NC for this in case I get jumped on.
DD has just started year 6, and during the summer holidays she started pretending to be a cat. I'm going through a divorce at the moment, so at first I thought it was a bit of a childish regression as a response to all the changes, and just assumed it would fizzle out once she went back to school.
Unfortunately, she seems to have gone in the other direction with it, and is now saying she 'identifies' as a cat and spent some of her birthday money on a couple of masks and tails. Her dad and I have tried to mostly ignore and gently discourage it, but we've since become aware of the more sinister 'furry' connotations of this kind of thing. We're also both pretty GC, so we're definitely not happy about her 'identifying' as anything and want to put a stop to it. I've always had very frank conversations with her about how people may identify as different things, but it's not possible to change biology.
However, we have no idea how to explain it to her in terms she'll understand, and meanwhile she seems to be wanting to take it further and further. I'm also worried that if we give her a hard no, we'll end up pushing her even further in the other direction. I've already told her she's not allowed to dress up at school, and today while we were out another parent questioned her 'tail', which led to a conversation in which she told me that grown adults have called her 'furry' and growled at her in public.
That crosses a very clear line for me, so I ended up telling her that she's not to dress up in public any more because it's not appropriate for her age. The problem is she has NO IDEA of the more sinister connotations of what she's doing, so she doesn't understand what that means. She's currently in her room crying and saying she hates me and that I must be embarrassed and disappointed in her.
How can I explain it to her in a way she'll get and without having to bring sex into it?!