'Gay Furries' Clap — and Hack — Back in Protest of Anti-Trans Laws
Anti-transgender officials have made baseless claims about "furries" as part of a broader attack on trans people. Now, a group of "gay furries" are striking... or rather, hacking... back.
UK newspaper the Guardian reported that a group calling itself SiegedSec — supposedly made up of "self-described anti-US government 'gay furries'" — have hacked into "state and local agencies" in a campaign that has accessed "South Carolina police files, a list of licensed therapists in Texas and contact details for court officials in Nebraska."
The article says that the group points to "legislative attacks on gender-affirming care as their motive." The group specified this in a post regarding its hack in Texas, posting, "Texas happens to be one of the largest states banning gender-affirming care, and for that, we have made Texas our target."
"In June, Texas's rightwing Republican governor, Greg Abbott, signed a law that restricts transgender minors from accessing gender-affirming treatments," the Guardian recalled.
The group has posted messages on Telegram, where it "has posted dozens of links to data breaches and leaks, and claimed responsibility for defacing a range of websites," the Guardian said.
The group claims, among other things, to have hacked "the South Dakota boards and commissions (BAC) website" following the state's Republican governor, Kristi Noem, signing "laws banning gender-affirming treatments for minors in February..."
Another target was South Carolina, where anti-LGBTQ+ measures under consideration by lawmakers "include SC 4047, which would criminalize the provision of gender-affirming care to minors," the news report detailed.
But the group also targeted "Pennsylvania Provider Self-Service, a platform hosted by the Pennsylvania department of human services (DHS)," even though, the Guradian noted, "LGBTQ+ groups have praised Pennsylvania's moves to enshrine LGBTQ+ non-discrimination provisions in law."
Contacted by the Guardian, the group offered the explanation that "We will refrain from targeting states allowing gender-affirming care, but with Pennsylvania we saw a good opportunity that would result in minimum damage."
Furries, the Guardian explained, "are a subculture united by passion for anthropomorphism" — in other words, depictions of animals that are like human beings, often in that they are portrayed as speaking and acting like people do.
Furries have long been associated with sexual fetishes, but, as Vox noted in a 2015 account, that erroneous image does not apply to the majority of furries — many of whom don't even own full costumes, though some (still a minority) might use a fake tail as a fashion accessory.
But the mistaken impression that furries are all about kink found its way into anti-trans politics when some Republican officials began whipping up fury toward schools and trans students by insisting, falsely, that students who identified as cats were using litter boxes at school instead of restrooms.
As Keenen Crow of LGBTQ+ equality group One Iowa told the Iowa Capitol Dispatch after a school superintendent in Iowa had to counter wild claims of furries and litterboxes in pubic schools, "The real goal with comparing furries to trans people and bringing up stuff like this is, one, to make fun of furries and say, 'Oh, aren't they so silly. And oh, by the way, transgender identities are just as silly as this. And we should reject the request of a transgender student to use the restroom that matches their gender identity, in the same way that we should reject a student request to use a litter box.'''
The Dispatch article noted that Republican lawmakers in Iowa had proposed a raft of bills targeting teachers as well as LGBTQ+ people, in what the article characterized as an attempt to create distrust of public schools while trying to "funnel a significant share of education dollars to private and religious schools."
"Somehow, it always comes back to money," the article added.