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Furry Panic Is the Latest Dumb GOP Attack on Public Schools

It happens whenever a school board member speaks out about changes to Central York School District’s COVID-19 plan. “Cat!” a group of four would mock from the back of the room. “Cat!”

Amelia McMillan, a parent in Pennsylvania County, recognized the four. They’ve been supporting Central York’s recently (and now upside down) banned some school books, many books about race. After the mid-January meeting ended, McMillan said she saw the group herd a local father in the hallway.

McMillan told The Daily Beast: “They yelled at him about his kid being a jerk. The group cites “an email someone sent to the board about fur. I heard him say, ‘Get my kids out of this.’ Two school administrators broke the interaction and kicked the four aggressors out of the building, then asked the father if he was okay. He told everyone standing there (myself included) that they were calling his baby furry and he asked them to stop.”

Fur is a subculture of creators of other selves like anthropomorphized animals. A furry person can paint himself as a tiger in a cartoon or dress up as a dragon at a like-minded convention. It’s a genre that’s been around for decades and, compared to other pre-existing subcultures, pretty healthy.

So why are school board attendees panicking about the supposed furs in the classroom?

In Pennsylvania, Maine, Michigan and Iowa in recent months, school board meetings have been disrupted by allegations that educators are giving special treatment to fluffy students. While false, these widespread hoaxes create a broader right-wing effort to discredit and demand greater control over public education.

Patch O’Furr, owner of the Dogpatch Press news site, told The Daily Beast: “It’s a culture war, it’s about control, and it’s not about protecting children. “If you really look at who’s doing this, when certain political groups get involved, they’re fine.”

The rumors have been simmering for months in boroughs like Central York last year, where a “parent-related” Facebook group encouraged concerns that fur “could be in your kid’s classroom hissing.” in your child’s face and lick yourself.”

They are demonizing the minority by proxy, with a goal behind the goal.

But it was in Michigan’s Midland school district, not Central York, that the claims finally caught fire.

“Yesterday, I heard that at least one school in our town, in one of the bathrooms for both sexes, has a trash can for kids who identify as cats,” said a speaker at a school board meeting said, in a video that went viral in January. “And I’m really bothered by that.”

GOP Michigan co-chair Meshawn Maddock is quick to amplify the claims about cats. Maddock wrote on Facebook: “Children identified as ‘furry’ have a trash can in the school bathroom. “Hero parents will BACK to our schools.”

Midland Public Schools does not provide litter boxes – unisex or otherwise. The superintendent debunked the rumours in a scathing email. (“It is unconscionable that I send this communication again this afternoon,” his email to parents began.)

However, the allegations quickly spread to Texas, where a GOP candidate (and activist with the right-wing parent group Moms For Liberty) added her own baseless claims about perks for fluffy students. “Cafe tables are being lowered at some middle and high schools @RoundRockISD to allow for easier ‘fur’ to eat without their tools or hands (eg. like a dog eating from a bowl),” she tweeted.

That allegation is also not true. Sharon Roberts, associate professor at the University of Waterloo and member of the organization Furscience academic research group.

Roberts told The Daily Beast of furrydom: “It’s a limited fantasy. “It’s not escapism, it’s not a departure from reality. Fluffy people don’t like, ‘I’m my anthropomorphic character.’ That’s not what happens.”

Roberts says furs don’t believe they’re animals other than humans. Instead, a furry can act as a cartoon animal, but when nature calls, it steps out of character and takes off its costume to go to the bathroom normally. (Furscience set an instant bathroom record in 2016, when they made a “head” video of can’t use the toilet in a fur coat.)

O’Furr, who traced the origin of the trash box urban legendhoax dating back to at least 2008. That’s when a local news story about a fur convention in Pittsburgh led to unfounded speculation that hotel staff would have to clean up the attendees’ dung. attend the conference.

Those rumors resurfaced as the 2021-2022 school year began. In August, for example, an anonymous grandparent told Kentucky’s WLKY that her grandchild was bullied in class by students making loud noises. The superintendent told the station that “a small number” of students violated the dress code by wearing cat ears or tails, and the situation was under control.

But the rumor spread to other states, especially when it was picked up by conservative voices. Blogs in Iowa and Idaho promoted stories this fall, claiming that fluffy students were either given special litter boxes, or exempted from doing homework (can’t hold pencils with their feet. ). The blogs note that the schools have denied the allegations, but the authors go on to say they’ve heard more rumors from locals and residents “at the Clay County GOP booth at the fair seed”.

An Iowa commentator wrote such rumors, if true, would threaten to weaken the US military. “When China threatens to invade neighboring countries, we cringe when someone tells us he is an antelope and we better admit that he has hooves even though he may be See it or not,” he said. “How can we win a war with an army full of dogs and cats?”

Not all of these questions are well received in the fluff community. In early November, an aspiring educator went to Reddit’s board of teachers to spread rumors about students in her hometown demanding trash cans be removed from the school. “I went to r/furry for their advice and opinions on how to handle this situation but was permanently banned,” wrote the Redditor, who is studying to become a teacher.

By October, hair-raising fears had spilled over into school board meetings. In Skowhegan, Maine, where Redditors are shared the trash can rumora speaker at a school board meeting “said the request for information regarding the district’s position on allowing students to identify as (fur) animals is exempt from the regulation on dress (hat, etc.),” according to the public minutes of the meeting.

The query took on a more political tone at the Iowa school board meeting. “Another topic many parents want to tackle is fur.” one speaker said. “Why are children allowed to dress like animals in our school? They are allowed to growl and bark at their teachers. They’re allowed to wear chains and necklaces and tails and they just bark but God forbid a kid wearing a Trump hat goes to school; they are asked to remove it immediately. ” (Most schools don’t allow hats.)

The politicization of fluffy school rumors comes amid a widespread conservative attack on public schools and their approach to issues like race and gender. School board meetingssometimes attended by members of far-right paramilitary groupshas become a theater for the culture wars, with GOP figures like Maddock urging parents to “GO BACK to our schools” from the specter of liberal educators.

Sometimes, as in the case of Central York, the people who support the book ban are the same people who are currently promoting false rumors.

O’Furr notes that fur is a convenient target for those looking to lash out at marginalized identities, particularly the LGBT community, which has a higher-than-average representation rate among people. fur farming. The multi-trash bin hoax is clearly linked to “sexist” toilet boxes (which parallel the wars over gender-affirming bathroom choices in schools) or claims that students are “authentic” identified as fur” (a phrase uncommon in fur media, but synonymous with conservative media that often describes transgender youth).

O’Furr wrote in a recent blog post: “They are demonizing the minority by delegation, with the goal behind the goal. “It’s a cousin to anaerobic memes like ‘I define gender as an attack helicopter‘use weird stuff to make it easier to swallow.’

The director of the Public Schools Branch in Prince Edward Island, Canada, took a similar stance when fur hoaxes flooded his district’s social media in October.

“It seems to me like a backlash to some of the progress our school is making,” said superintendent Norbert Carpenter. tell CBC“And we’re going to have a lot of people saying this is rooted in hate and homophobia and homophobia and that the message needs to be clear, that’s unacceptable.”

That’s not to say fur isn’t in schools. Recently Rolling Stone posts showcases a thriving TikTok youth scene. It’s a space for creativity and play, the kids and their parents explain — and like any youth subculture (see: goths and MySpace queens of decades past) some of the appeal lies in furrydom’s incomprehensibleness to adults.

But efforts to treat anthropomorphized animals as a niche issue are nonetheless misguided. Last week, a Tennessee school board banned the graphic novel Holocaust Maus, apparently on the grounds that its illustration of naked rats was inappropriate. Meanwhile, conservative commentators accused the left of trying to “destroy our democracy“To draw Minnie Mouse in a long dress instead of her short mini dress. The rat costume duels do not illustrate some Americans deeply angry about the rodent dress code; Humanized animals, imbued with our own anxieties, have long acted as our agents in the culture wars, regardless of our fur possessions. or not.

Roberts, the fur expert, says the fur community can act as a safe home for young people who may be at risk from efforts to ban books about autism and LGBT issues (like Central York schools did earlier this year).

“The fur movement is LGBT and disproportionately polyneurotic,” says Roberts, but we do see that furry is thriving in this community. “That’s because they have a strong bond and the connection is rooted in creativity.”

But with a fixation on trash cans and non-existent lunch tables, hairy panic has turned a thriving subculture into a pastime against public schools and their students. Ironically, O’Furr says, it’s the right – not the fur – who won’t stop talking about cat poop.

“It shows a complete failure to understand how children think, what they care about, what they want,” he said. “They are targeting places where children have a little privacy in school, such as their lunch or their bathroom break. It’s about control. ”

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