From that article:
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?
Is it a mental health issue, used as a coping mechanism by children who have autism or other difficulties, and who should be treated sympathetically in the same way as other pupils with special needs?
Or does it conceal something much darker going on in the child’s life?
Tracy Shaw, of the grassroots Safe Schools Alliance, said children coming to school and insisting on being addressed as an animal should sound loud alarm bells, and teachers already have all the tools they need to deal with the issue, if they would stop conflating it with gender diversity.
“Teachers should be dealing with this under existing safeguarding frameworks,” she says. “If a child is coming to school identifying as a cat or a horse, that should immediately raise red flags.
“The teacher should be asking themselves, what are these children looking at online? What forums are they on? What is going on in the home? What is happening in that child’s life and who else is involved?
“The problem is that teachers have a blind spot where anything involving identity comes in, because they are frightened of doing the wrong thing. They think they are being kind by affirming these behaviours, but they are not being kind, because they are likely to be missing all sorts of things that are going on in that child’s life.”
The teachers are also letting down other pupils whose education is being disrupted by the affirming of children with abnormal behaviour.
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.”
The student in question is in Year 11, but began using the pronoun “catself” in Year 9 “when the whole thing with neo pronouns started”, the pupil said.
She described how lessons could be completely derailed if a teacher attempted to get the child to reply to a question in English rather than meowing.
“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.
The pupil blamed social media, saying students were being influenced by accounts run by people who identify as trees and animals. It started “around Covid”, she says.
“When it first started, it didn’t really go out into real life that much. It stayed confined to social media, but then as it got more popular and more people were finding out about it, people then started bringing it into real life situations.”
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.
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
Before concluding:
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.
Unfortunately, as parents up and down the country are finding, the problem with common sense is that it is not so common
What the actual fuck have I just read?
To go back to what the teacher accused the girls recording of and to reflect on it: The lunatics have taken over asylum.