If you’ve been keeping up with the various passionately transphobic UK media outlets, you might be under the impression that the mythical, long awaited child who identifies as a trans cat has finally been found, manifesting straight from conservative nightmares into a British classroom. Obviously, every transphobe in the country with a platform or the slightest pretense at relevance immediately jumped at the chance to be gleefully, joyously transphobic with no consequences.
After all who can defend allowing a child to identify as a cat, and isn’t defending actual trans people’s right to exist exactly the same thing? Obviously not, but they’ll loudly shout that opinion across the media. These transphobes made so much noise that even the government got involved via an actual discussion in parliament. The only problem with their little festival of transphobia (which will come as no surprise to anyone still remotely connected to reality on this issue) is that the cat-identifying child never existed in the first place. This whole circus was based on a misunderstanding of a three and a half minute TikTok, where a student derisively compared being trans to identifying as a cat while a teacher tried to stop them.
Let’s go back to the beginning. Last week a video illicitly filmed by one of the students in a Year 8 (age 12 to 13) classroom at Rye College in East Sussex made its way to TikTok. This video, beginning midway through an already heated debate around gender identity, featured two students arguing with a teacher over whether trans identities were legitimate or even possible, with the students claiming that transness was a mental illness comparable to identifying as a cat. In the face of some pretty aggressive transphobia, which (from context of the teacher’s statements) seems to have upset a specific child, the teacher eventually lost her cool a bit. She tells the students, “If you don’t like it you need to go to a different school.” It was from this clip that Tucker Carlson, Turning Point UK, and all the rest of the transphobia-drives-clicks brigade incorrectly deduced that the upset child identified as a cat. And furthermore, that said cat-child was supported by the school instead of referred out for some kind of psychological intervention.
Seeing a chance to villainize trans people as a whole, every right wing or transphobic newspaper and TV talking head picked up the story and ran with it. Making it worse was the anonymous online source, picked up by the Mail Online, claiming to be one of the girls in the video’s mother. She asserted that the cat-identified child did indeed exist, and was enabled and coddled by both the school and many of her classmates. This source (tenuous as it was) was held up as proof that not only did the trans-cat child exist, but that the school also had a policy of accepting trans animal identities. The source claimed that the school required other students to respect those identities in the same way they would a gender identity, treating it like part of the spectrum of human diversity. All claims that the school has now unequivocally stated are false on every count. Rye College is not teaching anything like that, there is no child identifying as an animal attending their school (cat or otherwise), and they would not be willing to support or enable a child in identifying that way.
This should be a non-story, but instead it’s gripped the nation’s outrage machine for almost a week now. It’s genuinely hard to tell how much of the furor around this story was cynically manufactured by the media, and how much of it came from those who genuinely believed the absurd story. The whole spectacle was deeply disturbing to watch.
Dressing up as a cat and insisting people call you Meowchelle, as a former Apprentice contestant Michelle Dewberry did on GB News, is not the act of a genuinely concerned person. Yet somehow, the attitude towards both trans and mentally ill people in this country has deteriorated to the point where a mainstream morning TV show decided this was an appropriate response to an unverified news story.
Eventually the story, and the uproar around it, attracted enough attention that the British government got involved. Kemi Badenoch, Minister for Women and Equalities, demanded that the Department of Education investigate the school, with the Education Secretary Gillian Keegan quickly obliging. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak (amidst the numerous real crises plaguing the government) joined in to condemn schools (plural!) for allowing children to identify as animals. Again, this all occured despite the fact that there is no evidence this has ever happened, anywhere, ever.
Of course, the UK government has never let the truth come between it and a convenient, populist talking point (the Brexit means millions for the NHS promise, anyone?). All those crises and problems may very well be the reason the ruling party decided to weigh in on this faux story in the first place. Is it a coincidence that the same day a “mortgage time bomb” dropped, the debate about trans animal children in schools made it to parliament floor? Or is it a distraction, as more than one social media user has pointed out.
Despite confirmation from Rye College, neither the Department of Education nor any other public figure has acknowledged the fact that there are no trans-cat students. And no one has apologized over unleashing a transphobic hate storm fed by easily disprovable lies. Instead, it seems almost as if the Department of Education is doubling down with a statement to Pink News in the aftermath of the “this literally never happened” revelation:
“It is completely inappropriate for schools to treat a pupil as an animal or inanimate object and it is important that parents are able to raise concerns with schools, and that schools engage seriously and constructively.”
Obviously it’s inappropriate for schools, or anyone, to treat children as animals or inanimate objects. But, as we’ve already established, that’s just not happening. What is happening is a lot of transphobic violence, attempts to deny children appropriate information, and a whole lot of government incompetence and malfeasance in more areas than I can count on one hand. But raging against imaginary threats and indulging in mindless hatred is much easier than actually admitting to or tackling any of the real issues in our country. And for dyed-in-the-wool transphobes, it’s a lot more profitable and fun. So that’s where we are right now, and yes, you should be worried. But not about children identifying as cats. Because again, that’s not real, but government corruption is.
(via Byline Times, featured image: screencap/GB News)
