No, Furries Weren’t Assailing Students at a Utah Middle School. They Were Therians.
The TikTok trend has been around for years- baffling teachers, administrators and the press
It was unprecedented. Dozens of students walked out of Mt. Nebo Middle School in Utah on an April afternoon to object to classmates that the protesters characterized as over-aggressive “furries.” They were wrong, of course.
Yes, the alleged offenders were a clique of animal-mask-wearing 6th graders (and some 7th graders), regularly invading the personal space of fellow students. And yes, the students in the clique self-identified as animals. But the near dozen students were not “furries” per se, in body-suit regalia, parading about campus like out-of-work sports mascots. They were ‘therians.’
It only takes a TikTok search for #therians to see that the school kid trend of identifying by an animal “therio-type” is enthusiastically embraced by thousands.
Media reaction to the cultural phenomenon, much like a prior 2022 iteration in the state of Michigan, was swift and polarized. If you were commentator Megyn Kelly, you likely saw the verified video of mask-wearing students at the school, circulating only on conservative publications. If you were Politifact (run by one time non-partisan institute Poynter) and the local Salt Lake City Tribune, you sided with the school’s denial, without doing any further research.
Few connected to the actual parents and students in Utah.
Why doesn’t the term “furries” suffice in this case?
Run a Tiktok search for #Therians. The accessories of today’s “therian” teens & tweens, immersed in a subculture of anthropomorphic identity, are more scaled down than their more adult “furry” counterparts. Kids often sport a simple mask or a tail. Their identities are not rooted in a fur-suit. They are rooted in behavior.
The Utah school district assured media outlets that this was no more than online rumor and internet hysteria. “We have had zero incidents either reported or observed,” spokesman Seth Sorenson confidently repeated to several media outlets the morning after the protest.
Yet, Sorenson sounded exasperated over the phone. When asked what the protest was about, he paused, and let out a nervous laugh. He then downplayed the situation as “a few kids in headbands” with animal ears at Mt. Nebo.
That Thursday morning, Sorenson had not yet disclosed that the school received the first overnight hoax bomb threat, rattling the community and casting a pall over the discourse. Several more unsubstantiated threats would continue into May, with some parents deciding to keep their kids home until the end of the school year.
The videos, verified by students and parents, came out several days after the protest. Some showed school kids on all fours, in animal masks in various parts of the campus from the “Panther Den'' student commons, to the steps to the cafeteria stage, to Mt. Nebo’s outdoor field. Some tweens were recorded taking an aggressive stance towards schoolmates.
Footage of the protest outside the school started to percolate. A student named Kendalyn had launched an online petition, “Students for Humans at Schools, not Animals aka furries.” Pristine protest signs signaled parental involvement, yet by all accounts it was grass roots.
“We the people, not the animals,” the group chanted quite seriously.
Kendalyn’s message? Regulate the distracting behavior. “We’ll be able to learn without having to worry about getting barked at, getting scratched, getting growled at, having to argue with these kids. And then getting yelled at by the admin,” she told videographer Adam Bartholomew at the protest.
11 year old Brody Pierce confirmed that the students in question do not actually identify as furries. “They are therian,” Brody told me, without previous mention in the conversation of that key word.
There are adult witnesses too. Former Mt. Nebo success coach Katie Ogren described a student who didn’t want to attend a class where animal-identifying classmates reigned supreme, with few constraints from the teacher.
“‘I’m going to end up getting in trouble because this ‘furry’ keeps growling in my ear in class. And when I told her to stop, she bit me’,” Ogren recounted the exasperated student’s words:
“I told the teacher- and the teacher said that we can’t discriminate against them.”
The therian trend has been on TikTok and reddit for years. If you google “therian” & “Utah,” the top search result is a reddit thread inquiring, “Any fellow therians in Utah? Near Lehi?”
The Utah subreddit connects animal-identifying tweens and teens to meet up to do what therians do: “quadrobics’, the physical act of prancing about on all fours, at times in public.
“Yep, that looks like my neighbor,” a Colorado mother declared, after viewing the video of the Mt. Nebo therian students, “The mask, the tail, running around barking at people, howling at the fence because there’s another dog (a real one) on the other side.” The mom of three took the neighbor’s kid Christmas shopping last year. “She was acting like this in Target,” she recounted.
‘Therians’ are often conflated with ‘furries’ but are distinct in identification and often engage in quadrobics, the act of moving on all fours. Many claim they ‘shift’ into their animal state.
It’s unfair to pin an online trend, years in the making, on one single Utah school district, especially when establishment press consistently dismissed “therianthropy” as a right-wing fever dream.
There was the 2021 “litter boxes in classrooms” admitted hearsay in a Michigan school district. The unsubstantiated rumor (characterized as such by the woman testifying) went viral. But it also distracted from the actual testimony of an 8th grader named Paige, who told the Midland school board at the time of recurring incidents that disturbed her. “A boy wearing dog ears barked at me when I passed. This same boy was walking out of the building on all 4 legs, as we walked outside for a science project,” Paige detailed.
The controversy had therian and furry accounts on TikTok gleefully satirizing themselves through 2022, even posting screenshots of litter boxes with phony calls for more accommodations from schools.
Ironically, by students’ accounts, Mt. Nebo has continued to accommodate.
According to organizer Kendalyn, the animal accessories continue to be worn at school, even weeks after the protest, though she says behavior has moderated.
“What happened to letting kids be kids?” the most tolerant voices online ask.
“Why is this person biting my hoodie and barking at me?” 11 year old Brody asked.
He detailed an incident at a friend’s gathering, after one of the therians showed up.
Kids into “therianthropy” or what is also called “otherkin” culture are not just fans cosplaying anthropomorphic behavior. On TikTok you can find several explainers of an associated belief system, upheld by practitioners who “identify as partially or entirely non human.”
“They say God made them this way,” Brody pondered of his classmates.
There is TikTok clout in all of this. One of the most popular TikTok accounts is a teen named Opal with over 700 thousands of followers. We never see Opal’s face behind the fuzzy trimmed cat mask. Opal doesn’t post about the credo much, just quadrobics. Opal’s parents are in on the act too, with Opal’s mom hosting her own popular account in which she answers questions about her “therian” daughter.
After being presented with the video evidence, the Utah middle school’s spokesperson suddenly went silent on the issue for over 2 weeks. Sorenson, in the meantime, has been responding to continued threatening calls, according to the school, “from out of state.”
What’s more, the district denied a FOIA request in May for all electronic communications using the words ‘furries’ and ‘therians.’
Former staffer Katie Ogren, who resigned 1 week before the brouhaha, described the behavior as “harassment” but also says that the conflict goes both ways. Those rebelling against the status quo then become the target of backlash. Ogren also said that reports of “groping” at Mt. Nebo are not attributed to one student group alone.
“The lack of discipline goes so much deeper,” Ogren said. She points to an administration that puts being “curious, patient and tolerant” (per a letter to parents and students) over enforcing rules.
“If it’s affecting our learning, it’s a problem,” said Kendalyn.
The 13 year old’s petition stays on message, emphasizing school policy that already should prohibit “Jewelry, accessories, tattoos, hair, facial hair, and other elements of a student's appearance that draw (undue) attention, distract, disrupt, or otherwise interfere with the learning atmosphere at school.”
In other words, can common sense school policy be enforced uniformly- so we can get back to focusing on our school work?