You say this but really, what is the fandom about? Compare this to any other actual community: Gatekept (if even just by needing to show up physically), centered around an activity or occurrence, a sense of togetherness. Furries are individual brands who identify only through the furry angle despite that consisting of fuck all. "Oh yeah bro I play fighting games, I wanna go to EVO and see all the pros bro it's like our Mecca".
Furrie? They go to furcons. Why? Meet people. And do what? Engage in the bare minimum of human qualities; booze and sex? Groom a minor, give a child illegal HRT? There is -nothing- at the heart of the fandom. Even bronies got MLP to consume. I knew a full-on normal adult working furry who went to 14 cons in his life. He went to EVO once and was like "dude wtf are furcon even for?".
Personally in my teens I used the furry angle to identify people who fit a certain personality; shy nerdy gamer type folk. Now, go on tiktok, it's basically anyone. Uppity sparkledog deviantart "girls" (age 29) who bully and gaslight like they did in public school. Randoms in $2500 fursuits who never actually had art drawn or even have an OC and just consider their suit "them". To think people still identify with this shit is beyond me as opposed to what most streamers and figures do these days: Have a little funny gremlin doodle OC for profile pictures and what not.
"furry" feels like it should be less of a dedicated fanbase to something, like MLP or anime or vidya, and more of an aesthetic, like goth or prep. maybe that's why the furry fandom is such a mess, it's a generalized concept that tries to be hyper specific, having the potential to appeal to people from all walks of life with the simple angle of "cartoon animals fun" but ending up only appealing to a particular kind of people who can enjoy nothing BUT furry stuff, attempting to narrow down a vast and ancient artistic concept to the most generically specific fanbase possible.
and that's why you end up with this artificial feeling community, where instead of art and creativity you get the same five memes circulating and they consider it some deep inside joke.
maybe that's why it appeals to a certain type of autist, a weird inverted middle ground between "autistic enough to be weird and creative" and "too autistic to belong elsewhere", the ones who somehow managed to be overly socialized yet too low functioning to be savants. who thrive in an environment of predictable behavioral patterns and memetic rituals of engagement where they can just slide right in and take their spot.
where a good community lives and breathes, furries are like the taxidermied corpse of a once living thing filled with preservatives, it can't rot but it can't thrive either, so it just sits there stiff around the people who are a part of it like a dried cum soaked pair of pants.
@Pinball 2000 is probably correct, but I have my own pet theory:
At the start of the lockdowns we saw plenty of troons jubilant that they had to wear masks, because those made them "pass better". As in, it hid their massive man-jaws and similar features. I suspect a good amount of them still want to keep wearing masks no matter what for that hit of gender euphoria, which means any event they have a hand in organizing will keep finding excuses for masking up.
Because it 100% isn't about COVID anymore. As you said, they don't require vax certificates anymore (because most places stopped issuing them), and masks do fuck-all compared to washing/sanitizing one's hands regularly.
ugly people fucking loved the mask thing, but i firmly believe that's not the only reason
covid still plays a large role in this- they don't want to admit it's over and they were on "the wrong side of history"
they're like an adult who's keeping up their middle school alt phase just so as to not prove mom wrong when she called it 'just a phase', they're saying "we were RIGHT THEN and we're STILL RIGHT NOW, we're gonna keep pushing this dead horse and running with it dammit, we weren't wrong! we weren't wrong! we weren't wrong!"
