On 22 September 2026, Senator Tommy Tuberville stood on the floor of the United States Senate and spent part of a speech talking about furries. His speech was primarily about transgender people, whom he repeatedly described using his own terminology, but somewhere around the 1:58:00 mark he moved on to the furry community and claimed that there was significant overlap between furries and people he considers “gender confused”. He then claimed that “many” airline pilots, flight attendants and air-traffic controllers are part of the furry community, before telling the Senate that it was “terrifying” to think that somebody flying a commercial aircraft could have a “deranged fetish of dressing up like an animal”.
That is an actual thing that happened. This was not somebody making a shitpost on Twitter. It was a United States senator making the argument on the Senate floor, and the remarks were subsequently circulated as a genuine political talking point.
My first genuine response was basically: “You okay, America?” I mean that in the same bewildered sense as asking someone who has wandered so far from reality that you briefly wonder whether they are alright. The whole thing just felt ridiculous. Not because there is anything inherently ridiculous about being a furry, but because of the apparent significance being attached to it.
And, weirdly enough, there is a small piece of truth buried underneath the completely disproportionate reaction: yes, there are furries who work in aviation.
Of course there are.
Yes, there really is an aviation furry community
I want to be fair about this, becausI genuinely cannot believe this is something I am writing about.e pretending that Tuberville invented the existence of furry pilots would actually miss the more interesting point. There really is an aviation community within the furry fandom. Furry Migration's 2026 schedule included an “Aviation Furs Meet-Up” specifically calling pilots, mechanics, air-traffic controllers, line operators and people interested in aviation to attend. This was not something hastily invented after Tuberville's speech: the convention has also had aviation-related programming in previous years.
There are therefore, quite genuinely, people who are both furries and aviation professionals. That is not particularly surprising. It would be considerably more surprising if a sufficiently large fandom had somehow managed to avoid having people from a particular profession in it.
This is where the argument falls apart. The existence of a group of pilots, mechanics, air-traffic controllers and other aviation workers who happen to share a hobby tells us that those people have a hobby. It does not, by itself, tell us anything about their ability to perform their jobs.
The convention programme does not say that pilots are flying aircraft in fursuits. It does not say that air-traffic controllers are sitting at their consoles pretending to be animals. It is literally a meetup for people who work in, or are interested in, aviation. That is a perfectly ordinary thing for a convention to have.
People are allowed to have more than one thing going on
I think the fundamental problem here is that there is a tendency to treat someone's membership of a subculture as though it completely describes them. It doesn't. A furry can be a pilot, but they can also be a software engineer, a doctor, a teacher, an accountant, a mechanic, a scientist, an artist or a civil servant. They can be a university student, a parent, a manager, a shop worker or unemployed. They can have political opinions, religious beliefs, musical tastes and a dozen other hobbies that have absolutely nothing to do with furry fandom.
Being a furry is a hobby and a subculture. It is not an occupation, a professional qualification or a personality type.
I know this because I'm a furry myself. I don't particularly go around introducing myself as “Ewan, software engineer and furry”, because being a furry is a hobby. It isn't my profession, and it isn't particularly relevant to most situations in which I need to introduce myself. If I'm applying for a software engineering job, my employer needs to know whether I can write software. If I'm getting on a plane, I care whether the pilot is qualified and capable of flying the aircraft. I don't particularly care whether they draw wolves in their spare time.
Those things can coexist quite comfortably.
Yes, I am a furry
And since I have spent this much time talking about furries as an abstract concept, I may as well make this considerably more personal.
I have my fursona, Exylian. A white and green wolf. Yes, I know, original.
He's a character I created and use as my furry identity. I have artwork of him because I enjoy having artwork of a character I identify with. There is no hidden professional qualification attached to him, and there is no contradiction between having a fursona and being a software engineer.
If anything, I feel like people finding out I'm a furry would probably be less of a shock than finding out I'm Pagan.
That is arguably the more unusual thing about me to discover. My religious beliefs actually say rather more about how I see the world than the fact that I like anthropomorphic animals. Yet nobody is standing on the floor of the Senate warning people that their commercial pilot might secretly worship ancient gods.
And that's precisely the point. People contain multitudes. There can be things about someone that are relevant in one context and completely irrelevant in another. My being Pagan might be relevant when discussing my religious practice. My being a furry might be relevant when talking about my hobbies or the art I enjoy. Neither tells you whether I can write software.
For me, being furry is simply one part of who I am alongside everything else I do. It doesn't replace my profession, my other interests, my beliefs or my personality. It's just another thing about me.
This is where the IT connection becomes funny
The aviation example also gets at something I've always found amusing about the furry community: furries are absolutely everywhere in technology. There is a noticeable presence of furries in software development, systems administration, cybersecurity, open source, game development, hardware and other technical fields. That isn't because furries have somehow infiltrated IT. It's because people who like computers can also be furries.
And there are some genuinely good examples of this. Soatok Dreamseeker is an openly furry security engineer and cryptography programmer. He describes himself as “a security engineer with a dhole fursona”, and has worked on cryptography and application security. In an interview, he described working on a cryptography team at a technology company. He also maintains open-source security and cryptography projects.
Then there is Seth Morabito, whose furry alter ego is a raccoon called Tilton. In 1996, when he was a newly graduated programmer, he found an advertisement for Unix developers in the programme for ConFurence 7, a furry convention. The advertisement had been placed by Taos, a Silicon Valley consulting company that was actively trying to recruit systems administrators from the furry community. Morabito applied and got the job.
That is not just a funny anecdote about a furry getting a programming job. It is a pretty good demonstration that the connection between furry culture and computing is not some recent social-media phenomenon. People were noticing the overlap between the communities in the 1990s, when the commercial internet was still being built.
There is also an even more ridiculous example if you want to understand just how broad this gets. Dr David “Spottacus” Benaron was a physician, biophysicist, entrepreneur and former Stanford professor. His work in biomedical optics included foundational work demonstrating the usefulness of green light for photoplethysmography, which underpins the heart-rate monitoring found in modern wearables. He was also openly active in the furry community, with a cheetah fursona called Spottacus.
In 2024, UC Berkeley hosted Benaron for a talk explicitly titled “Furries, Neurodivergence, and STEM: Finding Your Path from Zero to One to One Billion”, describing him as the co-founder of Xenogen and inventor of the green-light heart-rate sensor.
So, yes, there was a furry scientist whose professional work contributed to technology used in smartwatches.
These examples aren't supposed to prove that furries are secretly exceptional geniuses. That's not the point. The point is almost the opposite: being furry clearly does not prevent someone from becoming a software engineer, a cryptography specialist, a systems administrator, a physician or a biomedical researcher. These are simply people who happen to have a hobby alongside their careers.
I am one of those people. I write software, and I happen to be a furry. There isn't some deeper contradiction that needs resolving.
And then there is the rather large problem of Disney
There is another part of this that I find particularly funny. People sometimes talk about anthropomorphic animals as though the furry fandom invented the concept. It absolutely did not.
Disney has spent generations building an enormous entertainment empire around anthropomorphic and animal-centred characters. Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and Goofy are some of the most recognisable fictional characters in the world. The Lion King is one of the most successful animated franchises ever made. Warner Bros. has Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and the rest of the Looney Tunes cast. DreamWorks has Kung Fu Panda, Madagascar and Puss in Boots. Pixar has produced films such as Ratatouille. Blue Sky Studios gave us Ice Age. Illumination has produced films such as Sing and The Secret Life of Pets.
Anthropomorphic animals are not some obscure invention of a niche internet subculture. They are an enormous and longstanding part of mainstream popular culture.
The furry fandom is, of course, distinct from the animation industry. Being a furry is not simply the same thing as liking Disney films or drawing cartoon animals. The fandom is a community and subculture with its own art, conventions, characters, social spaces and interests. But there is obviously some conceptual overlap.
Nobody looks at an animator who has spent ten hours painstakingly creating an expressive cartoon fox and concludes that they have somehow become less of a professional because they made a cartoon fox. So why should the person who enjoys that sort of thing outside their job suddenly become suspicious?
That's the part I genuinely don't understand.
Why is it such a big deal?
This is ultimately what I keep coming back to. Why is it such a big deal?
A person's hobbies and communities do not determine their professional competence. A programmer can be a furry, a scientist can be a furry, an animator can be a furry, a doctor can be a furry, a pilot can be a furry, a teacher can be a furry and an engineer can be a furry. They can all be exceptionally good at what they do, or terrible at it. Being a furry doesn't determine either outcome.
Someone can spend Saturday at a furry convention and Monday writing production code. Someone can spend their evenings drawing their fursona and their working hours researching cancer. Someone can maintain an open-source project while also owning a fursuit. There is no contradiction there.
We generally understand this when discussing almost every other hobby. A software engineer who spends their weekends playing Warhammer is not treated as though their professional qualifications have suddenly become questionable. A scientist who plays football is not considered less capable because of it. An accountant who performs amateur theatre is not suddenly suspicious.
So why does the word “furry” cause some people to throw common sense out of the window?
The existence of a professional furry group isn't evidence of anything sinister
The Aviation Furs Meet-Up is actually evidence of something quite mundane: people who share a profession sometimes want to meet other people in their profession who also share their hobbies.
That happens everywhere. Developers have meetups. Doctors have professional societies. Photographers have clubs. Pilots have aviation groups. Gamers have conventions. Car enthusiasts have owners' clubs.
If a convention contains enough people from a particular profession, it is completely predictable that somebody will eventually organise a meetup around it. The fact that the meetup happens to be called “Aviation Furs” makes it sound more unusual to someone who is unfamiliar with furry culture, but the underlying social behaviour is incredibly ordinary. Replace “furry” with almost any other hobby and nobody would find the concept remotely interesting.
And no, the existence of furry pilots does not make aviation unsafe
This is where the distinction between fact and insinuation matters. Tuberville did not identify an aviation accident caused by a furry pilot. He did not identify an incident in which a pilot's participation in furry culture affected their ability to operate an aircraft. He did not identify an aviation regulator warning about furries in the cockpit.
He pointed to the existence of an aviation-related furry meetup and treated that as inherently alarming.
When challenged about this afterwards, he eventually clarified that he meant some pilots rather than all pilots, and acknowledged that there were probably not very many of them. That clarification is rather important. “Some pilots are furries” is an entirely ordinary statement. The existence of people with a particular hobby across multiple professions is exactly what you would expect from a large, diverse community. It doesn't establish that the hobby has any bearing on professional competence or safety.
The relevant question for aviation safety is whether someone can safely perform the duties of their job. Whether they happen to have a fursona is not a meaningful substitute for that assessment.
If somebody is properly trained, qualified and able to perform their duties, I don't really care what they get up to in their spare time. That is true whether they're a furry, a metalhead, a Dungeons & Dragons player, a trainspotter or somebody who spends their weekends restoring old tractors.
The actual work matters
If someone has done something harmful, incompetent or unethical, criticise the thing they actually did. If someone has produced valuable research, written useful software, created something important or contributed meaningfully to their field, talk about that.
“Also, they're a furry” is not an explanation for anything. It does not tell you whether their code works, whether their research is sound, whether their qualifications are legitimate or whether they are good at their job. It tells you something about what they enjoy outside of work. That's it.
You do not have to understand furry culture. You do not have to participate in it. You do not even have to particularly like it. But there is a difference between finding a subculture unfamiliar and treating membership of it as inherently discrediting.
Once you actually look at the broader cultural landscape, the idea that humans being interested in anthropomorphic animals is somehow extraordinary becomes rather difficult to defend. Disney has been selling people anthropomorphic mice and ducks for generations. Warner Bros. built some of the most recognisable cartoon characters in history around a rabbit and a duck. Modern animation is full of talking animals.
And outside entertainment, people who happen to be furries are working in practically every professional field you can think of.
Furries are everywhere because people are everywhere
I think that is ultimately what makes the whole thing so strange. Furries aren't a separate species of person. We're not a single demographic with one job, one political position, one personality or one reason for being in the fandom. We're people who happen to share an interest.
Some of us make art. Some of us write software. Some of us fly aeroplanes. Some of us maintain aircraft. Some of us work air-traffic control. Some of us research cancer. Some of us write cryptographic software. Some of us have spent decades working in technology. Some of us go to conventions, while others never go to conventions at all. Some of us wear fursuits, some of us don't, and some of us have elaborate fursonas while others simply think anthropomorphic animals are cool.
And most of us have jobs that have absolutely nothing to do with being furry.
That's why I find it so surreal that the existence of furry pilots was considered worthy of a Senate speech. The surprising thing isn't that they exist. Given the diversity of the furry community, it would be surprising if they didn't.
The genuinely bizarre part is taking the perfectly mundane fact that people can belong to a hobby while working in a particular profession and presenting it as evidence of societal collapse.
I'm a furry. I'm also a software engineer. I'm also Pagan. Those facts can coexist without either one explaining the other.
There are furries in IT because there are people in IT who are furries. There are furries in aviation because there are people in aviation who are furries. There are furries in cancer research because there are scientists who are furries. There are furries in cryptography because there are security engineers who are furries.
There are furries everywhere because, well, we're fucking everywhere.
We're people.