Confidence

Solid means a careful reader can repeat the claim from a named source and know its limit. Contested means the sources disagree, or a proposal is being asked to do too much. Unknown means this build did not find evidence worth grading above a guess.

A. Fandom and identity science

Solid. A fursona is typical in IARP samples and is often rated as an ideal self. Social motives correlate more strongly with furry identification than sexual motives do, in Brooks and colleagues (2024). Concealment is common. The 2008 study exists, and its disorder sentence is a proposal.

Contested. Every demographic percentage. Autism elevation is real in the Anthrocon 2018 self-report and open to several explanations. The size of the therian minority inside the fandom moves between project pages.

Unknown. Population prevalence. A single religious breakdown. Whether ideal-self fursonas cause wellbeing.

B. Development

Solid. Imaginary companions and identity-status theory exist as literatures. Pet attachment exists. Furries in these samples are young adults, and many adults remember finding the fandom before 18.

Contested. Whether any of that is continuous with therian identity.

Unknown. The prospective path. Almost the whole ontogeny of the identity.

C. Embodiment

Solid. Rubber-hand, full-body, and virtual body-ownership illusions. Tool incorporation and phantom limbs as neurological phenomena. The Proteus effect as a laboratory finding.

Contested. Every application to fursonas or to phantom shifts.

Unknown. Absorption's correlation with these experiences. The phantom-shift experiment, which has not been run in the opened literature.

D. Clinical

Solid. Clinical lycanthropy is a rare, serious, heterogeneous syndrome in case series. Therian interview studies do not describe that syndrome. The 2015 paper's advice is to assess distress and to stop treating the identity as the illness. Zoophilia is a different category.

Contested. The 2025 spectrum proposal. Species dysphoria as a construct. How large any overlap with paraphilia is. This site withholds a number.

Unknown. Treatment outcomes under affirming versus pathologizing formulations.

E. Anthropomorphism

Solid. People attribute minds to non-humans under describable conditions.

Contested. How far hyperactive agency detection is a real device rather than a name.

Unknown. Zoomorphism as a research program. Any direct path from these biases to species identity.

F. Religion, folklore, anthropology

Solid as texts. Qur'an 6:38 and 2:30, Genesis 1, Durkheim on the totem, Lévi-Strauss on classification, Laycock's 2012 article, the existence of transformation motifs.

Contested. Eliade's universal shaman. Any use of Indigenous ontologies as a genealogy of otherkin. Deleuze as a scripture.

Unknown. How Muslim, Christian, and Jewish participants actually reason about the fandom. Comparative norms of kemono and shou quan. A sermon corpus.

G. Media and society

Solid. ConFurence Zero's 1989 date inside fandom archives. The litter-box policy claim failed fact-checks. Adult retrospective reports of under-18 entry.

Contested. How much platforms create identity rather than reveal it. The sexual reputation of early conventions.

Unknown. Therian Usenet history as a dated archive. Peer-reviewed global comparison. A real epidemiology of school practice.

H. Evolution and philosophy

Solid. The questions are well formed. Body schema is a serious philosophical and empirical idea. The transgender analogy has users, refusers, and a public smear version, and no settled winner.

Contested. Everything causal.

Unknown. Phylogeny. What believers themselves would count as a test.

I. Sexuality

Solid enough to say this. In the Brooks sample, non-sexual motives are the stronger correlate of identification, and sexual motives are not zero. The fandom has been sexually framed in public for decades.

Contested. Hsu and Bailey's near-universal sexual motivation, given Grey's recruitment critique.

Unknown. A fair comparison with other erotic-fanwork fandoms. Any clean rate of sexual interest in real animals.