Séamas O'Reilly: The 'kids identifying as cats' hoax is one of malice, not stupidity
Pictured: a cat, and not, as some hoaxes designed to belittle transgender and non-binary people would you have believe, a changeling student at your local secondary school
The WhatsApp message was breathless and concerned a school back home in Derry.
“Have you heard about this?” it said, and pointed to a forwarded block of text detailing a bizarre and troubling turn of events in class.
Students had started identifying as cats, it said, demanding litter trays, even.
“Wow,” I said, surprised.
My alarm was not, however, due to me having never heard of such a thing, but because I’d heard the exact same tired grift hundreds of times before. You might have, too.
As recently as January, it was reported that Skibbereen Community School had sent a letter to parents who demonstrated ‘concern’ — gullibility is, after all, an unkind word — when the exact same rumour had descended on West Cork.
As an extremely online person, my familiarity with this meme goes back a little further.
I’ve been hearing of the litter box hoax for years, and my initial feeling was to be quite tickled it had made its way to somewhere I knew in real life, almost starstruck.
It was a bit like going to your local supermarket and seeing the original Grumpy Cat stacking shelves, or thumbing through a rack of clothes in your favourite boutique and finding that dress that looked either gold or blue, depending on how much free time you had in 2015.
“It’s fake,” I said, posting a link to the alarmingly voluminous Wikipedia page for the ‘Litter Boxes In Schools Hoax’, assuring my correspondents that this was an extremely well-documented con, with a tediously predictable modus operandi.
They seemed unconvinced. Teachers had seen this, they said. Students too.
These accounts always arrived from some form of remove: a friend’s daughter who was a student; a colleague’s niece who worked there.
I’m a firm believer in Hanlon’s razor, the rule that says one should never attribute to malice anything adequately explained by stupidity — sorry, gullibility — and so, merely counselled caution.
I even sounded a hint of optimism. “If this is true,” I said, “then this will really put Derry on the map — the first place on Earth where this has actually happened after hundreds of fakes!”.
I waited a respectful period of a week or two and returned for an update.
Surely, by now, the stench would be overwhelming, the classrooms destroyed from scratching, the education board’s budget for balls of yarn and catnip stretched to breaking point. Thankfully not.
I was told that they’d not heard about it again, save for a few teachers expressing confusion and anger that totally unsourced rumours had forced them to answer the stupidest questions they’d ever encountered in long educational careers.
This, dear reader, was four months ago. I hadn’t thought about it again until this past week, when the UK press was confronted by the litter box hoax and managed to display less critical faculties than a disinterested WhatsApp group or, for that matter, a moderately well-informed sea sponge.
To give a brief precis of events, the same story made its way to a school in East Sussex, and then several schools thereafter.
Unlike their Irish equivalents, the British papers eagerly told their readers that the world was, indeed, going mad.
“Inside the world of the Furries” screamed the Daily Mail.
“Why is the number of children claiming they’re cats on the rise — and why are teachers indulging the new subculture to the alarm of parents?”
Katharine Birbalsingh, a favourite educational commentator of the right-wing press who bills herself as “Britain’s Strictest Headmistress”, really led the charge, tweeting out the same insider’s account of “children identifying as cats” that I’d seen on WhatsApp.
Her caption, “We are not making this stuff up”, was somewhat undercut by the fact that she’d failed to spot the template formatting of said message, the sincerity of which might be questioned in lines like “my child/children is/are at an independent school in Norfolk”.
Luckily, Birbalsingh appears to save her famous strictness for her students, and she refused to be too hard on herself for this lack of common sense — or, indeed, reading comprehension.
Instead, she doubled down, claiming she even knew schools where students identified as “gay holograms”. Sadly for science, no further detail on that tantalising detail was forthcoming.
The government demanded an investigation into the school at the centre of the controversy.
Opposition leader Keir Starmer said those students “should be told to identify as children”.
And then, the school released a statement confirming that, obviously, no such student had ever said they identified as a cat whatsoever.
By then, it was too late. Dozens more unfounded stories were printed, detailing a veritable menagerie of different creatures our poor, defenceless children were now embodying.
A full seven days after the first school’s statement, GB News declared, “Woke madness spreads as pupil now tells teacher they identify as a fox”.
The world’s stupidest meme had become fully enmeshed in the nostrils of Britain’s culture war beast.
So let us speak as adults. The meme’s origins are in it being spread, deliberately and knowingly, by conservative organisations seeking to block proposed protections for trans students in American public schools, and to dupe gullible parents into thinking that any school that would teach their students that trans people are worthy of respect, would also tolerate — in fact, tacitly encourage — people identifying as animals.
Any clear analysis must avoid viewing this entirely depressing episode as a breakdown in critical faculties on the part of the British press.
Certain elements within the British press understand perfectly well that these things aren’t happening, but appreciate any cudgel with which to hit their intended targets — innocent trans and gender-nonconforming people, whose existence and dignity they reject out of hand.
So no, we should never attribute to malice anything adequately explained by stupidity.
But we should remember that malicious people are more than happy to use stupidity as their shield.
There is malice, and bigotry, at the core of these cat-child fairy tales, and we should be vigilant against them.
