Meeowww

Like this sign, we tend to see the world in yes-no categories. Why not "Please avoid trespassing unless you have a very good reason." Of course, that would take a bigger sign!

The conversation was about “furries,” kids who identify as animals and the schools who allegedly allow them to carry this identity into the classroom, the playground and the washroom, even to the point of providing litter boxes so cat-identifying kids can pee like cats.

Way back in the 1950s, I identified as both the Lone Ranger and his horse, galloped across the pasture with my bent-stick six-shooter under my belt, drew my horse to a rampant stop in an imaginary cloud of dust and shot the eyes out of an evil bandit before he could say, “Mennonite non-violence.” On other days, I identified as an engineer, damming up rain runoff in the yard, creating new rivers and lakes. Built bridges. Later, I’d pick up the family guitar and identify as a country singer like, well, take your pick.

My school never provided my horse-me with a stall and a manger of hay.

Identifying as something you want to be or wish you were, is a general phenomenon. Some men dress up as women, use makeup in the way glamorous women do. Some women dress in a way that projects an anti-effeminate, physically active identity. Performers preen images, politicians are only fluent when they have teleprompting, courting adults “put on the Ritz.” Hiding our shortcomings while projecting an image is commonplace.

In children, pretending, mimicking, identifying-with are learning tools. The object of “furries” identification, of course, can be disconcerting if it’s relentless and goes on and on. And granted, kids could certainly mimic behaviour to the point where it appears to spread like a virus. Schools had to ban “fidget gadgets,” after all.

People have been saying, “she/he/they thinks she/he/they is a cat, or dog, or boa constrictor.” Well, no. The only way you can see yourself in a mirror and register “body of a cat” is if you’re hallucinating, and hallucinating is symptomatic of brain trauma and cause for medical intervention. It’s far more likely that an ongoing cat-identification has to do with mimicking cat behaviour and demeanour, and that lying, walking and even “speaking” like a cat fulfills a social/mental need. Cats project calm; the world is stressful, possibly.

But that brings us to the charge that educators are accepting, even encouraging, such behaviour. I’ve read numerous credible reports refuting every one of the “litter boxes in the washrooms” stories. Given the nature of the children I’ve known, being caught by your peers sitting on a litter box in a washroom, even using an especially designated litter-room for cat-identifiers, would render every other part of school life a living hell for that individual.

As closely as I can gather from my reading, the “litter boxes in schools” propaganda dovetails with the abundant doubts being expressed about our educators, particularly via social media. Schools tend to be progressive, in part because their clientele live at the very frontier of whatever changes post-modernity is bringing to humanity. Your local principal and school staff have all had years of training bent toward educating children to live successfully in the world as it is and likely will be, not in a world seen through rose-coloured nostalgia. Keeping balance on a moving train rather than gluing yourself to the platform is an appropriate analogy.  

Reaction to change is always a given, and conspiracy theories serve nicely as tools for attacking progressivism in, in this case, education. The essence of the propaganda is this: homosexuality, transgenderism, “furries” identification, are products of the education system, which is therefor not to be trusted on any level. Misinformation can be bad, but the end goal here is to return education to the imagined past, and that’s important enough to make “the end justify the means.”

Leader of the Conservative Party of Canada has stated that “schools should leave LGBTQ issues to parents.” This “simple question, simple answer” solution couldn’t be more naïve in its conception. The “LGBTQ issues” march through schools, churches, workplaces, politics as surely as through homes, and if gays are being bullied, for instance, it’s possibly not in the home but in the school where it will become immediate and urgent. For a school to ignore discussion of human rights—of which gay rights are one item—avoiding both the social and the biological science surrounding gender/sex subjects would be a blatant derogation of duty.

It's hardly surprising that in New Brunswick and Saskatchewan, sitting governments feel compelled to take sides in questions of what should and what shouldn’t be addressed in the public school system. Among Christians, the creation allegory has Adam and Eve noticing that they are naked, right after sinning against God. In my growing-up generation, sexuality vs. biology was resolved through denial, voluminous covering of the female body, a cloak of silence and euphemism, and a tacit agreement to live in the pretense of sexualities non-existence.

That’s what all this is about; a fear that liberalizing the discussion to include frank education on sexuality and gender will—poetically put—result in our looking down at last and discovering that we’re naked, or even deciding, “Wow. Is that how it’s done? Looks like fun! Let’s do it.” This conservative push toward silencing liberalization in the area of sexuality and gender is strident and persistent … and the attempted repetition of a huge mistake.   

Parents have every right and responsibility to be guiding, nurturing influences in the development of their children. Teachers are charged with preparing them for the responsibilities, rights and privileges of citizenship, and for providing them with the tools to allow them to succeed as independent adults. The roles obviously overlap in many ways, and in an ideal world, differences in philosophy or practice would lead us to negotiate, not to demands for the resolving of differences through government decree.

Therein lies the biggest challenge I see. First order, of course, is to consult with, read reliable sources so that we know sex/gender, pedagogical subjects before firing off, or re-posting, half-baked opinions on social media.

A little learning is a dangerous thing;
drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring[i]:
there shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
and drinking largely sobers us again. (Pope, Alexander, in An Essay on Criticism, 1709.)

 

 

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[i] The source of knowledge