The connection is there because furries are mostly gay, and by extension there are also lot of trans furries. Both furries and trans people skew younger, so it's becoming more and more of a trans thing along with being a gay thing. There's also a huge overlap with autism with both being trans and a furry.

Why lgbt people are attracted to being a furry, I don't know. Maybe Disney made the male animals too sexy and a bunch of gay people latched on to that hard in childhood. Maybe its because lgbt are more online then normal and got exposed to this stuff when they were 13 and they developed a strong interest in this stuff. My feel on it as someone who's been around a ton of furries its a gay thing because its always been a gay thing.

As a trans woman it's been pretty impossible to not interact with the furry community when I'm around other gay or trans people. It's extremely common especially the younger or more online you go.

I’ve been a furry for forever now. Way back when I was a teenager I used to hang out in a lot of tech spaces online and there just happened to be lots of furries in them. I just ended up becoming one too. Then shortly after I realised I was gay and furry spaces also happened to be an incredible place to meet other gay people my age with similar interests.

You're getting a bunch of joking shitpost replies, but a useful answer is that it's very common for people to become furries first and then later realize they are trans, presumably because the feelings of body dysmorphia convince you that something is mismatched between your felt sense and outward appearance, but you only nail it down as gender dysphoria later.

To add on to this: if you're a "guy" still trying to feel out some really confusing feelings, playing a vixen online allows you to explore those feelings without it impacting your real life. It's the same reason it's pretty common for trans people to report preferring to play characters of their true gender in video games. It gives you a safe, low-stakes way to explore gender.

With furry especially, that particular fandom has for decades been openly and loudly supportive of LGBTQ+ people and a very very significant percentage are queer. It's a very, very safe place for exploration.

If you experience gender dysmorphia, being forced to adopt the norms of the disconnected gender is far more psychologically damaging than exploration of something else.

Cognitive restructuring, aka adopting a new norm, is the DSM recommendation, because it usually works. Exploration is healthy.

One good way to make screen time (online; video games) slightly less unhealthy is a standing desk.

I mean, it’s quite obviously not to anyone with even a tiny modicum of common sense, and I say this as a trans person (although not a furry).

Modern psychology has built up an incredible memeplex that is accepted unquestioningly despite being an enormous load of bullshit / giant house of cards.

All relativist extremists fall back on it and use it to justify their detachments from and disdain for the shared reality we all inhabit together. Sad to witness, and only growing stronger, it seems.

It's also very common for trans people to become furries. Furry conventions and meetups are a great way to exist in public without judgement. Outside of the community, you're just playing dress up, and you're anonymous. Brian from the YouTube channel Regular Car Reviews did a YouTube short that explains this pretty well.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/2xfwA-668SI

The Internet.

Furries have an emoji?

I'm not aware of any single furry emoji, but I've noticed a lot of furry communities on the Fediverse using custom (non-Unicode) emoji packs; see [1] for how that might work. Also an example of the feature in use[2].

[1]: https://misskey-hub.net/en/docs/for-users/features/custom-em...

[2]: https://thegayagenda.fans/notes/ah5imm41r1ru05a7

Not a single dedicated, representative furry emoji that I'm aware of (unless we count 1F43E – paw prints), but there are a couple emoji which happen to be furry. In addition to the plethora of animal emoji (which aren't furry, but likely to be appreciated by furries), there are several emoji of cats with expressive faces (which do technically classify as furry), such as:

1F638 – grinning cat face with smiling eyes; 1F63B – smiling cat face with heart-shaped eyes; 1F63C – cat face with wry smile; 1F640 – weary cat face.

There was also the unofficial and very narrowly supported combination of ‘hacker cat’ and a few others:

https://emojipedia.org/hacker-cat