Toby responds to ‘catgate‘ in his Spectator column this week, saying the phenomenon of children identifying as animals or ‘furries’ is welcome for at least one reason – it proves the need for adults to remember that they’re supposed to educate children, not indulge their fantasies. Here’s an excerpt.
The Department for Education (DfE) is due to publish draft guidance next week advising schools how to deal with the explosion of children identifying as trans and, judging from a sneak preview in the Sun, it looks quite robust. Schools will be banned from helping children change gender without their parents’ consent, no one can be compelled to use a child’s preferred gender pronouns and, for reasons of fairness, trans-identifying pupils won’t be allowed to participate in competitive sport. But there will be nothing in the guidance about how schools should cope with ‘furries’ – children who identify as animals.
My first thought on hearing about this bizarre subculture was that the kids must be doing it to ridicule woke teachers. After all, if the ‘correct’ approach when faced with a child identifying as a member of the opposite sex is to endorse their self-diagnosis, then schools are bound to adopt the same ‘affirmative’ attitude when children identify as cats or dogs. That seems to be the trap the teacher in East Sussex has fallen into.
But was it all an elaborate hoax? A recent story in the Telegraph about ‘furries’ suggests not. It described a sixth former at a school in Wales who claims to identify as a cat. She – or, rather, ‘catself’, since that’s her preferred gender pronoun – answers every question posed to her in lessons by meowing and gets very uppity if a teacher asks her to reply in English. She sounds like another anti-woke prankster, but other examples indicate these children may be in earnest.
For instance, the Telegraph discovered a child in the south-west who insists her teachers treat her as if she’s a dinosaur and a pupil at a secondary school in England who identifies as a horse. Yet another claims to be a moon and cavorts about in a Harry Potter cloak putting curses on classmates. In every case, the schools dutifully ‘respect’ these identities rather than risk accusations of being ‘exclusionary’. As far as I can tell these girls are not budding Titania McGraths. They’ve genuinely gone mad.
As someone who disapproves of the way schools have embraced trans dogma and welcomes the new DfE guidance, I quite like this weird phenomenon. It may not be intended as satire, but it exposes the shortcomings of schools pandering to trans-identifying children nevertheless. In the past, when I’ve made the ‘where do you draw the line?’ argument to woke teachers, they dismiss the notion that any child might identify as an animal as a ‘red herring’. But it turns out, if you encourage kids to part company with biological reality, there’s nothing to stop them believing they’re cats or dinosaurs – or, indeed, red herrings. This will surely help advocates of a more sceptical approach to persuade schools that a policy of ‘inclusion’ in all circumstances may not be in children’s best interests.
Worth reading in full.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
“when I’ve made the ‘where do you draw the line?’ argument to woke teachers, they dismiss the notion that any child might identify as an animal as a ‘red herring’.“
Are there any children identifying as red herrings?
No, that would be crossing the [fishing] line.
That would be a whole different kettle of fish…
It would bring a whole new meaning to having a herring problem. One that couldn’t be solved by teachers speaking louder or using sign language.
What about underweight children who identify as fat? Why encourage one delusion but not another?
Or the other way around? Or white children who identify as black (think Ali G) or vice versa? What about white professors who identify as ‘first nation’?
Where indeed do we draw the line.
I disagree they’ve gone mad. They’re just enjoying their liberty to fantasise. A girlfriend who worked in the same shop as me for a ‘Saturday’ job when we were about 15 insisted on being called Gandalf. Nice girl, not mad, just slightly quirky – caused me to read TLOTR. I can’t remember her proper name now.
This is the problem when you indulge the fantasy that there are unlimited genders. As we have seen recently the adults are behaving like children and the children are taking the piss.
It is useful to think of such children’s behaviour as being either imaginative or fantasy play: Wanting to be treated as an animal is imaginative (a drama teacher made this point a few days ago) and children’s imaginations should be encouraged. Thinking you can become another sex through surgery is fantasy.
Teachers ought to be able to spot/teach the difference.
I’ve even read of able-bodied people identifying as disabled and using wheelchairs. This social contagion seemed to start with the trans ideology but it has now broken free of those constraints and spread out of control! Some of it definitely can’t be taken seriously and I strongly suspect many kids are just taking the Mick, jumping on the loony bandwagon, just like many sexual predators are taking advantage of the loophole that allows them to gain entry to female-only spaces merely by donning a dress and stating they identify as female. But I honestly don’t know where this collective madness infecting society ends. When do we reach saturation point?
It’s become more visible in the private sector in the last couple of years. Having more women in management or tech jobs now includes men in those jobs provided they claim to be a woman. Some could make the claim to avoid unemployment as companies try and hit a quota that keeps them above the social media pile-on threshold.
This is a symptom of a sick education system that indoctrinates rather than educates and the attack on the traditional family.
Focus on root cause.
The Unaparty caused this and the British people, who have largely abandoned our Christian heritage let it happen.
Get the plank outnof your own eye, then fight the wokists.
What I’d really like to see is a black kid in one of these out of control schools committed to reaffirming their students “identities” say he identifies as a monkey. Just out of mischief.
I would pay good money to watch and see how the staff handle that one.
Once you allow this self identification thing and then insist that everyone else must accept it or face being verbally abused and ostracised from polite society then soon you will have people demanding they are referred to as “Chairs” or “Squirrels” and the Social Justice brigade defending their right to be a “Table”, because the precedent of self identification has been set. This is ofcourse absurd. But absurdity is all the rage, and immature children can maybe be forgiven for doing silly stuff till they get a bit older but there is absolutely no excuse for politicians and bureacrats who are responsible for this clutter of absurdity.
There may be a group hoping children will identify as adults.
Steady.
There might be a man who identifies as a woman who identifies as furniture.
I think this is satire but nowadays you just can’t tell.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMmsQGnkd9U
Reposting the link to Robert Malone’s substack on this topic. The fact that this weirdness has arisen at this particular time is no coincidence.
https://rwmalonemd.substack.com/p/the-world-of-school-aged-furries
Ok, so there’s always the explanation that it could just be a case of children doing what they do with expertise – imaginary play acting. And this I would actively encourage in the context of out-of-school antics with their friends, etc. because it engages the creative mind and is incredibly healthy for a child’s development; a sober engagement with consensus reality and a purging of all flights of the imagination leads to a dull childhood and potentially and unproductive, bland, utilitarian existence.
However, this kind of play acting I think should only apply to kids under, say, 12, after which age they should really have grown out of pretending to be dinosaurs. And all such games need to end with the child reassuming his or her human identity, especially as it applies to refraining from meowing or barking our way through the school curriculum.
Kids identifying as red herrings? I’m opposed to that hook, line and sinker!
That “teacher” didn’t fall into a trap.
She sounded like a poorly-educated, brainwashed woke drone, who was trying to impose HER opinions on a class of children …. at least two of whom demonstrated they are vastly more intelligent and resilient than she is.
This whole self-identifying b0ll0cks has to stop. You cannot change sex/gender. If you are born male, you will die male. No amount of surgery will make a scrap of difference to that biological FACT.
We need to stop calling men who have transitioned “women.” They are NOT women. That is a LIE.
Anyway – I’ve done my little bit to join in the self-identifying LIES and lunacy coming from the Establishment. This week, I emailed Mel Stride, Sec of State for Work and Pensions. I told him I’m self-identifying as an 80 yr old woman so I’m owed 20 years’ of backdated State Pension and asked him to arrange payment 🙂
Amazingly, the DWP replied and asked me for more information. THAT’s the level of lunacy which now permeates our “Government.”
The new guidance is robust?!
Sure, it says children shouldn’t be allowed to pretend to be a member of the opposite sex without parental consent. In that sense it is robust – it reinforces the rights and duties of parents.
But it is still far adrift from reality. You cannot become a member of the opposite sex just because you “feel” yourself to be – any more than you can become tall if you are short, or become intelligent if you are stupid, or indeed become a cat if you are a human.
Part of growing up is coming to realise that you cannot have everything you want, and you cannot be anything you want to be. You have to learn to accept yourself as you are.
Parents who indulge their children’s fantasies of being a different sex are guilty of child neglect at best.
And this new guidance is coming under attack already from the few real Conservative MPs left in the Commons.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/06/24/tory-row-children-change-pronouns-gender-school/
The Daily Sceptic should surely be supporting these MP’s, not defending a hapless Education Secretary who thinks she is being sensible when she asks for parental consent before children pretend to change their sex.
One of the biggest problems about this is the expression “Identifying as”. This is rubbish because children try various things in play and life, and the correct term for it is “pretending to be”. Children will always pretend to be various things like soldiers, cowboys or Indians, sports champions, superheroes, ninja turtles or any other thing they fancy. Stupid adults have extended this pretence to be something serious and have given children the opinion that their pretence can be real, when it can’t. There comes a point when intelligent adults will tell them that, but the number of them seems to be diminishing fast.