The Furry community is a funny thing. It's full of great people. It's also full of unmitigated asshats and absolute fuckwits. But, that's just how it bloody works, sometimes.
One thing I've noticed is that recently, among furries, it's trendy to be transgendered. On the one hand, this pisses me off. It incenses me that they latch onto the friendly, theme-park version of transgenderism and play it out on line, all the while neatly tangoing around the all-too-real nasty side effects. On the other hand, though, I can't help but think that positive publicity is positive publicity, even if I don't particularly like it. If a bunch of angsty trendoid weens living in their mothers' basements decide they want to ham it up and play at being transsexual for a while, and in so doing increase exposure and acceptance of the phenomenon, then all's well that ends well. On the gripping hand, with a lot of them, it's hard to tell if they're just emulating, just being poseurs, or if they really are as transgendered as they claim.
There is something analogous to gaydar among genderqueers, I think - if there weren't, we wouldn't practically trip over each other with such regularity. (Maybe that's just me, but I doubt it, with as awkward as I am!) That said, that doesn't work too well over IRC. I think I might have slightly better odds of separating the real from the fake than J. Random Cisgendered Fur, but even at that, I don't rate my odds too highly. So, all in all, I don't know what to make of this phenomenon. Why exactly would someone want to pretend to be transgendered? Wouldn't that be like pretending to be gay? Only, less understood? Someone throw me a bone here, because I don't bloody get it.
But, as I observed, the net effect is that among furries, at least in the venues I frequent, transsexuality doesn't shock nearly as much as it does in the mainstream. Furries are also really hard to genderfuck. And that, all in all, is a good thing. The problem is, furries are themselves so misunderstood, pigeonholed, stereotyped and even reviled that their reputation thoroughly banjaxes any hope of propagating this tolerance to society at large. Well, except maybe for those fringes that already tolerate and accept lifestyles that challenge social conventions, but transphobia is already fading fast there. Outside that, it's the same issue that people face trying to fight sexism or racism or homophobia or any of a million other social inequities.
But, I digress. Furries. Right. Oh, fart. The phone just rang and now I've forgotten where in the nineteen hells I was going with this train of thought. Plus, I'm dog tired. So, I'll go beetle off and catch a catnap.