Is this the new "it never happens"?

[AtomicBlondeRose]

Seeing a lot of sniggering and joking on Twitter etc about students identifying as cats after the recent school news story. Lots of joshing and "oh yes, furries are the new threat" and accusations that people who believe this are off their rocker and exaggerating.

Except...I'm a teacher and I've taught a student who identified as a cat. Didn't have much effect on anything as we didn't have to call her by a cat name (it was a few years ago) and so on but she did identify as one! And I now work at a college and there's a student who wears a tail every day and a few who come in cat ears. And we're very much not on the cutting edge of trends here, so, given the rise in identity-assuming, and that it's a big world, and that teenagers are the absolute target audience for this sort of thing, why would we jump to the conclusion it isn't happening? If you look on Tiktok you can find lots of young people identifying as animals. Why the denial?

‘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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Oops an errant “to” there.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.