Fighting the Furries

 

by Pa Rock

He, Him, and (occasionally) It

As a former school administrator of several years, I can say, without hesitation, that scandalous stories about the local schools are a staple in the mental cupboards of many small town gossips and busybodies.  One of the big scare stories back in the days when I was principaling was the continually circulating warning about the temporary tattoos on small slips of thin paper that children could wet and transfer to their skin.  About once a year an excited mother or three would call the school in a panic to warn that she had heard that some biker gang, or hippies, or commies were circulating temporary tattoos on paper that had been soaked in LSD.  

That was back in the days before the internet and social media.  The local gossips had to do their meddling in the education of other people's children the hard way:  door-to-door and by phone.  Today their children and grandchildren can do their fear-mongering with relative ease over platforms like Facebook, X, and TikTok.

With the advances in the methods of spreading wild rumors, the quality of stories has also improved.  Today one of big tales that keep making the rounds is that of the "furries."  This particular mass exaggeration appears to be rooted in the hysteria that conservative media whipped up a couple of years ago over people choosing to use pronouns that were reflective of genders other than the one listed on their birth certificates.

At some point a clever instigator wondered what would be the result if, instead of identifying as a different gender, people chose to identify as another species.   Someone developed that concept a bit further and imagined these human 'animals' going to school, and decided to call them "furries."  Bathrooms were already controversial, so why not stir that into the mix as well and have teachers providing littler boxes for their students who identified as "furries"?

It was a great story - an attack on pronoun usage, a slap at transgender people, another chance to stir some anger over school bathrooms, a way to express some outrage over "permissive" teachers - it just had everything and was too good not to spread.  And though is was total BS with absolutely no basis in fact, tales of "furries" and litterboxes in schools have spread coast-to-coast.

I am a 75-year-old retiree with absolutely no connection to the local schools, but over the past couple of years I have been told twice by local residents about the "furries" in our local school system and the litter boxes that the teachers are providing.   And after hearing about the "furries" that are being educated here locally, I had great concern regarding our area schools.  I knew the stories were malarkey, but my concern was that the local schools had produced the mental nincompoops who were spreading that nonsense.

Last Wednesday Justin Humphrey, a Republican state representative in Oklahoma, introduced legislation to address the very serious (and imaginary) problem of furries in the public schools of Oklahoma.   Rep. Humphrey's bill targets "students who purport to be an imaginary animal or animal species, or who engage in anthropomorphic behavior commonly referred to as furries at school."

Problem solved.  Praise Jesus!