How a viral hoax became GOP talking point

Perhaps one of the strangest urban myths circulating the country, especially during this election year, is that elementary school children believe they are cats and use cat litter boxes at their school as part of their cat identity.

They are referred to as "furries" and although no one has been able to locate one in some 10 years of investigation, right-wing political candidates have been pushing this rumor as part of their broader conservative narrative.

Among them is Minnesota's Republican candidate for governor, Scott Jensen, who during a campaign stop in Hutchinson month ago was recorded saying "But what about education? What are we doing to our kids? Why are we telling elementary kids they get to choose their gender this week? Why do we have litter boxes in some of the school districts so kids can pee in them, because they identify as a furry? We've lost our minds. We've lost our minds."

Earlier this year in March, Nebraska state senator Bruce Bostelman, who described himself as a conservative Republican, went public in a video in which he made the same claims as Jensen. According to "How a viral hoax about furries became fodder for the GOP's moral panic," by Hayes Brown in an Oct. 7, 2022, MSVBC blog, Bostelman soon apologized and removed his video after being "mocked from one end of the internet to the other."

Unfortunately, Colorado gubernatorial candidate Heidi Ganahl hasn't yet retracted her comment on furries, nor has Jensen, despite neither candidate's campaign staff being able to identify which schools are doing this, even after being asked multiple times.

But the furry frenzy started even earlier. Last December a parent's impassioned warning about furries at a Midland, Michigan, school board meeting went viral in an internet video. Since then, school districts in Michigan, Colorado, Minnesota, Nebraska and Iowa have been forced to issue statements insisting no, they are not providing litter boxes for children in their schools.

A lot of the furor about furries is pushback against the possibility that there may be young people who are gay or transgender in a local school. Some right-wing conservatives fear having gay or transgender students in a school is part of a larger picture of teachers supposedly grooming kids to become gay or transgender. But the bottom line is that this urban legend is part of the Republicans' broadside against GLBTQ students and their rights.

Interestingly enough, there actually is such a creature as a furry but it's not a transgender person in training thinking the first step is identifying as a cat. According to "Fact Check: No evidence that U.S. schoolchildren are self-identifying as animals and disrupting classrooms" by Reuters Fact-Check in the July 6, 2022, Reuters blog, furries are people with an interest in animal traits who create their own animal personality but are fully cognizant they are humans. According to Furscience co-founder Courtney Plante, "Furries are fans, just like any other fan group. Furries are no more likely to think they're animals than sports fans think they're their favorite team's quarterback."

According to Plante, claims about furry activity in schools are familiar to researchers and have been around a long time. "(It has been) circulating around the internet a long time, this claim that there is a pandemic of furries in schools eating out of dog dishes or barking or hissing in class... and despite our having studied thousands of furries, we've found no evidence to support this. If there is an epidemic of kids howling and meowing in schools, you'd think it would be easier to find them and put them in front of a camera."

According to Michael Bronski, professor of women, gender and sexuality at Harvard University, being a furry is not a form of queer identity. "People who identify as furries do so for fun; it is not a primary identification," he said, adding that rumors that children identify as animals and disrupt schools "is completely a fabrication."

But, he says, as schools move toward tolerance for students who question their gender identities, this becomes yet another issue for those already protesting books and curriculum choices with which they may not agree.

Bottom line: if someone insists there's furries using litter boxes in school, tell them to show you.

— This is the opinion of Times Writers Group member Lois Thielen, a dairy farmer who lives near Grey Eagle. Her column is published the first Sunday of the month.

This article originally appeared on St. Cloud Times: How a viral hoax became GOP talking point