From our director, Yinx – @yinx.bsky.social
As one of the Directors of ConFuzzled for the past five years or so, I’ve had to deal with some really fantastic highs, and some utterly awful lows. This is a role where you really get to experience the best and the worst that our community has to offer. From the heights of selflessness, camaraderie, and support of the differences that make us beautiful to the depths of derision, othering, and divisive dynamics that contradict our values so much, whether they arise from within or without our community.
I’ve taken the time to write this little essay because I think that, given where we are right now – and I mean this in the grandest sense as we look at the world outside the walls of our convention spaces – there is a need for it. There are some things that I think have to be said, and they can’t be said quietly, or in places where only those who already know or agree with them will hear. They need to be written in bold font and pinned to walls for everyone to read and understand.
There is a weight of expectation and desire to make a difference that comes with representation. ConFuzzled was the first place that I had the confidence to express my gender identity in public, the first place I felt safe exploring myself as part of my way of healing from my past traumas and my own personal experiences of abuse; and now I find myself one of its Directors. I know, from speaking to other trans and gender non-conforming attendees over the years, that I am not the only one to use the convention to experiment with their self-expression and try to exist in their own genuine version of themselves. This freedom, the safety to be true to oneself and to shrug off the weight of conformist expectations that exist in the world outside our community is, I believe, one of the most beautiful and precious things about it.
Our community is, if we really distill it down, a collection of weirdos and oddments (as defined by our conformist societies). Different sub-groups and communities with varying interests that sometimes overlap and sometimes don’t, where it is our mutual oddness which in fact knits us all together. This mixing pot of culture and experience undeniably includes sub-groups and interests that are adult in nature. Kinks and sex-positivity have always been a part of this community. It is often based on this adult and sexual facet of our community that the most pernicious efforts to divide it arise. This is of course, something we have in common with the Queer community as a whole. Anyone under that umbrella is connected by the very fact that we are all viewed as other by society at large and any Queer who has had anything to do with running or organising a Pride march has experienced the calls, year on year, to bar pups, leathermen, or others from taking part.
This can be an uncomfortable truth. It can lead some, either knowingly or unknowingly, to seek conformity or the acceptance of those who would other them in order to feel accepted. But, in my view, conformity dilutes what we are. It lessens us by giving up our individuality, our uniqueness, and our self-expression in exchange for the lacklustre comfort of being accepted by those whose views labelled us as different in the first place.
So what am I getting at with all of this? Simply, I believe that we – and I mean the furry community as a whole but also each of us with our individual power and agency within it – cannot afford to allow our community to be pared down along those fragile lines of shared non-conformity between sub-groups. Every year as Director of ConFuzzled the Wheel of Conformity is spun and one group or another becomes the target of ostracism not by those outside our community, but by those within it. One year it could be latex/shiny/rubber furs, the next pups, or trans furs, or Littles, or Therians. A year passes and the cycle continues as the normal world outside our community leaks poison through the cracks that turn us against one another.
Recently, myself and the other Directors of ConFuzzled made a number of statements and decisions in response to this year’s target for vilification and ostracism due to being too different and making some people uncomfortable. We have seen a wave of targeted efforts to remove, deplatform, other, and shame members of the Little/BabyFur community, which began by targeting conventions in the US but eventually made its way here to the UK. Those behind this campaign, either knowingly or unknowingly, misrepresented the nature of events on our schedule, encouraged mass reporting and pressure on our staff members, directly threatened our venues with bad press coverage, and conflated anybody within this community or those supporting it with paedophiles.
Any community, when it reaches a certain size, will contain abusers, criminals, and others who put individuals or groups at risk. Since I have been a Director of ConFuzzled we have taken steps to remove individuals with criminal prosecutions or who have demonstrated that they are a risk to attendees or staff. This has happened every year to date; and I expect it to be necessary every year going forward. However, the ascription of unproven, unsubstantiated, and collective guilt for a crime as serious as sexual abuse or the sexual abuse of minor onto an entire subset of our community should be seen and understood for what it is: bigotry.
Whether intentional or not, to call not just one person, but a whole group of people as diverse in nature and experience as any other group within our community that you would care to point to, paedophiles, is an ignorant expression of bigotry. Words have power. The people who engage in this kind of targeted harassment know that. If they didn’t then they wouldn’t be trying to leverage their platforms with carefully chosen emotive terms, names, and accusations to achieve their goals. That word in particular can cause devastating emotional, psychological, and financial harm to a person or group. These people will say that they just have “genuine concerns” and that all they want is to “see these issues addressed.” What they really mean is that they want us to react to that word as if it were applied accurately and with full recognition of its meaning. They want us – ConFuzzled but also the Furry community as a whole – to discard all these people that they have labelled as too weird on our behalf. People who have likely never harmed anyone as a result of being a Little, or a Baby Fur. They want us, I hope without knowing it, to do the work of our oppressors and throw this whole group out of our collective community of misfits. And then, next year, the wheel will spin again and we’ll get to see which of us is now deemed too weird to be allowed to be a fur.
ConFuzzled’s other Directors and I have made clear our stance on this year’s chosen sacrifice to the wheel of conformity. Our position will be unchanged when it selects its next victim. Why? Because we believe that if we don’t stand up for one part of our community then we might as well not stand up for any of them. We will always do whatever necessary to protect our attendees, our staff, and the Community at large from those individuals who are genuinely a threat. In some instances that means pinning our message of solidarity and support to the wall for everyone to see it.
With love
Yinx