A Republican rant about transgender people took a bizarre detour as Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) wrung his hands about the furry community swarming the aviation industry on Wednesday in Washington, D.C.
Tuberville hit the usual anti-trans talking points during his 20-minute-long speech on the Senate floor, prattling along beside a poster-sized printout of the pregnant man emoji bannered with a message saying, “transgenderism is a mental disease.”
Things went from bigoted to bonkers when the MAGA ally started talking about furries, the community of anthropomorphic animal-obsessed hobbyists who he claimed were running wild throughout the commercial airline world.
“Many airline pilots, flight attendants, and air traffic controllers are part of the furry community,” Tuberville said sternly. “Lord help us.”
“It’s terrifying when you think about this,” he continued. “When you walk on to a commercial flight, it’s possible that the pilot flying your plane could have a deranged fetish of dressing up like an animal.”
It seemed Tuberville had gotten some signals crossed during his deep dive into the furry-sphere, which he inaccurately described as “a bizarre subset of transgenderism where people are sexually attracted and frequently dressed up as animals” earlier in his speech.
A vast, vast majority of furries consider themselves a community and not a kink, sexuality or gender identity. That hasn’t stopped conservatives from regularly trying to use them to drum up anti-trans hysteria, however.
Mockery swiftly ensued once Tuberville’s comments escaped the confines of the Senate chambers.
Former Sen. Doug Jones, Tuberville’s Democrat opponent in Alabama’s race for governor, called it “the strangest speech on the floor of the United States Senate I have ever heard.”
When late-night TV host Jimmy Kimmel caught wind of the savage sermon, he dubbed Tuberville one of the Senate’s “truly unsung dipshits.”
“I cannot think of a more serious made-up problem in this country right now than furries flying airplanes,” Kimmel sighed. “But the big question is, what is Dummy Dummerville gonna do about it?”
Despite all the ridicule, Tuberville dug in with a morning-after X post that said, “I know the deranged Democrats don’t like the fact that I called out the insane FURRY CULTURE this week” and claimed there were an “alarming number” of “deranged” fur afficioados working the skies.
Later that afternoon, TMZ tried to get to the bottom of Tuberville’s fuzzy theory when they trapped him into an impromptu interview while walking around the wings of the Capitol building.
Asked how he knew about this sprawling society of anthropomorphs, the senator pointed to an early September “Aviation Furs Meet-up” held at a Minneapolis, Minnesota convention that drew a total of 3,836 attendees, according to organizer stats.
Hearing himself out loud, Tuberville then told TMZ, “There’s obviously probably not a whole lot of them.”