How a viral hoax about furries became fodder for the GOP's moral panic

At first it sounds like something out of The Onion: Republican politician decries “woke” schools for tolerating students who identify as cats. You chuckle as you scroll past it on your social media feed. Because nobody could actually believe such a wild story, right?

Except it’s true — the part about Republicans’ spreading the claim, that is, not the part about kids’ telling their teachers they want to be treated like cats. That part is entirely made up and has been debunked repeatedly.

But that’s the thing: The lie keeps getting repeated, to the chagrin of school districts around the country. At this point it’s clear that this is less a funny bit of GOP nonsense than part of the party’s larger broadside against LGBTQ kids and their rights and against public schools in general.

At this point it’s clear that this is less a funny bit of GOP nonsense than part of the party’s larger broadside against LGBTQ kids and their rights and against public schools in general.

In the last week we’ve heard two Republican candidates running for governor — Minnesota’s Scott Jensen and Colorado’s Heidi Ganahl — claim that kids are showing up for schools dressed as cats. Moreover, they say these schools are not just accommodating students who identify as animals, but also encouraging them. Of course, neither candidate’s campaign was able to identify just which schools were doing this despite being asked multiple times.

I was shocked when I read those stories — not because of what they were saying, but because I’d heard it all before. I first became aware of this bizarre rumor in March, when a video of Nebraska state Sen. Bruce Bostelman, a conservative Republican, went viral. “They meow and they bark and they interact with their teachers in this fashion,” he told his fellow legislators. “And now schools are wanting to put litter boxes in the schools for these children to use. How is this sanitary?”

If you, like me, are a millennial who grew up on the internet, it quickly became clear that he was referring to a bizarrely literal version of “furries.” For the uninitiated, furries are a subculture whose members, to varying degrees, identify with animals — their “fursonas,” as it were. For some people it’s a sexual kink; for others it’s just a way to express how they feel inside and enjoy having pictures of their fursonas drawn for them. It’s absolutely not something that teachers are dealing with as a major issue.

Bostelman, to his credit, apologized and retracted his claims after being mocked from one side of the internet to the other. I figured that would be the end of this particular moral panic. How wrong I was.

It was easy to overlook the subtext of what Bostelman was saying because of the sheer absurdity of it all. But fast-forward six months and Jensen, the gubernatorial candidate in Minnesota, was much more explicit about why he was relaying the story to his audience:

"What are we doing to our kids? Why are we telling elementary kids that they get to choose their gender this week? Why do we have litter boxes in some of the school districts so kids can pee in them, because they identify as a 'furry'?" asked Jensen, a family physician and former state senator, during the Sept. 29 stop in Hutchinson, Minn. "We've lost our minds. We've lost our minds."

Jensen and Ganahl keep spreading this rumor no matter how many times they’re corrected because it fits the broader conservative narrative about “woke” schools’ damaging America’s children. While liberals laugh at the idea of school litter boxes, some conservatives believe it tracks with everything they’ve been fed over the past year about teachers’ supposedly “grooming” kids to become gay or transgender. If teachers are already letting boys use the girls’ bathrooms, the thinking likely goes, of course it’s a slippery slope to teachers’ accepting trans-speciesism.

By the time the story had made its way to Bostelman, it had already been circulating for a few months as evidence of liberal tolerance run amok. Snopes wrote an article in January related to a school board meeting in December in Midland, Michigan, where a parent warned about the furry menace.

It’s unclear where she first heard that tale — whether online or from a kid who thought it was funny and she didn’t recognize the sarcasm — but it spread quickly. It’s also worth noting that Twitter’s @LibsOfTikTok shared the video in January to its massive following. The account’s owner has been spreading misinformation and fearmongering about so-called “groomers” for the better part of a year, despite attempts to have the account banned for inciting violent threats against hospitals that provide health care for trans minors.

Since the Midland video first made the rounds, school districts in Michigan, Colorado, Minnesota, Nebraska and Iowa have been forced to issue statements saying “no, we are not providing litter boxes to children.” Thankfully, many of the administrators in these states are dismissing the claims out of hand and calling out the rampant transphobia at play here.

Now, I don’t know whether Jensen or Ganahl buy what they’re saying or not. Either they really do believe schools are letting kids defecate in boxes or they think their audiences are gullible enough to believe it. It’s either idiotic or deeply cynical. But as long as they keep repeating it to the detriment of trans kids, the distinction doesn’t really matter.