An extraordinary report from a Sussex school has shed light on the growing trend of pupils insisting on being addressed as animals
Difficult as it may be to believe, children at a school in East Sussex were reprimanded last week for refusing to accept a classmate’s decision to self-identify as a cat.
The Year 8 pupils were told they would be reported to a senior leader after their teacher said they had “really upset” the fellow pupil by telling them: “You’re a girl.”
The incident at Rye College, first reported by The Daily Telegraph yesterday, was not a one-off. Inquiries by this newspaper have established that other children at other schools are also identifying as animals, and the responses of parents suggest that the schools in question are hopelessly out of their depth on the question of how to handle the pupils’ behaviour.
The Telegraph has discovered that a pupil at a secondary school in the South West is insisting on being addressed as a dinosaur. At another secondary school in England, a pupil insists on identifying as a horse. Another wears a cape and wants to be acknowledged as a moon.
Stories about children self-identifying as animals – sometimes referred to as “furries” – have been circulating for some time. Some of them, such as tales of schools providing litter trays to cater for children identifying as cats, have turned out to be hoaxes, which has made it all too easy to assume that the problem is either a myth or is wildly exaggerated.
‘One student wears a cape and wants to be acknowledged as a moon’
But it is not difficult to find genuine examples of children in UK schools insisting on being addressed as animals, raising two important questions: why is it happening, and how should teachers respond?
Perhaps tellingly, the incident at Rye College – a Church of England school – happened at the end of a class on “life education” in which children were told by their teacher that there were lots of genders, including “agender – people who don’t believe that they have a gender at all”.
An argument ensued in which two pupils disagreed with the teacher, saying there was no such thing as agender, because “if you have a vagina, you’re a girl and if you have a penis, you’re a boy – that’s it”.
When the pupils told their classmate: “How can you identify as a cat when you’re a girl?” the teacher reprimanded them for “questioning [the child’s] identity”.
In this instance, the teacher in charge of the class appears to have bracketed a child’s desire to be treated as a cat with other children’s desire to be treated as another gender, or genderless.
The school, which does not dispute that the incident happened, said it was committed to inclusive education, but would be “reviewing our processes to ensure such events do not take place in the future”.
The school, then, seems to have accepted that the teacher in question was wrong, but it is hardly surprising if teachers find themselves struggling to make sense of the fast-paced societal changes in which pupils can not only decide to change their preferred pronouns overnight but also their preferred species.
Schools have established protocols when it comes to transgender pupils, but the issue of “furries” is more complex.
Is it simply a spillover from early childhood imaginative play, or the growing phenomenon of cosplay – in which participants dress up as superheroes, aliens, animals or whatever else they choose – being brought into the classroom, where children should be politely told to leave their fantasies at the gates?
Is it a mental health issue, used as a coping mechanism by children who have autism or other difficulties, and who should be treated sympathetically in the same way as other pupils with special needs?
Or does it conceal something much darker going on in the child’s life?
Tracy Shaw, of the grassroots Safe Schools Alliance, said children coming to school and insisting on being addressed as an animal should sound loud alarm bells, and teachers already have all the tools they need to deal with the issue, if they would stop conflating it with gender diversity.
‘Teachers have a blind spot where anything involving identity comes in’
“Teachers should be dealing with this under existing safeguarding frameworks,” she says. “If a child is coming to school identifying as a cat or a horse, that should immediately raise red flags.
“The teacher should be asking themselves, what are these children looking at online? What forums are they on? What is going on in the home? What is happening in that child’s life and who else is involved?
“The problem is that teachers have a blind spot where anything involving identity comes in, because they are frightened of doing the wrong thing. They think they are being kind by affirming these behaviours, but they are not being kind, because they are likely to be missing all sorts of things that are going on in that child’s life.”
The teachers are also letting down other pupils whose education is being disrupted by the affirming of children with abnormal behaviour.
One pupil at a state secondary school in Wales told The Telegraph of a fellow pupil who “feels very discriminated against if you do not refer to them as ‘catself’”. She added: “When they answer questions, they meow rather than answer a question in English. And the teachers are not allowed to get annoyed about this because it’s seen as discriminating.”
The student in question is in Year 11, but began using the pronoun “catself” in Year 9 “when the whole thing with neo pronouns started”, the pupil said.
She described how lessons could be completely derailed if a teacher attempted to get the child to reply to a question in English rather than meowing.
“It’s affecting other people and their education and everybody in their lessons. It’s distracting to sit in a lesson and have someone meow to a teacher rather than answer in English, especially at secondary school age.
“That’s going to take a lot out of a lesson because people are going to spend the entire lesson talking about whoever it is over there meowing to the teacher.
“It’s a big ask to sit there and listen to someone answer like that and not have that be the main talk of the classroom rather than the lesson going on.”
‘They meow rather than answer a question in English. It’s distracting [us] in the lesson’
The pupil blamed social media, saying students were being influenced by accounts run by people who identify as trees and animals. It started “around Covid”, she says.
“When it first started, it didn’t really go out into real life that much. It stayed confined to social media, but then as it got more popular and more people were finding out about it, people then started bringing it into real life situations.”
The Telegraph also spoke to a pupil at a school where one student, who identifies as “moonself”, wears a cloak to school, described by a fellow pupil as “like a Harry Potter wizard cape”.
The child in question did not identify as the Moon, but as a moon, and said they could put curses on people.
But while other pupils would be pulled up for wearing non-uniform items, such as facial piercings or dyed hair, children who identified as cats or moons would be allowed to wear cat ears or cloaks to express their “true self”, breeding resentment among other pupils.
Teachers are not helped by the fact that respected organisations to which they might turn for guidance can themselves be caught up in the confusion between cosplay and self-identity.
The Safer Schools organisation (not to be confused with the Safer Schools Alliance), which claims to be a “multi-award-winning safeguarding ecosystem” has issued guidance to parents and teachers in which it says: “The furry community itself is a complex one, made up of many different identities and definitions of what it means to be a ‘furry’.”
It also advises parents and teachers to “engage in conversation about what it means to be a furry and the benefits of the furry community”.
It hardly constitutes clear instructions on how to react to a child who insists on being recognised as a cat or a dog, and does not mention the fact that children identifying as an animal may be highly vulnerable and in need of help.
If teachers – or parents – hope that the Government will clear up the whole mess when it issues its new guidance on self-identity this week, then they will be sorely disappointed.
The Department for Education said the issue of children identifying as animals will not be addressed in the guidance, with a spokesman saying that the department trusted teachers to apply “common sense” in each individual case.
Unfortunately, as parents up and down the country are finding, the problem with common sense is that it is not so common.
