No, American schools are not encouraging pupils to identify as cats

As if there were not enough other threats to American civilisation to consider, the national epidemic of furries, or children who identify as animals, in schools has been getting a lot of attention. Popular social-media accounts, including Libs of TikTok, which highlights daft things liberals are supposedly doing, spread the idea that schoolchildren are self-identifying as cats, and teachers are placing litter boxes in school bathrooms so that they may defecate comfortably. This is not actually true. But the speed with which this idea became mainstream illustrates how social media can confirm partisans’ wildest ideas about the other side, as well as how hard such fantasies are to dislodge once they have taken hold.