Earlier this week, Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL), who is currently running for governor of his state, spoke in the Senate about how “many airline pilots, flight attendants, and air traffic controllers are part of the furry community.”
“Lord help us,” he said while standing next to a giant poster-sized image of a pregnant man emoji. “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.”
Related
He faced mockery online for this, and many people wondered why he spoke about pilots in particular. Now he’s doubling down on his claim that the nation’s air safety is in danger because of pilots in fursuits, and he claims to have evidence of furry pilots flying planes.
“I know the deranged Democrats don’t like the fact that I called out the insane FURRY CULTURE this week,” he posted to X. “But the truth is, there is an ALARMING number of these DERANGED people working in our airline industry.”
Your LGBTQ+ guide to Elections
Stay ahead of the election with our newsletter that covers candidates, issues, and perspectives that matter.
“Don’t believe me? Just a few months ago, PILOTS were MEOWING and BARKING at each other over the radio at DCA.”
He attached an MS NOW clip of pilots meowing and barking on the radio near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport earlier this year.
An ABC News report from the time, though, said the pilots made the noises on April 12 of this year as a joke and were scolded by their superiors. The Federal Aviation Administration, in a statement, urged pilots to follow rules around professional conduct on public airwaves, while the Allied Pilots Association said that this has happened before and that “idle humor or any kind of schtick… should stop.”
While this behavior apparently annoyed other air travel professionals, there doesn’t appear to be any evidence that the pilots were furries or actually believed that they were animals.
But Tuberville wasn’t done. He wrote another post about a meetup of “aviation furs” at a furry convention in Minneapolis earlier this month.
“Ask yourself… would you be comfortable with a MENTALLY ILL FURRY being your pilot?” Tuberville wrote.
Yesterday, TMZ caught up with Tuberville at the Capitol and asked him about his comments.
“You went viral yesterday!” the TMZ reporter can be heard saying in a clip shared online, asking him to explain what he was worried about.
“Well, all you gotta do is look at their convention,” Tuberville responded. “They had a pilots section at their convention this past week in Minnesota. So, you gotta call it what it is.”
“We got a huge mental illness problem in this country. We need to address it, we need to address it quick.”
“I don’t want somebody flying me that’s behind the scenes that they think they’re an animal,” Tuberville concluded. “It’s some part of mental illness that could be a catastrophe.”
Being a furry is not a mental illness, and there isn’t any evidence that furry pilots are causing crashes. Airline safety statistics don’t track the furry subculture.
The furry fandom is a subculture where people take an interest in anthropomorphic characters, sometimes creating their own “fursonas,” dressing up in “fursuits,” and interacting with other like-minded people online or at conventions. Furry fandom can have a sexual component, but it’s not necessarily part of being a furry. There are LGBTQ+ furries and non-LGBTQ+ furries.
Over the past few years, conservatives have attacked furries as a way of attacking transgender people. Their argument, often brought up in the context of schools, is that if society accommodates trans people living as their true selves, then that will create a slippery slope to allowing furries to live full time as animals.
Conservative activists and even many Republican elected officials often bring up furries in discussions of trans accommodations in schools and for years propagated an urban legend that schools were being forced to replace toilets with boxes of kitty litter for furry students. This myth led schools to send letters to parents stating that students are not, in fact, using litter boxes in school.
Related
Being a furry is not like being transgender. The main difference is that furries don’t identify as animals; instead, they see being a furry as an interest or hobby. Trans people, on the other hand, are people whose gender differs from the sex they were assigned at birth, and they want to live as their gender, just like most other people do.
It is possible to be both transgender and a furry, or to be just one or the other.
Tuberville’s original comments this week about furry pilots were made while he was attacking trans people, claiming that transgender people were responsible for a “rise in violence.” He said that parents are “forcing their young children to transition to the opposite sex,” even though it’s a fairly common experience for trans people to face resistance to their identities from their parents. He also claimed that there are doctors who “don’t even tell parents that their underage kids is going and undergoing these dangerous procedures, and they go behind the parents’ backs,” which is another right-wing myth about trans people.
Tuberville has a history of anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment. In 2023, he spearheaded a 10-month blockade of over 400 military promotions to protest so-called “woke” military policies that promoted LGBTQ+ inclusion and reproductive rights. One high-ranking military officer told the Senate that it will take years for the military to recover from the blockade.
During the blockade, he said the military was too “woke” because someone once read a poem about a homosexual sailor.
And in 2024, while promoting his anti-trans sports bill, he claimed Democrats not only hate women but are trying to make the entire gender extinct.
Last year, he said he wants transgender children to “live in fear” of their own parents and also claimed that “entire men’s teams” in the U.S. are transitioning just to win at women’s sports, something that is not happening.
Tuberville is currently polling well ahead of his Democratic opponent, former Sen. Doug Jones (D-AL). A July poll found Tuberville leading in the race with 49% of the vote to Jones’ 41%.
Subscribe to the LGBTQ Nation newsletter and be the first to know about the latest headlines shaping LGBTQ+ communities worldwide.