References

Im gonna go ahead and put these up first. Why? Because these are my recommendations to you the reader. Throughout this article i will be making references to media by name, with the assumption you have a base line understanding of certain things. I cannot promise everything will make perfect sense if you have zero experience with queer adjacent media, but something tells me if youre reading this thats not entirely true.

I will be providing any links i can such that if you wish to support the creators of the media referenced, you can do so!

Music

J McClendon AKA Classic J AKA Casio Dad AKA you are an angel:
awawawa.world

For the biases

As someone who used to sit in the ‘Anti’ section of the following topics, but battled said biases and now sit as a furry transfemme, i will try my best to speak in a way that is understood by bigots and allies alike.

I speak for NO ONE, except myself. This is purely my opinion.

Furries / Therians

What you deem to be a sick and twisted fetish , or a “disgrace on humanity”, or whatever other twisted bullshit you wanna spit out, is genuinely one of the most normal feelings experienced by kids and young adults. The association with themselves, and some animalistic trait.

What i only recently had to come to terms with, was the fact that you dont have to get a fursuit, or have this detailed fursona, and roleplay. You dont have to be super active in furry dominate spheres. All you have to do is say “i associate strongly” with anthro adjacent things.

For me, it was a feeling of emptyness, remembering pretending to be a lil mouse addicted to cheese in school, enjoying the playdates with my cousin when she brought over her Littlest Pet Shop dolls and i was always picking the rodents, to even my days on kik simply being around furries.

For others its a strong attachment to anthro media like My Little Pony, or Wonder Pets. Its natural that shows like this would lead to kids associating themselves with their favourite character, and if said character is animalistic, then they end up associating themselves with a horse, and they have this OC of themselves in the MLP universe.

Theres also a VERY important distinction to be made between Furry and Therian.

Furries are your standard “Animal Person”, person. They map human-like traits onto an animal-like character. These are your fursuit owners.
Therians are your millennial style “spirit animal” types, where they relate more closely to an animal on a spiritual or psychological level. These are your catgirls.

If you think furries are weird, and creeps, or whatever, i assume the only anthro media you have consumed is the movie ‘Cats’…

Queerness in General

This is where it gets juicy, because this is where i have lived for two years atp.

Everywhere i see Anti-Queer rhetoric, its almost always rooted in either ignorance, or subjective malice. And i dont mean the usual “transphobes have never met a trans person” style rhetoric, i mean viewing something as mundane as all music that seems unique to a queer circle like Glass Beach, or Betu, as cringey, or having an wavering disdain for the media without ever giving it a chance in the first place. You may not like furries, but looking at the album art for Bite Me by ‘GABUISLOST’, and saying “nah fuck that, thats furry music”, is just bad faith.

You have zero logical reason to dislike the media presented in-front of you, other than a misguided bias rooted in bigotry or a lack of understanding! When you shut out queer media for simply being queer, you are telling EVERYONE in the space “i am not your friend.”. Why? Because if youre not willing to interact with the media we like/relate to, you will never be able to understand us beyond the surface level stuff youre told.

Same deal with opposite sex music! This mainly applies to men, tho. If you refuse to listen to your girlfriends favourite artist because “thats girl music”, you are perpetuating misogyny under the basis of musical taste.

If you think queer people are creeps, i urge you to put on a skirt, kiss the same sex, and get a buzzcut. This isnt sterotypes, its called ‘Experimenting with Expression’

Time for the real blog.

In your last blog you spent a lot of time talking to the reader in a way that put them into your shoes, but never actually gave them anything to chew on to help them understand you better. You focused more on the steps you took and some of the hurdles you had to jump through, not really touching much on the intricacies of it all.

“What intricacies?”, you ask yourself. To you its all quite obvious in hindsight. To you, when you learn a new fact that challenges your biases, you actually try to find a way to either integrate or disprove. You ask yourself over and over “does this make sense?”, and if it doesnt, you ask someone else!

Friends opening the door.

Best example was your best friend zoey. You talked about her some in your previous posts, but kinda glossed over her overall. You did this because you knew most of it was better suited for a post like this.

She was always your go to for anything information, so when she came out to you years past, not only did it completely rattle your entire world view, it also opened the doors to the answers to more information! Not with the intent of realizing youre trans, but just to better understand your friend.

That level of understanding truly started with J McClendon, and her break-out band, ‘Glass Beach’.

When she first showed you glass beach, you were still in your baby-trans era, but were always very picky with music. You were open to the new music, but preferred the prog-rock chords, and psychadelic vocals signature to ‘King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard’, so thats all you listened to. You listened to gizz for the lore and the sound. You didnt care about the meaning, or the underlying message of the music.

All of that changed when you moved. April of 2025 you had asked

“glass beach was that other transfem album you recommended yea?”

Can you hear the music

You had just moved across the country, leaving your family behind. A foreign place, with almost nobody to actually help you. You had been listening to GNX and CHROMAKOPIA on loop for the past few months, and was feeling far more open to the idea of new music, so you went and found some new music! Starting with Glass Beach.

You remember telling her at the time that a lot of their music felt very familiar. Almost like you had heard it all before. Some songs felt almost homely, like classic j dies and goes to hell pt1, or glass beach. While other songs, like bedroom community, or yoshi’s island made you feel seen. The funny girl in your headphones was saying the quiet part out loud. You related to it all!

Then you listened to Plastic Death, and was pleasantly surprised by the very different sound that opened the album, with the 6 minute epic coelacanth that spent the first minute playing behind the scenes audio talking about the meaning of art. They bring up Banksy, and Unnus Annus as examples of art that was meant to be ephemeral, but ended up being immortalized in the shitshow that is the modern internet. The opener of the album is an existential crisis wrapped in pop culture. About half way through the song it shifts into something that almost seems antithetical to the intro clip, where everything is temporary. Suffering is temporary. All while everything that initially created the material conditions are all but forgotten in favour of the modern interpretation.

J just dropped a new solo album ‘its fine to dream’


Holy… Fucking… Shit… You found yourself getting lost in the meanings of the songs on the previous albums, interpreting your own meanings in ways that helped you cope with how you felt. But this album? This album was different.

The opening track, overture sets the tone very well, with the first words being a gutteral “I fucking hate myself!”, but you kinda expected a tone shift after that. Then, almost as quickly as overture got the point, the same ripped your heart open with “are you living in a lie”.

Song after song you just kept getting hit in the chest. Eventually you accidentally scrolled too far in the description and saw the chapters for the album, and at the very end of the album you saw a song named escape your home town. Your heart immediately sank. You were already getting emotional over industry, and you just got spoiled on the ending of the album. And youre scared.
You did that. You escaped. You ran away.

It was your anthem. You finally made it to the end of the album. The album ended with J yelling at you, and telling you to run as far away as possible. You had just done that. You moved across the entire country, to be Taylor. You missed all your friends, but you felt they didnt miss you, so you didnt reach out. Your mom was staying in a run-down motel where she couldve been evicted at any day, but your mom refuses to call you your name. Your mom makes bathroom-law arguments, while you use the ladies room at work all day and nobody cares. Because of that, you barely ever called her, or talked to her. Fucked up? Absolutely. But to you, you made the right choice. You took that place in your head, and burned it to the ground. You cut the people out of your life who didnt make you feel like you.

This album… felt real. It didnt feel like the other albums, where you were projecting your problems onto the album as a coping mechanism. This album simply was your problems. J said, in ‘the same’, “wanted to see in your head, do you wish you were dead”, and you felt like she had cracked your skull open and had extracted your inner thoughts.

- Thorn in the side
of a wolf in the middle
of the grass in the middle
of a picture on a website
- Binary digits in a server
in a closet
in a windowless office
on the west side
- And i dont know
What makes you so sure.

Isnt her fur so soft?

Youre gonna start this off with the entirety of three songs, and the introduction of a new artist: Doefriends

Every time these songs came on you felt…odd. You related to them, but that didnt make sense to you. You werent a furry. You didnt want to be a furry, but you knew thats what the songs you were relating to were about. You knew ‘puppy’ was about an abusive relationship involving petplay, where the pet is pushed around, and forgotten about, which made the ‘you relate to this’ even weirder!

Out of all of the songs on the 3 albums, these 3 all rose to the top, very quickly. From ‘sure’ being a strange unease yet safety in the uncertainty, to ‘puppy’ drawing analogies that you didnt like or understand, to your relationship with your girlfriend.

There was a part you didnt quite understand, however ‘Why the furry songs?’.

Lets back it up a little

Being a former hardcore conservative, you had this thought in the back of your mind that furries were just outright weird people, with some weird agenda about persuading people into acting like dogs. And its not like it was totally unfounded, because you had heard of people wanting to be in cages. Hell, while you worked at Dunkin’ in Tennessee you had a co-worker who had a boyfriend who was EASILY 3x her age and when you and your girlfriend were talking about her, she informed you that she knew who they were!

She told you about a day she was at work and the two of them came in. This co-worker had walked into a Wendy’s with a full collar leash and a cat ear headband, with that ‘3x her age’ boyfriend holding the leash! Your co-worker made the statement while you were training her ‘I try to make friends, but nobody seems to stay friends with me for very long’, and after you and your girlfriend talked about it, you understood why! “I dont care what you do behind the privacy of your own home, but dont bring it in public”, was your stance on that whole thing. On paper you dont really care that they get off to petplay, for YOU the problem came about by taking the kink into the public world!

You were grossed out. “Shes one of those furries”, you thought. “No wonder people dont stay friends with you”. To you it was gross, but you also didnt understand it! Not to say that is 100% okay, or above board, but theres nothing inherently wrong with what they were doing. You associated furries with gross kink shit, so when someone did gross kink shit with cat ears on, you said “oh these are the same thing.”, and it affirmed your bias. You and you girlfriend would make not-so-savoury jokes about them, and you almost immediately stopped talking to the girl.

You understood the concepts of self identification, and the freedom of ones own expression, but you were just worried about the idea of ‘what happens behind closed doors’. You always tell people ‘its not bad to educate kids about the LGBTQ community’, but you drew the line at furries.

— wait- whats that? —

Bigotry — Merriam Webster
(noun) - derogatory
1 | obstinate or narrow-minded adherence to one’s own opinions and prejudices
|: the state of mind of a bigot

The shadow in the corner

Your past loomed over you like an ugly storm ready to rip you off your feet for simply going outside. After coming out as trans, you had more and more reason to not feel the way you did about furries, yet you still did. Partly, because you participated in your negative bias. You were one of those freaks on kik back in like 2014 doing insane shit. As you grew older, and all the friends you made on kik stopped talking to you, you became more ashamed of that, but there was always this part of you that said ‘well, it felt right.’. That part of you missed the freedom you had to be who you wanted to be.

You had remembered a year or two before that you had found Kylee’s instagram. In hindsight you really should have expected what you saw, given you grew up with Kylee and her friends — even you were participating in the Warrior Cats, and Animal Jam with them back then — but for some reason opening her page and finding good artwork of varying furry characters in varying styles was kindof eye-opening a little. You didnt think much of it then, and honestly the whole “everyone in XYZ group is bad except for my friends in y group, and im still gonna make fun of XYZ group” was doing a lot of the work.

You never knew how to explain how you truly felt about furries, and furry media, but because you were a degenerate teenager, all youre aware of as the “core furry” thing was degeneracy. If you saw SFW furry art, you have the thought of ‘theres prolly porn of this somewhere’.

Trans rights are human rights

As time has gone on, youve seen connections between your “trans rights” arguments, and ‘pro furry’ arguments. The biggest being self expression!

What you were doing, was objectifying the entire furry fandom, and boiling them down to their most degenerate hypothetical self. You battle this exact same logic literally every day, in the form of bathroom-law arguments, ‘protect the kids’ bullshit, chasers who are only interested in you because “cock and boobs”. This is the same form of bigotry you were applying to furries.

Let me explain this logic to you. Lets say trans people (including ‘not-fully-out’) make up ~2% of the entire US population (~350M) as of 2026. Saying ‘what about the rapists’ when denying a transwoman the use of the ladies room, is not only statistically improbable, but simply does more harm than good in the long run. If i go to the ladies room, and i see a trans man, im gonna panic a lil cus like ‘guh ur in the wrong bathroom’. Ive never clocked anyone as a trans man in the mens rooms. This ‘bathroom law’ is overwhelmingly anti trans-woman, by nature of what testosterone does.


Going off statistics alone, middle aged cis het white men are most likely to commit the style of crimes trans folk are being accused of.

Even in cases where it unfortunately does happen where a trans woman does something unspeakable to a woman or child in the bathroom, stopping 2% of the us population (roughly seven million people) from doing stuff because of a super small minority is just simply illogical. Yeah, its kinda insane 3% is seven million people. Thats a lot of people.


Also, the likelyhood of some cis-het white guy pretending to be trans to lure kids into a trap, is somehow less likely than the father of the child doing unspeakable things to a child in a public bathroom.

For some reason however, you didnt apply this logic to people like Kylee in your life. To you, Kylee was normal. She was ‘one of the good ones’. Her friends were fine, because you ‘knew they were normal people’. All the puzzle pieces are starting to click, but if youre being honest with yourself, you didnt really feel comfortable talking about this with anyone. You care a lot about what others think of you, to a point where you never addressed it because just the idea of you being a furry gave you anxiety that everyone around you would freak out and be like ‘yo wtf taylor’.

Eventually you werent able to run from it anymore. You had spent a year with your girlfriend out of state, and that ended with an argument with her grandmother. You moved back to texas and called the only people you thought could help you. Not to repeat the previous blog, but you had just moved in with a furry, whilst effectively being closeted yourself. It was awkward at first. You didnt wait very long before telling Kylee how you felt about furries, while “reassuring her” that you didnt see her or her girlfriend that way. You could tell she wasnt happy with your take, but to you it was logical.

One day, you made a not-so-savoury comment about Kylee being trans, and her response kinda locked you up. She used your ‘trans affirming’ arguments against you, like ‘you shouldnt tell someone theyre trans, as it will cause them to be apprehensive towards the topic’ She wasnt happy with your opinion and was bent on changing it, but she was right in her beliefs. She knew what she was doing, too… After a week or two of twisted feelings you and her eventually sit down and talk about furry culture and what it truly means to her. Most of what she said made logical sense to you, like the idea that its just an ‘OC’ that just so happens to have ears and a tail. Or, that the character doesnt even need ears and a tail! Your fursona is just traits you like about yourself mapped to an animal.

You two were actively watching Bojack Horseman.
A show that does a very good job at anthropomorphism in a way that is deemed normal by society. You kept thinking back to the show at times. Mr. Peanutbutter having all the traits of a golden retriever boyfriend, Princess Caroline being a catty bitch. Even side characters affirmed this idea; Sextina Aquafina is a dolphin, and dolphins are sexual creatures who have sex purely for pleasure like humans, and thats one of her character traits.

This is fundamentally how furry logic works. Take an animal, and map traits to it.

Disney

Disney was the first person that actually made furry media mainstream. Mickey Mouse is inherently furry by nature of having relatable anthropomorphic characters. The mouse ears they give you at Disney, for some reason, arent seen as “indoctrination”, or weird. Instead, its viewed as support for The Disney Corporation. The people on the right like to say ‘The left is turning the kids into dogs’, when in actuality is the media the child is exposed to during their formative years.

Its not the left’s fault your kid is a furry. Its not the internets fault your kid is a furry. Your kid simply sees themselves in certain animals, and wishes to express themselves in a way that is validating. You cant, in the same breath, say ‘Furries are bad’ and ‘The Lion King was my favourite movie as a kid’. All furries start somewhere.

For you, that “start” was seeing the album cover for I WANT TO LOVE AGAIN by ‘doefriends’ and saying “hm. surely this cant be that bad”. It seems so silly, but in the end it was some sub-10k-monthly artist’s album cover that showed you how normal furries can be. You didnt care that she was a deer. You just liked the music.

Thats what glass beach had become for you. A safe space to vent about your trans issues, while also holding an unseasy feeling inside you when songs like ‘calico’, or ‘puppy’ come. The song ‘the killer’ is all about you being an animal being hunted, and eventually failing to run and getting caught in a trap that inevitably leads to you being poached.

Who cares what you do in your private life? Like genuinely. The only difference between me and a mickey mouse fan is the shape of the ears. Except wait- My fursona is also a mouse!

From, Taylor

Ive taken almost a month to write this, so my thoughts are pretty scattered. I sat down initially with the intent on making some big exposé-esque post where i beat down on Disney lovers who hate furries, but i certainly lost the plot at some point.

I hope you enjoyed the read.