a us senator went to the senate floor to warn you that your pilot might be a furry. his fix is bringing back asylums.

via Sen. Tommy Tuberville's own YouTube channel, which posted the full speech, and his post announcing it, with the Congressional Record text as quoted by TransPreacher.

"Lord, help us."

That is Tommy Tuberville, Republican senator from Alabama, speaking on the floor of the United States Senate on Tuesday, September 22, at the moment he reached the part of his speech about airline pilots. The pilots were not the point of the speech. The point, by his own announcement on X that afternoon, was that "the Democrat-Socialists have intentionally caused mass gender-confusion among our young people, leading to violence and a disturbing trend of online 'furry' culture." The pilots were where he ended up.

His office uploaded the speech to his YouTube channel that same day and gave it a title, in case anyone was wondering how it was meant: "Senator Tuberville Speaks on the Senate Floor to Discuss the Transgender Mental Disease."

what tuberville said about furries

For the first stretch it is the speech you have heard before. He will not say "transgender," he explains, because it implies you can change your sex, so he will call people "gender confused." Doctors who provide gender-affirming care "should spend the rest of their lives in prison." Then he pivots to violence, runs through a list of shootings he attributes to trans people, and arrives at furries, which he defines for the Senate as "a bizarre subset of transgenderism where people are sexually attracted and frequently dressed up as animals."

"Research shows that 25% of the furries are gender confused," he said, without saying which research. And then the discovery that seems to have genuinely shaken him: the furry community "touts the fact that many, listen to this, that many airline pilots, flight attendants, and air traffic controllers are part of the furry community."

He is not wrong that they tout it. There is an Air Line Furries Association, International, formed in 2022 from the merger of a furry flight attendants' group, a furry pilots' group and a furry aircraft mechanics' fraternity, whose stated mission begins with promoting "all aspects of aviation safety." So yes, senator. Somewhere above you right now, a man in a very normal uniform is landing a plane perfectly and thinking about his fursona. The plane lands fine.

the part that is not funny

"It is the best interest of our country to bring back mental institutions as a normal part of our society instead of sweeping it under the rug," Tuberville said. "Otherwise, we're just sitting ducks until the next gender confused person decides to show up at our churches or our schools and start committing acts of violence. It's coming."

Read that one twice. A senator who is also running to be governor of Alabama has stood in the Capitol and proposed that the answer to a group of people is institutions. He closed by saying the left talks about kindness, but "the kind thing to do" is to encourage them to get help. The kind thing, in his telling, has a locked door.

We have been cataloguing this register all week, from the defense secretary who brought a slur to Texas A&M to the UN rights chief warning of a comprehensive onslaught. It has stopped being a dog whistle. It has a YouTube title.