A Texas politician in line for the GOP primary for Texas House District 136 has claimed that schools are being redesigned to accommodate students who are furries. Michelle Evans has claimed that "cafeteria tables are being lowered" in certain Round Rock ISD schools to allow furries to "eat without utensils", a claim which was quickly debunked and ridiculed by Round Rock ISD's chief of public affairs Jenny LaCoste-Caputo.
"This is not happening. Our tables don’t even have the option of lowering,” explains LaCoste-Caputo. “You win the award for strangest media question of the year!”
Evans' absurd comments were first picked up by Texas Monthly writer Dan Soloman, who claimed remarks like these are being used to spark a new "moral panic." Seeing as though Evans' evidence of these claims came from gossip and rumors relayed by "another parent", it's easy to see how this feels like manufactured hysteria.
Unfortunately, Evans isn't the only high-profile figure to think that furries are now somehow taking over American schools. In fact, Evans' comments were in response to Texas Scorecard publisher Michael Quinn Sullivan's tweet regarding litter boxes in school bathrooms, another claim which has also been swiftly debunked.
According to Texas Monthly, concerns over furries in high schools originated from a report last August in which a grandmother claimed that students "wearing cat ears and tails" were bullying her grandchildren. Ever since, false stories of furries rampaging through high schools demanding sweeping changes to benefit their nonexistent lifestyles have been steady.
It's pretty clear from the outside looking in that furries aren't doing any of the things they're claimed to have done, and if they are, it's a vast minority. Attacks on gender identity from high-profile individuals have ramped up in both the US and the UK in recent years, and furries becoming the new hot "controversial" topic in the US is sad but not unexpected. People simply need something else to get mad at, and there's nothing more dangerous to a right-wing pundit than their own imagination.
Source: The Detroit News