn’t trying to push his personal religious beliefs onto the Madison County Library System through withholding funding to the Ridgeland Library.
I was perfectly content ignoring this opinion piece (bad takes are a dime a dozen in the Opinion section of any newspaper, after all) until they parroted the same idiotic narrative in their coverage of a new library contract being agreed upon at Ridgeland City Hall.
I could take the time to analyze their narrative in order to expose its lies and deceptions, but the fatal flaw in their Public Relations strategy is this:
If Mayor Gene McGee wasn’t guilty of the homophobic agenda he’s accused of, why did he decided to block me on Twitter after I started raising awareness of the library fundraiser?
After all, an Appeals Court previously ruled that it’s Unconstitutional for politicians to block critics on social media accounts used for official purposes. And since McGee’s campaign website links directly to his Twitter account in the footer, establishing that it’s used for official purposes isn’t exactly difficult.
Not only does the Madison County Journal‘s false narrative about Mayor Gene McGee fall apart in the face of this evidence, but it’s pretty clear that the Mayor violated my Constitutional rights as an American citizen.
Actions speak louder than words.
The only reason I haven’t pursued legal action against the Mayor is that doing so would effectively dox myself through the courts. McGee really isn’t worth sacrificing the pseudonymity I enjoy as a blogger or as a queer furry on the Internet.
The lies and omissions of tabloid publications notwithstanding, the plan to save the library was an overwhelming success.
https://twitter.com/SoatokDhole/status/1507351230603010048
In Closing
I’d like to take a moment to thank everyone that donated to the fundraiser, shared links on social media, or covered this story. Without each and every one of you, we wouldn’t have come so far.
This will probably not be the last time a library needs financial help from the community (but hopefully the others won’t be under duress of a theocratic bully in the municipal government). If you’d like to go above and beyond the effort discussed here today, visit your local library and find out how you can help.
Disclaimer
Everything on this webpage is the sole opinion of the author, and should not be confused for statements of fact. It should also not be confused for a representative opinion of anyone else (employers, communities, demographic sectors of the human population, etc.) unless other parties externally concur with what is written here.
Header is a collage of art from @FlashWhite_, @MrJimmyDaFloof, and @JohisArt.
https://soatok.blog/2022/02/09/that-one-time-furries-saved-a-library/
#furry #FurryFandom #homophobia #LGBTQIA_ #Mississippi #Politics #publicLibraries #Ridgeland
I rarely think about the labels that describe me.That isn’t because of privilege (I spent many years painfully aware of them), but because my friends are incredibly supportive and we’ve been able to cultivate an environment where I’m not constantly reminded of why I don’t “belong”. (It took many grueling years to achieve that, and I’m still reminded of my weirdness if I leave home for any appreciable length of time. Fortunately, I’m a bit of a homebody.)
The majority of people don’t think about their labels either, but for privileged reasons, until a minority calls it to their attention. Then you get almost-comical indignant hot takes of the “don’t call me cis, that’s a slur!” variety.
At least, they would be comical if they weren’t so stupid and dangerous.
Identity
Identity is a funny thing. I actually find rather insulting the proposition that you can take the vast diversity of the lived experiences of billions of people and compress it into one bit of information.“Are you a YES or a NO?” “Are you X or Y?” “Are you good or evil?”
Labels are a lossy compression algorithm. They’re meant to simplify and convey ideas so they’re more broadly accessible and easily understood. In practice, people are overly reliant on them, and they become a crutch.
Sure, you can think of me as an androsexual, demisexual, cisgender male with a dhole fursona, but do most of us even know what that means?
Most of us just simplify our identities to, “I’m gay”. Art by LindseyVi.
Pride
Pride is a protest against unjust systems. Pride started with a riot in response to police violence and discrimination. You probably didn’t learn about Pride in great detail in history class (if at all).Pride parades in recent years have been co-opted by what some call “rainbow capitalism”.
I wish I knew the original source for this meme.
And this obviously feels really gross, but at the same time, it’s often somehow forgivable that companies use Pride Month (June) to show active support for their LGBTQIA+ employees. (If nothing else, it assures us that we won’t suddenly become unemployed if someone accuses us of falling in love with a person with the “wrong” phenotype, etc.)
There are currently a lot of hard conversations taking place about a different target of police violence and discrimination.
I hope that the protests happening today will result in the change our world needs, so that everyone can live equally without fear or shame for who they are.
This will almost certainly require dismantling racist systems and rebuilding them without the tainted legacy they originated from.
That being said, I’ve never really been fond of the emotion, pride. It feels inherently reckless to me. At the same time, I acknowledge it’s a great foil for the emotions that bigots want us to feel (fear, shame, despair, self-loathing, etc.). If that works for you, I’m happy. Keep on keeping on.
Rather than pride, I’ve always sought contentment and joy in my life.
Authenticity means a lot to me, and being fearlessly and shamelessly me is something I shouldn’t have to work for or feel proud about; nor should anyone else.
Contentment and joy… there used to be another word folks used to encapsulate that genre of emotion: Gay.
It always comes full-circle, doesn’t it?
A Dream To Seek
Art by Khia.
Society has numerous institutions and systems that are designed and implemented to ensure discrimination and injustice against people who are different than their architects.
As long as bigoted institutions and systems exist, society will always need movements like Pride and Black Lives Matter to resist atrocity and inspire loud authenticity, in equal measure.
So it might sound odd to say without the above context, but as a strong proponent of human rights and equality, I dream of the day when these movements no longer need to exist; for the day when their job is done and we have moved past the specter of hate that continues to haunt each generation that survives its direct violent influence. I say this knowing that this day will probably never come (at least in my lifetime).
Until bigotry is abolished, and bigotry’s apologists recognize that they’re little more than asymptomatic carriers of that vile psychic pathogen, I will continue to strive to enable everyone I can reach to enjoy the same peace that my friends and I have built at home.
No matter your sex. No matter your gender. No matter the gender(s) you’re attracted to (if any). No matter your race or ethnicity.
The labels people use to describe us shouldn’t condemn anyone to a life of misery and injustice.
The day we cultivate a society that is absent of, and resistant to, the kind of hate and discrimination we’ve seen for centuries will be a day worthy of pride.
And the only way to get there is to acknowledge a simple truth: Black Lives have to Matter in order for the superset (“All Lives”) to Matter.
What Do Your Labels Mean?
This will probably be my only Pride Month post on this blog, so I suppose it makes sense to explain them.I’m a guy, who’s attracted to guys (thus, androsexual)… but I don’t exactly have a “type”. I have to genuinely like a person to find them attractive. That’s the demisexual part.
Most people understand being gay, conceptually. Asexuality might also click readily without a lot of exposition.
Being demi is weird: You spend a lot of time wondering if you’re asexual or not, until you actually develop feelings for someone else for the first time.
Cisgender just means “not transgender”; that is to say, I identify as the same gender I was assigned at birth.
If that’s helpful to know, cool. But you don’t have to think of me in those terms. I’m just Soatok.
https://soatok.blog/2020/06/09/pridemonth/
Update (2020-04-29): Twitter has fixed their oversight.
{ "errors": [{ "code": 356, "message": "preferences.gender_preferences.gender_override: Must provide a non-empty custom value 30 characters or less in length." }]}
Anyone who set their custom gender to a long volume of text, should still have it set to a long volume of text.
The original article follows after the separator.
I was recently made aware of a change to Twitter, which exposes a new Gender field. If you’ve never specified your gender before, they guessed what it was (which is a really shitty thing to do, especially towards trans folks!).
https://twitter.com/leemandelo/status/1254179716451438592
Slightly annoyed, I went to go see what Twitter thinks my gender is.
Curses! They know I’m a guy. This won’t do at all.
But what’s this? An “Add your gender” option?
That’s at least, something, I guess? Defaulting to [whatever the algorithm guesses] is sucky, but at least nonbinary folks can still self-identify however they want.
But 30 characters isn’t a lot. What if I want to drop in, say, 68 characters? Do I need to do some crazy Unicode fuckery to pull that off?
Nope, Inspect Element + set maxlength="255" and now Twitter thinks my gender is the EICAR test file. Wonderful!
Which means: If someone downloads my Twitter data without my consent onto a workstation running antivirus software, the file will delete itself and all will be right in the marketing world.
https://twitter.com/SoatokDhole/status/1254635753319079937
(Okay but seriously, a lot of downstream systemic failures would have to exist for any damage to occur from me deciding to self-identify to marketers this way.)
Lessons to Learn
Twitter enforced a maxlength of 30 in the HTML element of the “Add your gender” text input, but they didn’t enforce this requirement server-side. The takeaway here is pretty obvious.
Also, don’t try to automatically[b] guess people’s gender at scale[/b]. It’s insulting when you get it wrong, and it’s creepy when you get it right.
What’s the Upper Limit for the Field?
I don’t know, but this indicates it has a larger upper bound than a tweet.
https://twitter.com/txlon5/status/1254648412261228545
If anyone has success dropping an entire thesis on gender identity and culture in the Gender field, let me know.
Update: The Best Genders
Everyone is having a lot of fun with the Gender field. Here’s some of the best tweets I’ve seen since publishing this stupid bug.
https://twitter.com/TecraFox/status/1254653500887310337
https://twitter.com/everlasting1der/status/1254652388713082880
https://twitter.com/hedgehog_emoji/status/1254650551473594368
https://twitter.com/Neybulot/status/1254659048886210563
A fox in Furry Technologists suggested building genderfs, which is a lot like redditfs but hoists the entire filesystem into the Gender field.
While I have your attention, trans rights are human rights and biology disagrees with the simple notion of “two sexes”. Thank you and good night.
https://soatok.blog/2020/04/27/why-server-side-input-validation-matters/
#furry #infosec #inputValidation #LGBTQIA_ #security #softwareDevelopment #Twitter
Update (2020-04-29): Twitter has fixed their oversight.{ "errors": [{ "code": 356, "message": "preferences.gender_preferences.gender_override: Must provide a non-empty custom value 30 characters or less in length." }]}
Anyone who set their custom gender to a long volume of text, should still have it set to a long volume of text.
The original article follows after the separator.
I was recently made aware of a change to Twitter, which exposes a new Gender field. If you’ve never specified your gender before, they guessed what it was (which is a really shitty thing to do, especially towards trans folks!).
https://twitter.com/leemandelo/status/1254179716451438592
Slightly annoyed, I went to go see what Twitter thinks my gender is.
Curses! They know I’m a guy. This won’t do at all.
But what’s this? An “Add your gender” option?
That’s at least, something, I guess? Defaulting to [whatever the algorithm guesses] is sucky, but at least nonbinary folks can still self-identify however they want.But 30 characters isn’t a lot. What if I want to drop in, say, 68 characters? Do I need to do some crazy Unicode fuckery to pull that off?
Nope, Inspect Element + setmaxlength="255"and now Twitter thinks my gender is the EICAR test file. Wonderful!Which means: If someone downloads my Twitter data without my consent onto a workstation running antivirus software, the file will delete itself and all will be right in the marketing world.
https://twitter.com/SoatokDhole/status/1254635753319079937
(Okay but seriously, a lot of downstream systemic failures would have to exist for any damage to occur from me deciding to self-identify to marketers this way.)
Lessons to Learn
Twitter enforced a maxlength of 30 in the HTML element of the “Add your gender” text input, but they didn’t enforce this requirement server-side. The takeaway here is pretty obvious.Also, don’t try to automatically[b] guess people’s gender at scale[/b]. It’s insulting when you get it wrong, and it’s creepy when you get it right.
What’s the Upper Limit for the Field?
I don’t know, but this indicates it has a larger upper bound than a tweet.https://twitter.com/txlon5/status/1254648412261228545
If anyone has success dropping an entire thesis on gender identity and culture in the Gender field, let me know.
Update: The Best Genders
Everyone is having a lot of fun with the Gender field. Here’s some of the best tweets I’ve seen since publishing this stupid bug.https://twitter.com/TecraFox/status/1254653500887310337
https://twitter.com/everlasting1der/status/1254652388713082880
https://twitter.com/hedgehog_emoji/status/1254650551473594368
https://twitter.com/Neybulot/status/1254659048886210563
A fox in Furry Technologists suggested building genderfs, which is a lot like redditfs but hoists the entire filesystem into the Gender field.
While I have your attention, trans rights are human rights and biology disagrees with the simple notion of “two sexes”. Thank you and good night.
https://soatok.blog/2020/04/27/why-server-side-input-validation-matters/
#furry #infosec #inputValidation #LGBTQIA_ #security #softwareDevelopment #Twitter
If you’ve somehow never encountered an Internet meme before, you may be surprised to learn that the number 69 is often associated with sex (and, more specifically, a particular sex act).
This happens to be the 69th blog post published on Dhole Moments, since I started the blog in April 2020.
You could even go as far as to say it’s the 4/20 +69th post, for maximum meme potential.
However! I make a concerted effort to keep my blog safe-for-work, so if you’re worried about this post being flooded with furry porn (a.k.a. yiff art), or cropped yiff memes, or any other such lascivious nonsense, you won’t find any of that on this blog. (Sorry to disappoint.)
Instead, I’d like to take the opportunity to correct some public misconceptions about human sexuality, identity, and how these topics relate to the furry fandom.
Is Furry a Sex Thing?
I find it difficult to overstate how often people assume the “furry is a sex thing” premise. Especially on technical forums.
But let’s backtrack for a second. What isn’t a sex thing?
This turns out to be a difficult question to answer. Even Wikipedia’s somewhat concise list of paraphilias doesn’t leave a lot of topics off the table.
Are shoes a sex thing? Are cigarettes? Poetry?
Hell, one might be tempted to cry foul on the header image used in this blog post for including tentacles, hypnotic eyes, and footpaws in the same image. (Scandalous!) But if you look at the uncropped versions of these images, you’ll quickly realize they aren’t yiffy.
Top Art by AtlasInu.
Bottom: Created by FlashWhite_. Fox is Kiit Lock.
The more you read about this topic, the more you’ll realize this question is inert. Anything can be a sex thing. Humans are largely a sexual species, and sex is deeply ingrained in our culture (which can make life awkward for asexual people).
Instead, the question of whether or not the furry fandom is sexual becomes a bit of a Rorschach test for one’s cognitive biases.
If you’re chiefly concerned with public image–especially when fursuiting in public, where kids can see–you’re incentivized to double down on the fact that the furry fandom is no more inherently sexual than anything else can be. And this is true.
If you’re concerned with cultivating a sex-positive environment where people can live out their sexual fantasies in a safe, sane, and consensual manner, you’re incentivized to insist that furry is a sexual thing. “We have murrsuits for crying out loud! Stop kink-shaming! Down with puritan ideologies on sex!” And this is also true.
Humans are largely sexual, so any activity humans engage in will inevitably involve people sexualizing it. Even tupperware parties, for fuck’s sake! Anyone who believes there is a “Rule 34 of the Internet” tacitly acknowledges this fact, even if it’s inconvenient for a narrative they’re trying to spin.
So while this might be a meaningless question, one has to wonder…
Why Does Everyone Care So Much If Being a Furry (In Particular) Is Sexual or Not?
To understand what’s really happening here, you need to know a few things about the furry fandom.
- Approximately 80% of furries are LGBTQIA+ (source).
- Early anti-furry sentiments were motivated by queerphobia, especially on forums like Something Awful–and the influence of early hateful memes can still be seen to this day.
https://twitter.com/spacetwinks/status/728349066178998274
One of the Something Awful staff eventually acknowledged and apologized for this.
There was even a movement within the furry fandom history (the “Burned Furs“) that aimed to excise queerness and sex-positivity from the community. It’s no coincidence that a lot of the former Burned Furs joined with the alt-right movement within the furry fandom.
The alt-right is explicitly queerphobic; especially against trans people. But it’s not just queerphobic; it’s also an ableist and racist movement.
Regardless of sexual orientation, a lot of furries are neurodivergent, too.
Simply put: The reason that most people care whether or not furries are sexual is rooted in the propensity of anti-furry rhetoric in Internet culture, which was motivated at its inception by mostly queerphobia with a dash of ableism.
The notion that furries are “too sexual” originated as a dog-whistle for “too gay”, and caught on with people who didn’t know the hidden meaning of the idea. Now a lot of people repeat these ideas without intending or even knowing their roots, and many more have internalized shame about the whole situation.
Unfortunately, this even precipitates into the furry fandom itself, which leads to an unfortunate cyclical discourse that takes place largely on Furry Twitter.
Furry Isn’t a Sexuality. There is no F in LGBT!
If you publicly state “anti-furry rhetoric is largely queerphobic dog-whistles”, you will inevitably hear someone try to retort this way. So let’s be very clear about it.
Furry isn’t its own sexual identity, and I would never claim otherwise.
Unlike transgender people, furries do not experience anything like “species dysphoria” (although therians/otherkin do report experiencing this; don’t conflate the two).
What’s happening here is: Most furries (about 80% of us) have separate sexual/gender identities that deviate from the heteronormative. A lot of queerphobia is easier to sell when you convey it through dog-whistles. So that’s what bigots did.
Polite company that wouldn’t partake in queer-bashing is often willing to laugh at the notion of “Beat A Furry Day“.
Anyone who tries to twist this acknowledgement to mean something ridiculous like an LGBTF movement is either being irrational or a 4chan troll.
For related reasons, you shouldn’t ever feel the need to “come out” as a furry.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZG2DRLimBSM
It’s okay to just really like Beastars, Zootopia, or even the Furry aspects of the Minecraft and Roblox communities. It doesn’t make you a sex-freak.
What’s the Take-Away?
It doesn’t really matter if the furry fandom has a sexual side to it. Everything does! The people who proclaim to care very much about this care for all the wrong reasons. Don’t be one of them.
And remember: Lewd furries aren’t furry trash; we’re yiff-raff!
Sex Isn’t Well-Defined Either
While we’re talking about sex, did you know that biological sex isn’t neatly divided into “male” and “female”? This isn’t an ideological position; it’s a scientific one. Just ask a biologist!
https://twitter.com/JUNIUS_64/status/1054387892624285699
Trans and nonbinary people change gender (which is about your role within society) from what they were assigned at birth, but even sex itself isn’t so concrete.
The next time someone tries to appeal to “science” when talking about trans rights and then vomits up some unenlightened K-12 explanation of human reproduction and biological sex, remind them that science disagrees with their oversimplified and outdated mental model–and they might know this if they kept up with scientists.
Where Can I Learn More About the Sexual Side of the Furry Fandom?
Important: If you’re under the age of 18, you should stay out of adult spaces until you’re old enough to participate. No excuses.
If you’re looking for pornographic furry art (also called “yiff”), most furry art sites (FurryLife, FurAffinity, etc.) have adult content filters that you can turn off when you register an account.
If you’re looking for something more interactive, there’s a swath of furries that develop private VR experiences for 18+ audiences. One of the most well-funded Patreon artists makes adult furry games.
If you’re curious about why and how people express their sexuality when fursuiting (also called “murrsuiting”), there’s a subreddit for that.
It’s really not hard to find. This is one of the advantages of furry being a largely sex-positive community.
Furry YouTuber Ragehound even has a series about Furries After Dark if you want to learn more about these topics.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGOlQJDO5no
Finally, similar to how 69 is a meme number for sex, furries have an additional meme number (621) that comes from the name of an adult furry website (e621.net).
You now have enough knowledge to navigate the adult side of the fandom. Just don’t come crying to me when you develop the uncanny knack for recognizing which r/furry_irl posts are actually cropped yiff versus wholly worksafe art.
https://soatok.blog/2021/04/02/the-furry-sexuality-blog-post/
#furries #furry #FurryFandom #LGBTQIA_ #Society
Dhole Moments
Writings about information security, cryptography, software, and humanity, from a member of the furry fandom.From the Furry Fandom…
Featured Furries
Can’t get enough of blog posts written by furries? This post aims to curate some of the other blogs written by furries that are worth sharing with my regular readers. Many (but not all) of these furry blogs are focused on technology in some way. Background Information Many years ago, I wrote a post titled…July 21, 2024August 15, 2024
Soa Talks (Latest Posts)
Ambition, The Fediverse, and Technology Freedom
If you’re new to reading this blog, you might not already be aware of my efforts to develop end-to-end encryption for ActivityPub-based software. It’s worth being aware of before you continue to read this blog post. To be very, very clear, this is work I’m doing independent of the W3C or any other standards organization…October 12, 2024October 12, 2024
Why are furry conventions offering HIV testing to attendees?
Spoiler: It’s nothing scandalous or bad. Every once in a while, someone posts this photo on Twitter to attempt to dunk on furries: Over the years, I’ve seen this discourse play out several times. The people that post this photo usually don’t elaborate on why they think this photo is meaningful, they just let it…September 30, 2024October 3, 2024
Cryptographic Innuendos
Neil Madden recently wrote a blog post titled, Digital Signatures and How to Avoid Them. One of the major points he raised is: Another way that signatures cause issues is that they are too powerful for the job they are used for. You just wanted to authenticate that an email came from a legitimate server, but now…September 20, 2024September 20, 2024
We’ve more-or-less all been coping with the pandemic since early March.
During this time, I’ve seen a lot of people stressed and depressed to their breaking points, usually while also blaming themselves for not being able to bottle their feelings up and believing no one else is at their limit.
And that’s simply not true. Everyone is suffering, everyone is coping. Not just from the pandemic and the stress and isolation of avoiding the risk of infection, but from the other social ills of our world.
In a different vein, three different colleagues recently told me that I make blogging “look easy” because of the rate that I manage to output new blog posts here.
And if we take a step back and look at both situations, there’s a subtle theme here that I’d like to explore: The unseen.
Seeing Without Seeing
Everything you know about the world is an abstraction of the truth.
That isn’t some philosophical pontification, it’s a plain and simple fact. You don’t know what’s going on in anyone else’s brain at any given moment (especially if they have no inner monologue at all).
Under better times and better conditions, I’d say that the surest and fastest path to being mental unwell (depressed, anxious, etc.) is comparing your behind-the-scenes footage to other peoples’ highlight reels.
Social media is nothing but highlight reels.
Hell, this very blog is a highlight reel of the ideas I managed to flesh out into a coherent structure.
Nobody would ever have known the stress, frustration, and nihilism that goes into trying to come up with a topic to write about if I didn’t just allude to it in this sentence. My writing process is too informal to articulate and very unhelpful to anyone who has to write words for a living: If I can’t think of what I want to say and why, I don’t write. It’s that simple. I can’t force it. I’ve tried. And sometimes I have very strong opinions about certain topics, or something really funny happened, or I observed something really noteworthy that should probably be captured and immortalized in prose… yet, I just can’t figure out how to put it into words, so it languishes forever.
And yet, so many people are so over-exposed to this polished and curated filter bubble, I fear they’ve lost sight of the human experience, and how badly we all struggle and fuck up all the time.
The isolation sure isn’t helping.
The Political Queer Experience
Being LGBTQIA+ in the United States of America is quite an experience, whew, let me tell ya.
https://twitter.com/DogpatchPress/status/978408138612158464
https://twitter.com/NazifurReceipts/status/1325207247157301249
Sometimes I have to ask myself: Does anyone really believe that the Trump administration or the GOP is actually pro-LGBT? Surely nobody could have missed the memo? To wit:
- GLAAD has outlined all the ways that Trump has harmed LGBT rights.
- The Human Rights Campaign has outlined Trump’s timeline of hate.
- The Republican Party platform for 2020 under Trump’s leadership (PDF) specifically called for a reversal of Obergefell v. Hodges (the case that allowed for gay marriage rights). See Page 9.
It’s even worse when you hear from alleged “Gays for Trump” or even “Furries for Trump”.
It’s bizarre; how can so many people support someone who wants to hurt them?
Enter Dean Browning
Dean Browning is a political candidate from Pennsylvania who lost the Republican primary in 2020. He also runs a PAC.
When he’s not siphoning money from the pockets of gullible American conservatives, Dean Browning likes to pretend to be a black gay guy named Dan Purdy on social media to try to deceive the public about the Republicans’ intentions for the LGBTQIA+ community.
https://twitter.com/SoatokDhole/status/1326270305933942784
His cover was blown when he forgot to switch to his alt account (which apparently is owned by his adopted son?) to attempt to astroturf a critic. He then tried to offer “context” into the tweet.
Neither the original fuck-up nor his nonpology went unnoticed:
https://twitter.com/NerdyBlkGyrl/status/1326285558570692608
https://twitter.com/studentactivism/status/1326270324783132673
Sometimes the unseen gets revealed to us through truly spectacular mistakes.
Furries Improve Everything
I know I just talked about politics and we’re all sick of it, but I want to briefly visit this topic one more time for the sake of setting the stage.
Remember this?
https://twitter.com/thatbilloakley/status/1325152158866567168
Never one to miss a beat, Coopertom (the cat fursuiter from the infamous cursed photo) decided to remake this hilarious performance art of a gaffe in VRChat.
https://twitter.com/thecoopertom/status/1325710953305026560
This blew up. You’ve probably seen news coverage of this event. It made The Verge, it made BuzzFeed. Hell, it even made PC Gamer.
For many readers, this is the first time they read about the furry fandom in a positive light.
For the first many years of the furry fandom’s existence, our media strategy was nonexistent.
We kinda just winged it (with apologies to avian furries), and the end result was an episode of CSI about furries that was so inaccurate and bad in its portrayal of the furry fandom as sex-obsessed losers that if you type “that episode” into Google, it’s the first search result.
Unfortunately, this has stuck in the public imagination for many, many years since. Almost every interaction I’ve had online has been colored by a history of bad press that the many recent years of fair coverage hasn’t abated.
As a result, almost nobody outside of the furry fandom truly has the slightest clue about who we really are, or how incredible the community can be.
Even most furries don’t know this!
Let’s circle back to Coopertom. What many of the folks who saw the news coverage of his VRChat world didn’t see is that he later posted this…
https://twitter.com/thecoopertom/status/1325912477209649154
…followed a few hours later by this:
https://twitter.com/thecoopertom/status/1326000299954343937
I don’t think even Coopertom anticipated how much love and kindness he would be met with by the community he’s been a part of for at least a decade. He surely wasn’t counting on it. You can hear that much in his voice.
Everyone who hates furries because an old CSI episode portrayed us in an unflattering light–or because of the actions of a scant few individuals that did terrible things and are consequently not welcome in our community–has chosen to blind themselves to what this fandom is really about, and they will forever be Plato’s cave-dwellers as a result.
The furry fandom has always been about humanity.
Whether to celebrate or to critique? That depends on the individual.
Anyone who tells you different is missing the point. (To be explicit: The point isn’t sex, although we aren’t exactly prudes.)
Can We Take the Blinders Off?
A few years ago there was a TED talk to commemorate 1000 TED Talks, in which the speaker recursively used Amazon Mechanical Turk to summarize each of the talks into six words each, and then to summarize the summaries, etc. until he landed on a mere six.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5pklFtGthY
In the same spirit, I’ve been thinking what the six words that describe the furry fandom would be. (Spoiler: See the title of this blog post.)
Whether you’ve been a furry since the days of SomethingAwful trolls or are just discovering your interest for anthropomorphic characters, you’re not alone.
No matter how depressed, frustrated, stressed, angry, despaired, hollow, hopeless, or scared you might feel about your life, it gets better.
This video was made before the pandemic, but it hits differently after:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=waAVJtE23Wo
If I can be said to be coping well (and making blogging seem easy as a result), it’s simply because I’m privileged to have so many good friends to lift up my spirits. It’s not a reflection of me being somehow special, and it isn’t a poor reflection on you or anyone else if you aren’t.
But on the other paw, I utterly failed to gripe about a recent irksome instance of sensationalist cryptography reporting, as well as the recent anti-encryption legislation in the Five Eyes nations. So maybe I’m not doing as hot as some of you might think I am? Win some, lose some.
https://twitter.com/thecoopertom/status/1326373134161862657
https://soatok.blog/2020/11/11/youre-not-alone-it-gets-better/
#coping #happiness #LGBTQIA_ #mentalHealth #pandemic #Politics #Society
I rarely think about the labels that describe me.That isn’t because of privilege (I spent many years painfully aware of them), but because my friends are incredibly supportive and we’ve been able to cultivate an environment where I’m not constantly reminded of why I don’t “belong”. (It took many grueling years to achieve that, and I’m still reminded of my weirdness if I leave home for any appreciable length of time. Fortunately, I’m a bit of a homebody.)
The majority of people don’t think about their labels either, but for privileged reasons, until a minority calls it to their attention. Then you get almost-comical indignant hot takes of the “don’t call me cis, that’s a slur!” variety.
At least, they would be comical if they weren’t so stupid and dangerous.
Identity
Identity is a funny thing. I actually find rather insulting the proposition that you can take the vast diversity of the lived experiences of billions of people and compress it into one bit of information.“Are you a YES or a NO?” “Are you X or Y?” “Are you good or evil?”
Labels are a lossy compression algorithm. They’re meant to simplify and convey ideas so they’re more broadly accessible and easily understood. In practice, people are overly reliant on them, and they become a crutch.
Sure, you can think of me as an androsexual, demisexual, cisgender male with a dhole fursona, but do most of us even know what that means?
Pride
Pride is a protest against unjust systems. Pride started with a riot in response to police violence and discrimination. You probably didn’t learn about Pride in great detail in history class (if at all).Pride parades in recent years have been co-opted by what some call “rainbow capitalism”.
And this obviously feels really gross, but at the same time, it’s often somehow forgivable that companies use Pride Month (June) to show active support for their LGBTQIA+ employees. (If nothing else, it assures us that we won’t suddenly become unemployed if someone accuses us of falling in love with a person with the “wrong” phenotype, etc.)
There are currently a lot of hard conversations taking place about a different target of police violence and discrimination.
I hope that the protests happening today will result in the change our world needs, so that everyone can live equally without fear or shame for who they are.
This will almost certainly require dismantling racist systems and rebuilding them without the tainted legacy they originated from.
That being said, I’ve never really been fond of the emotion, pride. It feels inherently reckless to me. At the same time, I acknowledge it’s a great foil for the emotions that bigots want us to feel (fear, shame, despair, self-loathing, etc.). If that works for you, I’m happy. Keep on keeping on.
Rather than pride, I’ve always sought contentment and joy in my life.
Authenticity means a lot to me, and being fearlessly and shamelessly me is something I shouldn’t have to work for or feel proud about; nor should anyone else.
Contentment and joy… there used to be another word folks used to encapsulate that genre of emotion: Gay.
It always comes full-circle, doesn’t it?
A Dream To Seek
Society has numerous institutions and systems that are designed and implemented to ensure discrimination and injustice against people who are different than their architects.
As long as bigoted institutions and systems exist, society will always need movements like Pride and Black Lives Matter to resist atrocity and inspire loud authenticity, in equal measure.
So it might sound odd to say without the above context, but as a strong proponent of human rights and equality, I dream of the day when these movements no longer need to exist; for the day when their job is done and we have moved past the specter of hate that continues to haunt each generation that survives its direct violent influence. I say this knowing that this day will probably never come (at least in my lifetime).
Until bigotry is abolished, and bigotry’s apologists recognize that they’re little more than asymptomatic carriers of that vile psychic pathogen, I will continue to strive to enable everyone I can reach to enjoy the same peace that my friends and I have built at home.
No matter your sex. No matter your gender. No matter the gender(s) you’re attracted to (if any). No matter your race or ethnicity.
The labels people use to describe us shouldn’t condemn anyone to a life of misery and injustice.
The day we cultivate a society that is absent of, and resistant to, the kind of hate and discrimination we’ve seen for centuries will be a day worthy of pride.
And the only way to get there is to acknowledge a simple truth: Black Lives have to Matter in order for the superset (“All Lives”) to Matter.
What Do Your Labels Mean?
This will probably be my only Pride Month post on this blog, so I suppose it makes sense to explain them.I’m a guy, who’s attracted to guys (thus, androsexual)… but I don’t exactly have a “type”. I have to genuinely like a person to find them attractive. That’s the demisexual part.
Most people understand being gay, conceptually. Asexuality might also click readily without a lot of exposition.
Being demi is weird: You spend a lot of time wondering if you’re asexual or not, until you actually develop feelings for someone else for the first time.
Cisgender just means “not transgender”; that is to say, I identify as the same gender I was assigned at birth.
If that’s helpful to know, cool. But you don’t have to think of me in those terms. I’m just Soatok.
https://soatok.blog/2020/06/09/pridemonth/
