It’s a big ask
The Telegraph story on school children who meow when asked a question reads like a parody of Gender Religion.
Difficult as it may be to believe, children at a school in East Sussex were reprimanded last week for refusing to accept a classmate’s decision to self-identify as a cat.
The Year 8 pupils were told they would be reported to a senior leader after their teacher said they had “really upset” the fellow pupil by telling them: “You’re a girl.”
And, aha, one of the clever girls recorded the whole thing so now everyone knows how batshit it was.
The incident at Rye College, first reported by The Daily Telegraph yesterday, was not a one-off. Inquiries by this newspaper have established that other children at other schools are also identifying as animals, and the responses of parents suggest that the schools in question are hopelessly out of their depth on the question of how to handle the pupils’ behaviour.
Gee, I wonder why. I don’t suppose it could be because people have been screaming ever more deafeningly for the past decade or so that TRANS WOMEN ARE WOMEN could it? It couldn’t be because of the sacralization of identity could it?
Schools have established protocols when it comes to transgender pupils, but the issue of “furries” is more complex.
Is it simply a spillover from early childhood imaginative play, or the growing phenomenon of cosplay – in which participants dress up as superheroes, aliens, animals or whatever else they choose – being brought into the classroom, where children should be politely told to leave their fantasies at the gates?
People of all ages should be told (not necessarily politely) to leave their fantasies at all the gates, every last one of them.
The teachers are also letting down other pupils whose education is being disrupted by the affirming of children with abnormal behaviour.
That, too, applies more broadly. Everything is being disrupted by the affirming of men with abnormal behavior and vast contempt for women.
One pupil at a state secondary school in Wales told The Telegraph of a fellow pupil who “feels very discriminated against if you do not refer to them as ‘catself’”. She added: “When they answer questions, they meow rather than answer a question in English. And the teachers are not allowed to get annoyed about this because it’s seen as discriminating.”
…
“It’s affecting other people and their education and everybody in their lessons. It’s distracting to sit in a lesson and have someone meow to a teacher rather than answer in English, especially at secondary school age.
“That’s going to take a lot out of a lesson because people are going to spend the entire lesson talking about whoever it is over there meowing to the teacher.
“It’s a big ask to sit there and listen to someone answer like that and not have that be the main talk of the classroom rather than the lesson going on.”
Check, check, check. It’s like a parable about the ridiculous situation we’re all stuck in, being bullied and called names for refusing to play along with the stupid boring fantasies of people like India Willoughby. We have our own damn lives and work and interests so why should we have to devote ourselves to the fantasies of strangers? We shouldn’t. It’s simple.
The Telegraph also spoke to a pupil at a school where one student, who identifies as “moonself”, wears a cloak to school, described by a fellow pupil as “like a Harry Potter wizard cape”.
The child in question did not identify as the Moon, but as a moon, and said they could put curses on people.
But while other pupils would be pulled up for wearing non-uniform items, such as facial piercings or dyed hair, children who identified as cats or moons would be allowed to wear cat ears or cloaks to express their “true self”, breeding resentment among other pupils.
It does breed resentment to treat this one small group of silly people as combination saints and victims of the worst oppression on the planet.
Teachers are not helped by the fact that respected organisations to which they might turn for guidance can themselves be caught up in the confusion between cosplay and self-identity.
Well what is the difference? Is there much? Is there any?
The Safer Schools organisation (not to be confused with the Safer Schools Alliance), which claims to be a “multi-award-winning safeguarding ecosystem” has issued guidance to parents and teachers in which it says: “The furry community itself is a complex one, made up of many different identities and definitions of what it means to be a ‘furry’.”
It also advises parents and teachers to “engage in conversation about what it means to be a furry and the benefits of the furry community”.
Ahhhhhhhhhhhh the furry community. Once it’s baptized as a “community” all hope is lost. It’s an idenniny and it has a communniny; resistance is futile.
If teachers – or parents – hope that the Government will clear up the whole mess when it issues its new guidance on self-identity this week, then they will be sorely disappointed.
The Department for Education said the issue of children identifying as animals will not be addressed in the guidance, with a spokesman saying that the department trusted teachers to apply “common sense” in each individual case.
Because there’s been so much common sense about this identity nonsense all along? Please.
Half my family were teachers. A couple of my friends are teachers. Teachers have enough to do without having to “engage in conversation about what it means to be a furry and the benefits of the furry community”. Just ephemeral garbage.
A colleague of mine and I have been using exactly this example as a description of the most absurd endpoint we could think of to all this. I can’t help but think I’m in some sort of parallel but simulated universe, or something… all that’s missing to fit our predicted scenario is the call for litterbox installations. Putting that out there now to either forestall the inevitable, or to be able to take “called it!” credit…
…Neither of which would make me feel at all good about any of this :-/
The article is behind a paywall for me, so I couldn’t read it, but from the quoted excerpts it seems all the sources are anonymous?
I’m really skeptical of this. It reminds me of the story that was being passed around in the U.S. of schools putting litter boxes in classrooms for kids that identified as cats. If nobody — a student, a teacher, an administrator, a parent — is willing to go on record under their actual name saying that this happened, then I smell bullshit.
Article with paywall circumvented.
Another excerpt:
It seems the Telegraph is following up on the story, but no named sources yet.
This Newsweek article names at least one person.
Not verified, but it’s something.
Screechy, I do want this to be fake, because the alternative is worse. And yes, I do remember the fake litterbox in schools beatup by the GOP. This could be that semi-isolated case of a nutter/true-believer teacher. Note the stories don’t claim that any pupils have been expelled or asked to leave the school. Those isolated over the top instances do occur. Take this one who unloaded on a trans student for religious reasons…
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/education/132363081/teachers-registration-cancelled-for-hysterical-response-to-trans-student
While the article goes on about the teacher refusing to use the students preferred name, it is clear that there was a lot of berating about sin and homophobia going on, which is the despicable bit.
Cosplay and cosplay taken way too seriously.
The actual grain of truth behind the litter box story turned out to be a dystopian nightmare in its own right and nothing to do with any silly ideninny stuff – several teachers in American schools were keeping buckets of kitty litter in their supply closets for use by the kids in the event of an active shooter lockdown.
Ex falso quodlibet.
The only question is how much absurdity will be necessary for people to admit they’ve accepted a contradiction.
Sackbut, thanks for the Susie Govett lead. She’s on Facebook and is Ukip (alas). The tweet is here:
https://twitter.com/SuseG71/status/1670001383058165760
She clarifies in a reply that the girls are friends of her daughter’s, i.e. her daughter isn’t one of them.
She mentions the mother of one of the girls with a link to her Twitter account, which is locked.
I’d be tempted to pick up the “cat” and set her outside.
C’mon kitty kitty, time for you to go out and play.
If a student answered a question “meow” in my class, my only recourse would be to count them wrong, since that is not an answer to any question in my class. I guess I could ask “what does the kitty say?” and it would be an answer, but since I teach college and not pre-school, that would be rather below grade level.
My cat says meow, my dog barks. My son speaks English. Just as it should be.