Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Alabama), who’s retiring from the Senate and running against certified actual swell fella Doug Jones to become governor of Alabama, warned America Wednesday about a threat you probably hadn’t given any thought to at all: Furries in the airline industry.
Look at this asshole and his weird paranoia toward pilots, flight attendants, and air traffic controllers who might be fans of goofy animal costumes, only you wouldn’t know it since they cosplay as humans at work.
Tuberville fretted over claims from people who are into furry subculture “touting” the presence of airline employees in the furry community, and warned, “Lord help us! It’s terrifying when you think about this. When you walk onto a commercial flight, it’s possible that the pilot flying your plane could have a deranged fetish of dressing up like an animal. You can’t make this up.”
Pretty fucking weird, right? Or as that little poster with the pregnant cartoon man and the phrase “Transgenderism is a mental disease” suggests, it’s very calculated.
Of course, while it’s a crazy thing to bring up in a Senate speech, you could also argue that Tuberville is crazy like a fox, or like a $1200 handcrafted arctic fox fursuit on Etsy, because Tuberville knew exactly what the reaction to his bizarre rant would be: Lots of attention. He expected his ridiculous, outrageous comments to the World’s Greatest Deliberative Body would go viral, and he’s perfectly willing to endure some ridicule to bring attention to his holy cause of eliminating the rights of transgender people.
Oh shit, that’s not all that funny. Not at all.
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Tuberville’s weird rant about furries came near the end of a 20-minute speech attacking trans people, calling them mentally ill, and calling for trans folks to be locked away in mental hospitals until they stop being trans. He also suggested doling out prison sentences to doctors and parents who support their trans kids. He even used Donald Trump's favorite made up word, “mutilization,” to signal his loyalty to Dear Leader. Here’s a link to the full video, which we will not embed because it’s evil.
Tuberville railed against the “woke mind virus” that has led to a “serious gender confusion mental illness that is taking over this country,” and insisted that all this transgender stuff is part of Democrat socialists’ decades-long plot to “destroy this country by slowly chipping away at Christian values that have made this country great.” Because obviously Democrats hate America and seek to destroy it. Destroying America is all we think of, really.
Tuberville’s speech was crammed to the brim with every last lie possible about trans people, starting from the logically flawless premise that because God only made two sexes, transgender people simply don’t exist, full stop. That’s why he prefers the term “gender confused,” since it emphasizes his certainty that trans people simply need to be forced to stop being trans.
Ergo, said Tuberville, the gender binary is the only “scientific” view, and if you think trans people exist, you’re the one who is not only unscientific, but actually mentally ill, QED. He said that doctors who provide gender-affirming care should lose their medical licenses and be sentenced to life in prison for medical malpractice. He also insisted that liberal parents who are “plagued with the woke mind virus” — a very scientific thing, because it’s a virus — are “forcing their children to transition to the opposite sex,” which he said was “child abuse.” (Tuberville blithely ignores the lived reality of trans people whose parents tried everything possible to make them stop being trans, including torturing them with conversion therapy or just kicking them out on the streets.)
Tuberville also repeated the rightwing lie that trans people are dangerous and violent, because that’s what transphobes really believe. In reality, of course, fewer than a tenth of one percent of mass shootings have been committed by trans people, and the vast majority of murders are committed by cisgender men like Tommy Tuberville. But why let facts get in the way of a good panic?
He insisted that Charlie Kirk’s murder was all due to “transgenderism” because the killer had a transgender partner. Then Tuberville got weird, claiming the killer was “involved in transgender furry culture,” and insisting that furries are “a bizarre subset of transgenderism where people are sexually attracted and frequently dressed up as animals.” We have no idea where he got the idea that furries are all transgender, but it’s long been a theme in anti-trans rhetoric, particularly in the popular rightwing lie that public schools routinely provide litter boxes for children who “identify as cats” to pee and poop in. Everybody knows what the litter buckets in some schools are for — in case your children have to shelter in place during one of those epidemic mass shootings — so the continued grotesque lie is downright evil.
Tuberville went on to claim that Thomas Crooks, the guy charged with attempting to assassinate Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, used “they/them pronouns” and was into “online transgender furry culture,” an extremely dubious claim that appears to have started with a New York Post story claiming Crooks may have had two accounts at the DeviantArt social media site, which the article described as “a site that hosts fan art and has become notorious for its community of furries — people who identify as anthropomorphized animal characters and/or are sexually attracted to them.” That’s literally the piece’s only mention of furries.
The Post didn’t claim that Crooks liked or posted furry content, noting instead that Crooks seemed to have a thing for tall muscular women dominating small skinny men. Not furry stuff. Do we need to investigate fans of R. Crumb as possible future assassins?
Anyway, Tuberville cited what seems to be a made-up statistic that 25 percent of furries are “gender confused,” so obviously America has a transgender AND furry crisis. That’s the point in his speech where Tuberville brought in his weird claim that the airline industry is full of furries who might at any moment go crazy and crash into a mountain. Ta-daa!
To “protect” America from all the violent trans people and furries who aren’t really a threat, Tuberville claimed that
“It is in the best interests of our country to bring back mental institutions as a normal part of our society. […] Otherwise, we’re just sitting ducks until the next gender-confused person decides to show up at our churches or our schools and start committing acts of violence. It’s coming.”
Tuberville was right. He is terrifying, and he’s trying to give his campaign one more hate-boost before the election. His rant about furries is nothing more than a silly costume hiding a very dangerous agenda.
Update: Also, for what it’s worth, we think we may have found the source of Tuberville’s claim that furries are everywhere in the airline industry. Some dipshit on his staff may have found the website for “ALFA, the Air Line Furries Association International.” Its “news” page hasn’t been updated since July 3, 2022, and while the organizers may have had high hopes for building a lasting online community where people could talk about conventions, travel, and the fun/challenges, it’s a ghost site with no events, no “stories,” and a “store” where you can download free “credentials” for fun.
Maybe someone should tell Sen. Tuberville that the terrifying Furry Takeover of commercial aviation just never got off the ground.
[AL.com / NYP / Rolling Stone / MSNOW]
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Updated just now with a WONKETTE EXCLUSIVE SCOOP, we think. No, not a kitty litter scoop, pay attention. We think we found the source of Tuberville's furry-airline-panic, a zombie website for furry enthusiasts in the airline industry. It hasn't been updated since shortly after it went up in the summer of 2022. Refresh your browser if you don't see the update at the end of the story.
Let's break it down for Tommy Twobraincells:
“Lord help us! It’s terrifying when you think about this..."
Really? Out of all the things to be scared about, this is the thing that haunts you? How do you function? Do birds flying by give you a jump-scare?
"When you walk onto a commercial flight, it’s possible that the pilot flying your plane could have a deranged fetish of dressing up like an animal..."
And how does this affect my flying experience? Unless their vision is somehow obstructed by them currently wearing a costume, which I very much doubt is the case, why do you care, freako?
"You can’t make this up.”
And yet, you just did.