Is this the new "it never happens"?

I had this all of last night on reddit (having people tell me that nobody is identifying as a cat). Bollocks.

My SD identifies as a 'they' and loves wearing her cat ears so I suspect she's part of that club. She also told me that she has three children. Given that she's 13 and I've known her since she was 9, that seemed unlikely.

Turns out they are in the year below her in school and she's just friends with them, but they 'identify' as her children.

It's all bloody make-believe nonsense. But whereas previously, children knew where the boundary of fantasy lay, they are now having this piffle reinforced at school so are growing into mentally challenged young adults. Worrying times.

The ideology is entirely founded on 'my feelings create reality, the facts I don't like don't exist, and you're my enemy if you will not unconditionally enable me in this'.

So a rational conversation isn't going to happen.

People need to realise that some of the people they are debating with have NO morality preventing them from lying. That to them, language is not part of some mutual agreement to arrive at consensus; it is just a battlefield and they are entirely willing to destroy it rather than concede it.

As they're fond of saying on the Farms, "Once again, the thing that never happens, as happened."

Slightly extra worrying to me is that the whole "catgirl" thing is a kink/porn thing for a lot of people. A 13 year old girl saying she's a cat and possibly hanging out online pretending to be one might be at risk because of it.

Yes, teens can be immature and pretending to be an animal or watching kid’s programmes to escape reality, or whatever, isn’t hurting anyone, but nobody to join in with their pretence or pretend that it isn’t a bit daft.

It’s when it is children pretending to be the opposite sex and being encouraged by adults to take wrong sex hormones and undergo sterilising and mutilation that it is a problem.

Yea I've seen this - and dismissing it as "it's a Tory war on woke joke"

It's grim how those who taught children to identify and set up the cast iron 'if you say you are then you are and no one can tell you otherwise/refuse to indulge you' and trotted these children up the garden path, are now abandoning them and denying them now those children are no longer useful to their agenda and are attracting negative publicity.

It's the same way detransitioners are cast out. And rapists who get into the papers and cause major problems.

There is no difference between identifying as a cat and identifying as the opposite sex. None.

Oops an errant “to” there.

I realise now that my friend and I - Tolkien fans - were probably “identifying” as Elves when we were 13. We put a lot of effort into writing in Elvish (not real Elvish, just a code) and speaking and behaving like Elves. We went wandering in the woods feeling sorry for ourselves and our passing.
We annoyed our teachers by writing notes to each other in class in Elvish, though they had to be pre-written because to writing in Elvish is quite time-consuming if you want it to look nice. Lots of dots and accents and such.

Thank you for posting that clip. It always makes me laugh.

I particularly enjoy the expression on Victoria Derbyshire’s face throughout, a mixture of sanctimoniousness and suspicion. She knows that she’s being taken for a ride, but has to go along with it.

Yes last week there was the moon child and the one who identified as a holograph.

This is the crux of the matter.

Why is it so very important to call yourself a woman if in doing so, you have stripped the word of all meaning?

The word "women" can either mean female people, or it can include male people. It can't do both.

If it includes both male and female people then it has the same meaning as the word "men" and there is no basis for determining who is in which group or even that there are two groups.

Obviously there are still two groups and always will be, but the trans activist position appears to be that we don't have or need words for those two groups and we certainly don't organise single "gender" spaces or sports according to them. So given that we currently (according to trans activists) organise these things according to two groups which are the same as each other, because they both now mean "some humans", surely that's an argument for not having separate spaces and sports for men and women at all. And yet, they're, not campaigning for that.

This shows that, paradoxically, the word "women" has to have meaning, and it has to mean female people, because otherwise there would be no "other" group for trans people to identify as. The point is not the abolition of rigid gender categories. The point is for some men to be allowed in women's spaces.

I don't care about people identifying as cats or bagels; in fact, I welcome it. Because a man can no more be a woman than a teenage girl can be a cat or a bagel. It's all just claiming to be something you are not, and I welcome the discussion about why it's ridiculous to claim to be another species or a baked good, but not ridiculous to claim to be a woman with a penis.

Isn’t it a bit embarrassing because it takes pretending to actually be something you aren’t and never could be, from being a brave noble struggle against the cruel bigotry of women, over into being a very silly game for attention at school?
If you’re an adult who has been all #peoplearewhatevertheysaytheyare then you’ve ruled yourself out of having any boundaries and you’ve made it your ludicrous and offensive job to also enforce other people not being allowed to have any boundaries either. You’ve elevated validation of a sacred caste at all costs to everyone else which is very dangerous for more vulnerable people not in the special group.

And especially it’s very uncomfortable in schools because it puts the keen acolytes on staff that are facilitating it all, in a very awkward position. Cognitive dissonance because finally at some point they know that they will need to put a boundary around which identities should be respected and which not… but also according to their own #bekind #beinclusive aggressively enforced dogma, all identities are valid. So anyone can be anything and what’s more, everyone has to praise them for it. So why can’t the kids be a cat? or an elephant? Or a microbe? Or a space alien? Or Jesus Christ? Or Queen Victoria? Or Hitler? Or someone else’s mum or dad? Or their child? Why can’t they appropriate anyone else’s protected characteristics including race, disability, age etc?

If anyone can appropriate sex and be treated as the same or better than someone who is actually of that sex, then we urgently need to rediscover limits and boundaries. So I hope that there will be more kids trying to push the boundaries like this because it shows up the dangerous foolishness of some adults very plainly and clearly.

‘Hollowing out’ is a good way to put it. Gender is an ambiguous term as it has been variously and confusingly used to mean both biological sex and the social constructs around biological sex. There is no consensus across time and different societies as to what those constructs are. Now we have disagreement around whether gender is innate, whether we all have one, whether it is your sense of gender that makes you male/female/other or your biology.

But until very recently, one aspect of ‘gender’ that was taken for granted was that it had some relation to a sex binary.

With the dawn of the idea that ‘gender’ is also about being/identifying with or as animals, inanimate objects, feelings, etc., the link to sex is completely severed. The word is meaningless. By being everything it is nothing. Hollowed out.

But being a furry tends to be a fetish.
No one needs to participate in other peoples fetishes.

I am in a rush on my way out and have not phrased that well. I'll try again later. It's something to do with hollowing out words, severing their meaning and connection to material reality, but then trying to pretend the empty words still have meaning.

I think everyone retains some childish/childlike interests and characteristics through life, but part of growing up is knowing the time and place. I knew of many people at my workplace who dress up for as characters for conventions and one who was open about taking part in furry events. They didn’t bring it to work, other than not hiding the fact that’s what they do in their downtime. Fine. If they’d turned up to work in character and expected everyone to treat it seriously, however, I’d have thought them utterly silly, trivial and childish.

Teenagers are old enough to understand that it isn’t necessary to share your inner child in all contexts.

So, by all means wear tails and indulge in ‘play’, but don’t be surprised that others judge this negatively. It’s the lack of maturity in adapting to different situations that we’re judging. That not everything is or needs to be about your interests.

'They really cannot have it both ways.

This is exactly the dissonance that came about with Bryson’s sentencing. What has become very apparent is that gender identity is only relevant to the ‘right type of people’. Anyone else who claims a gender identity that has not been approved by the group is excluded.'

It's also what happens when you have a system that relies on existing understanding but simultaneously denies and undermines that understanding.

For example, genderism relies on everyone 'knowing' what sex they are and then applying a modifying belief to produce a 'gender identity'. Then the fact of sex is denied entirely, and we are left with 'gender identity' untethered from biological sex. We can only know what 'gender identity' we are, or anyone else is, by some mysterious inner process. It's not related to our sex.

So by this logic, how do you explain reproduction to children if you've told them sex is something we can choose? That their 'gender identity' is an arbitrary belief with no relation to their body?

We've had people on here try to argue that children can be taught that 'people with penises' can get 'people with vaginas' pregnant, but this falls down when we have people concurrently arguing that Isla Bryson's penis is female, or that as a transwoman they are 'biologically female'.

The issue isn't the kids, it's the way adults respond. I used to play ponies pretty obsessively as a kid- up to age about 12- with a couple of friends. We spent every playtime being ponies, would run in a sort of lollop pretending to be cantering, make little jumps etc etc. All fine. What wouldn't have been fine would have been adults responding as if this was actually our identity, that we should be treated as ponies in lessons, were actually ponies, or that anyone pointing that out was a hateful bigot.

Once you're an adult, you're allowed to play make-believe as much as you want but the rest of the points remain. Adults playing make-believe should be allowed to get on with it in peace. Doesn't mean the rest of us have to play.

I'm sure their 'hobby' is innocent, but the problem is where it will lead them if they browse the internet or search for other furries on-line.

There are numerous cases as males identifying as girls of a very specific age - such as a 4 year old girl.

'Otherkin' identification is a very much a thing and people indulge in it to greater or lesser degrees. There are community support boards for people who identity in such ways.

Identity labels and markers have become a perfectly normal and almost expected thing for many young people. I can also see how children on the autistic spectrum could easily end up following this trend.

There are 13 year old ´furries’ at dds school. I haven’t sought the details, but tbh it seems more pleasant to assume that they are identifying as cats than to imagine that we are dealing with the more traditional meaning of furry here.

I am finding the extreme trans activists push back on this to be enlightening. So many have declared it a ridiculous notion, yet fail to grasp this is an official, published gender. And if it could not be possibly valid, why is any gender valid.

They really cannot have it both ways.

This is exactly the dissonance that came about with Bryson’s sentencing. What has become very apparent is that gender identity is only relevant to the ‘right type of people’. Anyone else who claims a gender identity that has not been approved by the group is excluded.

Such a tolerant and inclusive group. The hypocrisy alarm is so clangingly loud that it really is being heard by the wider population now.

And this Reddit sub for xenogenders is informtive:

https://www.reddit.com/r/XenogendersAndMore/

Bristol university published a guide to gender that included 'catgender':

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/catgender-bristol-university-pronoun-guide-b2010087.html

Here's an earnest explanation of 'catgender'

https://www.reddit.com/r/lgbt/comments/11b1yz6/catgender_are_not_what_people_think_they_are_and/

And a wiki on 'xenogender':

https://lgbtqia.fandom.com/wiki/Xenogender

It's interesting to see this rise in 'xenogender'.

Children believe what you tell them, by and large.

If you raise small children to believe there are 100 genders:

As the BBC film shows this teacher doing, then how can a school possibly then deny their claim to any specific gender?