A Texas GOP Candidate’s New Claim: School Cafeteria Tables Are Being Lowered for “Furries”

https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/texas-gop-candidate-furries-schools/

This is the newest culture war outrage attempt by the right wing.  Hoping to play off the anti-LGBTQ+ book removal issues the right is now claiming that little kids schools are allowing kids to identify as cats and dogs along with other animals.  In other words schools are now accommodating furries.  Furries for those who don’t know are simply people that like to dress up in animal costumes.  It is not necessarily sexual but it also can be.  Some costumes are full body very expensive suits and others are much more limited.  Right wing candidates want to drum up outrage and get their base motivated are claiming that schools are setting out litter boxes for kids to relieve themselves and now letting kids eat like pets without using their hands.  The litter box thing was a joke the right wing took for real.  The more embarrassing thing is these candidates for elected office never checked out these silly things and just promote them as real.  

The allegation isn’t true. But that isn’t stopping some politicians and right-wing activists from running with it.

By Dan Solomon

January 26, 202240

On Sunday night, a candidate in the GOP primary for Texas House District 136, which includes a large portion of the suburbs north of Austin, tweeted a curious allegation. That candidate, Michelle Evans—an activist who works with the local chapter of conservative parents’ group Moms for Liberty and who cofounded the anti-vaccine political action committee Texans for Vaccine Choice, back in 2015—tweeted that “Cafeteria tables are being lowered in certain @RoundRockISD middle and high schools to allow ‘furries’ to more easily eat without utensils or their hands (ie, like a dog eats from a bowl).”

She was responding to a tweet from right-wing Texas provocateur Michael Quinn Sullivan, who had shared a video of a woman speaking at a December school board meeting in Midland, Michigan, claiming that schools there have added “litter boxes” in the halls to allow students who identify as “furries” to relieve themselves. Sullivan retweeted the video, adding, “This is public education.” (It isn’t; the claims made by the speaker in the video have been shown to be untrue.) 

As in the debunked Michigan example, the claim about Round Rock ISD is false. Jenny LaCoste-Caputo, Round Rock ISD’s chief of public affairs and communications, told Texas Monthly, “This is not happening. Our tables don’t even have the option of lowering.” She added, “You win the award for strangest media question of the year!” When reached for an interview about her tweet, Evans said she had “no comment” and was “merely relaying information” that she received from another parent. She promised to put other parents and students who could speak to her claim in touch with Texas Monthly. As of press time, we have yet to hear from anyone who could offer firsthand knowledge of what Evans described in her post. 

 

At face value, Evans’s claim fails to pass a sniff test: Did an entire school district of smartphone-addicted teens just forget to snap a picture of their classmates eating in the way that dogs do? If not, where did this strange claim come from? 

The furries panic appears to have originated from a news report from Meade County, Kentucky, about an hour southwest of Louisville, that ran on WLKY, an NBC affiliate, in August. That story lacked some of the more sensational elements that appeared in the tweet about Round Rock and in the video from Michigan, but it cited a lone, anonymous Kentucky grandmother who claimed that students wearing cat ears and tails were bullying her grandchildren. “Apparently, from what I understand, they’re called ‘furries,’” the grandmother told the station. “They identify with animals. These people will hiss at you or scratch at you if they don’t like something you’re doing.” (Notably, the story the station posted on its website is illustrated not with a picture of a student in an outfit like the one described by the grandmother, but with a photograph of a house cat.) 

In response, the Meade County school district superintendent said there was no need to change school policy because what was being reported as a plague of cat-people taking over a school was actually “a small number of Meade County High School students [who] have violated the dress code policy during the early part of the school year.” As for allegations of teens hissing at classmates they don’t like? That just sounds like high school. 

Nonetheless, concerns over furries in schools began to take on elements of moral panic and urban myth in the ensuing weeks and months. In October, an Idaho talk radio station ran a report that said students who claimed to be furries were being excused from their homework because “paws and hooves can’t grip a pencil and struggle with a keyboard”—with citations such as “I recently heard someone say that there are students in the Twin Falls city school system identifying as animals.” The story was later updated, after the station spoke with the Twin Falls school superintendent, who clarified that “none of the TFSD schools have experienced students coming to them with claims of identifying as animals. Nor have any building administrators heard from teachers that students are being disruptive during class due to identifying as an animal.” He added that such a claim would not exempt a student from homework.