Teachers, cowed by trans ideology, allow cats in the classroom

In the last century, when I was at school, quite a lot of girls in my year pretended to be horses. We were a short gallop away from Ascot and riding was something of an obsession.

Even for those of us who didn’t own our own ponies or have riding lessons, being a horse during break was a good way to fit in. I remember one day cantering back alone to the classroom as the bell went and going through the rituals horses go through when they come to an abrupt halt, whinnying, pawing the ground and so on.

A bunch of sixth formers watched, bemused, and suddenly I saw myself through their eyes, a girl old enough to know better acting like a horse. That was it for me as far as the equine fantasies went.

But the experience gave me some insight into children today who identify as animals although, unlike me, this lot – reportedly as old as 16 or 17 – are indulged at an official level.

It would seem there is currently a cat craze sweeping through schools, with pupils calling themselves ‘catself’, meowing instead of speaking English, wearing cat ears and lying down in lessons. 

Other animals make an appearance too, with tales of a youngster in the South West identifying as a dinosaur, another at a secondary school in England insisting they are a horse, reports of howling dogs, and parents and teachers being advised how to engage with the ‘furry community’.

The bonkers phenomenon reportedly gained ground on social media during Covid and then spread from virtual to real life, against a backdrop of cultural confusion around identity. But neurotic as some of these youngsters may be, it is the teachers we should be worried about.

In a school in Rye, East Sussex, two 13-year-old girls were reprimanded by their teacher for not respecting a classmate’s wish to be known as a cat.

Sceptics who perhaps thought this was a wind-up only had to listen to the exchange, recorded by the teenagers, to realise that the world has indeed turned upside down.

The teacher told one of the girls she should ‘go to a different school’ for asking her peer ‘how can you identify as a cat, when you are girl?’

The teacher also called the girls ‘despicable’ for saying that gender should be linked to biological sex and she maintained there were three sexes. If a Year 8 has to explain to her teacher that ‘cat’ is not a gender, our education system is in deep trouble. 

In my day, it was the teachers who corrected the kids when they strayed too far into the realms of make believe. Now, though, there seems to be a mass infantilisation of the teaching profession.

Either that or teachers are so cowed by toxic transgender politics that they can’t think straight. They have read about the teacher in Nottingham who was sacked for refusing to use a transitioning eight-year-old’s preferred pronouns, or the maths master in Swindon dismissed for ‘gross misconduct’ after he wouldn’t refer to a biologically female student by their preferred male name.

Tracy Shaw of the Safe Schools Alliance told the Telegraph that teachers now have a ‘blind spot’ over any issue involving identity because they are ‘frightened of doing the wrong thing’.

But they should not take all the rap. Our NHS boards, universities, government departments, publishing houses, public bodies across the UK and an alarming number of our politicians have allowed themselves to be captured by an extreme ideology that defies biological reality.

How can we expect teachers to know what’s what if the leader of the opposition, no less, is muddled over gender definitions and thinks it’s ‘not right’ to say only women have a cervix? 

Interestingly, though, Keir Starmer does know the difference between a cat and a child. The Labour leader believes ‘it is clearly ridiculous’ for teachers to treat children as animals.

Starmer (who himself often identifies as a rabbit caught in the headlights) must have been so relieved, when questioned on a thorny identity row, that it was only animals and children in contention, not men and women or boys and girls.

But in endorsing controversial transgender views that promote the lie that men can be actual women, and vice versa, he and others in positions of power have helped blur the boundaries between fact and fiction.

Is it surprising that the ‘be whoever you want to be’ agenda now extends to members of the animal kingdom for vulnerable children?

The Department for Education is due to publish draft guidance next week advising schools how to deal with the explosion of children identifying as trans but is not expected to include animals in the remit.

So it will be up to teaching staff to deploy some common sense, to distinguish between mischief makers mocking their naivety and those who are genuinely disturbed, and to reject the fashionable concept that changing identities is normal behaviour. 

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