I've seen a lot about anti-furry sentiment as a socially acceptable cover for homophobia, but there's an ableist aspect too. [Effort] [CW: Ableist slurs]

I've been a part of the furry community for a number of years now, and I can say with confidence that a lot of us, myself included, are autistic. That's probably not surprising - the subculture is centered around cute, stylized animal characters, after all, and it's well-known for appealing to people who aren't comfortable in normal society.

I also had the misfortunate of spending a fair amount of time in communities that were rabidly anti-furry (mostly Something Awful), and this created a lot of self-hatred in me. For years before I came to accept that part of myself, I joined in on the anti-furry hate not out of any real conviction, but just because I wanted to be one of the "good" people and not one of the "bad" ones. It's not something I'm proud of, but it left me with a lot of insight into what motivates and drives anti-furries.

It's ableism. Homophobia, too, but also ableism.

Specifically, it's disgust and contempt toward autistic people. Show me an anti-furry community, and I will show you one where "sperg" and "autist" are common and accepted insults. They'll make a lot of noise about protecting children or protecting animals, as homophobes do, and they'll often cherry-pick examples of one furry doing something terrible and act as if every member of the community is responsible and supports it - again, as homophobes do. But it always, always comes back to ableism. When they aren't pretending to care about that, they're going the cringe culture route and mocking examples of furries being socially inept or standing out in unusual ways - in other words, traits strongly associated with autism.

If you ask them what they actually want from furries, if the answer isn't a grisly murder fantasy, it's always the same: they want us to be "normal." To give up the things we enjoy and conform to how an "average person" behaves. They believe that we have a moral and social obligation to never make them uncomfortable, regardless of the toll it takes on us, and they see fit to punish us to any extent for failing to do so.

Those of you who are autistic, or who keep up with autism news, might see where I'm going with this. Applied Behavioral Analysis is a form of training given to autistic children with the goal of making their behavior conform to neurotypical standards. The child's unique needs and comfort are considered irrelevant; all that matters is to make them conform.

An autistic person with enough life experience can eventually conform to neurotypical social norms with some degree of success. This is called masking, in which we try to suppress our symptoms and present ourselves as neurotypical. There are two problems with expecting autistic people to do this. The first is that it's simply beyond our capabilities to act neurotypical all day, every day, because we simply don't have the faculties to do so. A person with impaired vision, if they don't wear glasses, will fail to see some things. A person with a bad leg will not always be able to walk and run like a healthy person can. And an autistic person can't mask all the time. Even when we're successful, though, it takes a toll. Masking in autistic people has been linked to anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation. This is the price that ableist people demand we pay for their comfort and our own reduced (but of course, never completely relieved) mistreatment. These issues aren't just matters of hurt feelings, either. This shit actually kills people: autism can cut up to 30 years off your life expectancy.

I've seen a number of people claim that harassing and ostracizing furries isn't a big deal, and that furries are just "coopting social justice issues." As someone who's dealt with both anti-furry and anti-autistic sentiment, though, the former is very often just the latter behind a fig leaf.