According to the British media, a purr-fectly terrifying new craze is sweeping the country: school children, everywhere, are identifying as cats. They’re meowing, using cat pronouns, drinking out of bowls, and defecating in litter boxes, sometimes inside the classroom. Thanks to equalities legislation and institutional capture by the woke, teachers are terrified to do anything about this – sadly, if they tried to they’d get cancelled, or even sent to prison. It might seem strange that there is no evidence for this mass phenomenon, at a time when everyone has a smartphone and the most minor social indiscretions are posted online every day, but let me assure you: cat-children are real, and their existence poses a threat to the survival of this great nation. You might think I’m being hiss-terical, but if we don’t put a stop to this now, the effects could be cat-astrophic.

Somewhere between a conspiracy theory and an urban legend, this claim has been around for almost a decade. But it has resurfaced this week and caught fire: there have been dozens of op-eds on the subject, a GB News presenter “stunned viewers” by dressing as a cat; Keir Starmer commented that “children should identify as children”, and to top it all off, equalities minister Kemi Badenoch has demanded an official investigation.

It all kicked off with a blatantly misleading Telegraph article, headlined “Pupil who questioned classmate ‘identifying as a cat’ called ‘despicable’ by teacher.” Based on this framing, you’d think that a pupil had been reprimanded for failing to respect the identity of a classmate who identified as a cat, which is how the article was widely interpreted.

But a recording of the incident – posted online by the reprimanded students – does not support this version of events. There is a reference to “identifying as a cat”, made by the student, but it appears to be rhetorical, as part of an argument about whether trans identities should be respected. The school in question has since released a statement denying that any of their pupils identify as a cat, or any other animal.

Of course, this is not really about cats: it’s a proxy argument about whether schools should affirm the identities of trans children, and whether pupils have an obligation to respect their trans classmates. Anti-trans advocates have embraced the narrative enthusiastically because, as they see it, it exposes the absurdity of “gender ideology”. Their logic goes: ‘If we have to affirm a child’s gender identity, then why wouldn’t the same go for people who identify as a cat? Really, isn’t it much the same thing?” It’s a classic slippery-slope argument, similar to the hoary old notion that gay marriage would lead to a litany of social catastrophes, from incest and bestiality to fathers marrying their sons to avoid inheritance tax.

Not only is there no convincing evidence that cat-children are a real phenomenon (beyond a handful of anonymous and somewhat suspicious DMs to Britain’s self-styled “strictest headmistress”), the idea has been debunked, time and time again, in recent history. In the US, a flurry of these stories emerged in 2022 and were heavily promoted by far-right influencers. Every single one was proven to be false. It doesn’t take much common sense to realise that this is not a significant phenomenon. Maybe, despite the absence of evidence, there are a tiny handful of children across the country who sincerely identify as cats. There are probably a few furries, cat-girls and cat-boys, and no doubt some teenagers are wearing cat ears on TikTok. But these are subcultures and aesthetics, not gender identities, and collapsing them together doesn't make sense.

The moral panic is now spiralling out in increasingly absurd directions. If the cat-children weren’t bad enough, there’s worse to come: according to The Telegraph, schoolkids are now identifying as horses, dinosaurs and even the Moon. Whatever next? A child identifying as Spiderman, and falsely claiming to possess superpowers? A young girl describing herself as “princess”, without having any identifiable royal lineage? If that sounds like glib hyperbole, it’s not far off what right-wing commentators are actually saying: journalist Toby Young has claimed that a school has been cowed into respecting the identity of a child who “cavorts around in a Harry Potter cloak putting curses on classmates”, for fear of being “exclusionary”. As well as the obvious transphobia, much of this seems to be driven by an antagonism towards children, their playfulness and imaginations.

This is all incredibly silly, of course. But it’s worrying that a number of British media institutions are so biased against trans people that they are promoting a claim which is both obviously ridiculous and downstream from the American far-right. It’s a kind of wilful, deliberate gullibility: they want it to be true, because it confirms their worldview – it makes a kind of sly, satirical sense. Conspiracy theories are often spoken about as the preserve of marginal figures and fringe obsessives; the kind of people making YouTube videos about how the Titan submersible disaster was a cover-up for alien invasions. But with a strong enough motivation, it’s clear that the ‘respectable’ bastions of the British establishment will believe just about anything.