Much like a serpent consuming its own tail, conservatives seem perpetually caught in a self-perpetuating cycle of lies. Namely, they continue to be obsessed with the fiction that public schools are accommodating children who identify as “furries” by providing them with litter boxes, as the Republican candidate for Michigan governor demonstrated at a recent event.
At a rally last week in Hutchinson, Michigan that was documented on Facebook, gubernatorial hopeful Scott Jensen asked the crowd, “Why are we telling elementary kids that they get to choose their gender?”
“Why do we have litter boxes in some of the school districts so kids can pee in them because they identify as ‘a furry’?” Jensen said, ironically adding, “We’ve lost our minds.”
It should go without saying that this is absolutely not happening literally anywhere. But for some reason, the anti-trans right wing has been losing their minds over the supposed furry agenda since at least January. That’s when another Michigan parent first spoke out against the litter box epidemic, claiming that at least one of the schools in her town had a litter box for children who identify as cats, and that this was supposedly a nationwide problem.
Jensen wasn’t the only political candidate spreading the litter box lie this past week, though. On Sunday, Colorado gubernatorial candidate Heidi Ganahl asserted that children in public schools were dressing up as animals “all over Colorado and schools are tolerating it,” per Forbes. When asked for evidence to support this claim, Ganahl’s team sent a local news channel a blurry image of a person wearing a blue fursuit. (Fursuits, it’s worth noting, cost thousands of dollars on average, at least according to anecdotal evidence from Reddit, so such a costume is generally not within the average middle or high schooler’s budget. Sadly, there is no peer-reviewed research on furry economics… yet.)
Despite zero evidence to support it, the notion of litter boxes for kids has since spread throughout the conservative media ecosystem, with a new “controversy” popping up seemingly every month. In February, an Iowa school district was forced to send a letter debunking the litter box conspiracy theory. A Nebraska senator referenced the supposed furry accommodations in a March debate, only to later backtrack and acknowledge that he had been spreading misinformation. A New York school district fell prey to the furry allegations in April; that same month, anti-LGBTQ+ hate account Libs of TikTok targeted a school district in Austin with those allegations, including completely fake worksheets that claimed to teach children about furry and goth subcultures to boot.
The tactic of repeating a completely baseless lie until it becomes widely accepted as truth has become perhaps the most emblematic rhetorical strategy of the GOP. Of course, there was the notion of the “stolen election,” which was largely driven by Fox News host Tucker Carlson. Fox News has also been primarily responsible for spreading baseless and/or misleading claims about trans people, at one point airing 170 segments regarding trans people in the span of just three weeks.
While we’re at it, it’s worth noting that furries don’t necessarily actually identify as animals. Much like cosplay, it’s mostly a hobby enjoyed by people who like to wear costumes around each other and/or draw themselves as anthropomorphized characters. But none of that matters to conservatives; what matters is drumming up as much fake moral outrage as possible to ignite their base, even if that comes at the cost of sparking a second Satanic Panic, this time about clumping clay.
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