What Senator Heffernan did on that floor was attack trans people. That's the whole story. The animal-cruelty bill and the talk about dogs were just the cover he used to do it.
His wink-and-a-nudge "warning" runs a chain of guilt-by-association: nudge trans people toward furries, nudge furries toward bestiality, and hope nobody stops to check the facts — because if anyone did, it would be obvious that not one of his claims or inferences is based in reality. They come from nowhere but his own fevered imagination.
So let's lay the groups out plainly, and watch the whole thing fall apart:
- Transgender — People who live as, and know themselves to be, a different sex than the one they were assigned at birth. A trans woman is a woman; a trans man is a man. That's it. It's about who a human being genuinely is — not something chosen, but something true about them, in their own body.
- Non-binary — People who recognize that the either/or framework of "man or woman" simply doesn't fit who they truly are. They aren't claiming to be something other than human, and they didn't pick this off a menu — they're being honest about a self that lives outside the two-box system.
- Furries — People who enjoy art, costumes, and characters of animals drawn or imagined with human traits — cartoon-style creatures, basically. This one is a hobby and a social community, like a fandom for a TV show or a comic — humans who share a creative interest and the friends they make through it.
Each of these groups dates and partners with other human beings, the same as anyone else. Not one person in these groups is involved in intimate relations with animals of any kind — and most importantly, not one animal is harmed by their relationships.
Contrast that with bestiality:
- Bestiality — When a person uses an animal for sexual gratification, their own or someone else's.
This is not an identity or a community — it is an abhorrent act, a crime, and it is animal abuse. Anyone who engages in it has no place in the LGBTQIA+ community or the furry community; both would push them out.
And here's the thing: a ban on that kind of abuse can and should be written without a shred of ambiguity — and it easily could be, if this sorry excuse for a senator weren't trying to inject his personal animus against trans people into a bill that is intended to prohibit a clearly despicable act.
Define it cleanly. A statute need only prohibit sexual contact between a person and an animal where the purpose is the sexual gratification of any person — that single line reaches the actual abuse and nothing else.
If you do so, not one trans person, not one non-binary person, and not one furry would object to making that abuse illegal, because not one of them has any stake in it to begin with. The clean version of this bill loses nothing.
But Heffernan never offered language like that, because cleaning up the bill was never his aim. He saw a debate on an animal-cruelty law and used it as a stage — a chance to attack the trans and furry communities and score points with religious conservatives who make up his party's base. He saw this important bill as an opportunity to spread hate and bigotry — his animus was the point.
That's what makes his chain a smear rather than a slip of logic. Two of these groups are simply people being honest about who they are; the third is a harmless hobby. Members of all three build their lives with other human beings, and none of them goes anywhere near the act the bill is intended to address. He linked them anyway, betting the room wouldn't check — because the moment anyone does, there's nothing left standing.
Vote for the animal-cruelty bill; it's a good bill. But call the senator's performance what it was: not a warning about animals, and not anything grounded in the real world — just bigotry against marginalized communities, dressed up in a fever dream, and pointed at people who did nothing but dare to exist. And in a just world, the Vermont Senate would censure him for it — because conduct like his calls the entire body into disrepute.
