The Cynical Reason That MAGA Insists Our Elementary Schools Are Full of Furries Using Litter Boxes When They Know They're Not

Texas Republican state Rep. Stan Gerdes recently introduced the Forbidding Unlawful Representation of Roleplaying in Education (F.U.R.R.I.E.S.) Act, which would prohibit “non-human behavior” from students, such as barking, meowing, hissing, or using a litter box to urinate rather than a toilet. 

It’s a bill that won the approval of Governor Greg Abbott and House Speaker Dustin Burrows despite the bill taking aim at a problem that does not exist. 

Though Trump supporters would love to act otherwise, there is no epidemic of second-graders coming to school in elaborate cat costumes and communicating only through meows and hisses. 

Under questioning, Gerdes conceded that he had no proof that furries had overtaken our public school system and were forcing teachers to stock their classrooms with kitty litter. 

In proper urban legend tradition, Gerdes admitted that he had not personally seen schools outfitted with kitty litter for seven-year-old furries but had “heard reports” of children behaving like animals and schools accommodating them. 

Gerdes could not point to specific instances of schools stocking litter boxes for their furry students because they do not exist. The idea that schools are full of kids dressed as kitty cats pissing into litter boxes in full view of their more ostentatiously human peers is a widely discredited hoax. 

Yet it has gained enough traction and credibility that a deeply deluded, misguided lawmaker decided to take a stand against it. 

In that respect, the non-existent furry problem in our schools is like the similarly imaginary crises involving Haitian immigrants eating dogs and cats. That racist lie gained so much unearned prominence that President Trump insisted that black people from other countries were eating the dogs, and eating the cats, and eating the pets in a memeable moment that should have cost Trump the presidency, but of course did not hurt him a bit. If anything, it might have helped him with deeply stupid, gullible voters worried about Fluffy and Rover getting barbecued by their non-white neighbors. 

Trump and his supporters promoted a clear-cut fiction because they very much wanted it to be true. They insisted that brown people were committing the ultimate transgression in treating pets we value more than other human beings (particularly poor people and people of color) like animals we consume. The pet-eating Haitian hoax appealed to MAGA because it fit their conception of Haitian immigrants as monsters who don’t understand our culture or our customs and consequently think nothing of stealing a neighbor’s pet for a family barbecue. 

One of the primary arguments against gay marriage was the slippery slope argument. Homophobes, Christians and Conservatives insisted that letting men marry men and women marry women would lead to men marrying cars and women getting engaged to tall buildings. 

That obviously did not happen because gay men and women who want to get married human beings with dignity. There is consequently a world of difference between two adults who love each other and happen to be the same gender and someone wanting to marry a baseball stadium. 

The slippery slope argument is at play with the furry conspiracy as well. The MAGA mob finds the idea of trans children morally abhorrent. They don’t just think it’s wrong or unethical: they think it’s absolutely monstrous. In their minds, it’s not a matter of accomodating children or empowering them to live their truths; it’s sexual and physical abuse. It’s “grooming.” 

They are less enraged but still plenty angry at the notion that children can be non-binary. Being asked to refer to people by their chosen pronouns is a hate crime to these people.

If children can identify as trans or non-binary, then what’s next, identifying as cats? Demanding that teachers bring litter boxes into school and put up with their students wearing elaborate animal costumes and making noises at one another rather than communicating through human language? That’s the thinking behind this hysteria. 

There’s an unmistakably sexual element to the furry aesthetic. That factors into the conspiracy as well. Parents become convinced that their precious children are being groomed in multiple ways. Cats groom themselves with their tongues. Conservatives are convinced that teachers groom children into pursuing what they see as deviant lifestyles by trying to convince their students that they are gay, trans, non-binary or a gopher. 

There is absolutely no proof that what conservative depict as a widespread trend has EVER happened, ANYWHERE but don’t expect them to give up on this lie any time soon. It doesn’t matter that it’s been widely debunked; all that matters is that it plays snugly into the right-wing delusion that elementary schools are revolutionary hotbeds of perversion and extremism. 

MAGA benefits from the lie and all of the hysteria that comes with it. They invariably prefer a fib that suits their purposes to an inconventient truth.