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A spokesperson for Keir Starmer, the leader of the United Kingdom’s center-left Labour party, has repeated a debunked claim that students are identifying as cats.
A video posted to social media showed a teacher arguing with a student about gender identity. In the clip, a student at Rye College in East Sussex says “If you have a vagina you’re a girl and if you have penis you’re a boy. That’s it,” but the teacher countered, saying “Cisgender is not necessarily the way to be. You are talking about the fact that cisgender is the norm, that you identify with the sexual organ you were born with, that’s basically what you’re saying, which is really despicable,” according to The Argus, a Brighton-based news outlet.
The video went viral, with the framing that the student had objected to another student identifying as a cat, based on a comment one of the students made in the clip: “How can you identify as a cat when you’re a girl?”
With this framing, it was reported on by right-leaning UK newspapers including the Daily Mail and The Telegraph, but without any investigation into the claims, taking the cat comment at face value. The outlet Schools Week, however, reached out to Rye College, which confirmed that “no children at Rye College identifies as a cat or any other animal.”
When asked about this incident by The Telegraph, a spokesperson for Starmer accepted the story as true.
“It’s clearly ridiculous if you’re in a situation where children are not being recognised as children. I think it’s fairly obvious what the right approach should be in this case,” the unnamed spokesman said. “I think children should be told to identify as children.”
The idea of children identifying as cats was common in the United States last year, with the urban legend being cited by at least 20 Republicans, according to NBC News. The urban legend usually involves schools being forced to provide kitty litter for these students. The claim, ridiculous on its face, was credulously accepted and repeated by politicians, despite no evidence. It was amplified by Joe Rogan in an interview with former Representative Tulsi Gabbard, and, again, taken as truth despite Rogan not providing any verifiable details. The claim has been widely debunked by outlets including—but not limited to—the Associated Press, Reuters, and Education Week.
It appears that the claim has now jumped the pond as the United Kingdom faces its own transphobia problem. This January, Conservative Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced his government would block a Scottish law that would make it easier for transgender citizens to change their legal gender marker. This week, a leaked video showed Sunak making a transphobic joke, and in April, he wrote an op-ed for the Daily Express supporting a ban of transgender people from single-sex spaces.
“When it comes to women’s spaces, women’s prisons, changing rooms, sports, health, I believe that biological sex really matters,” Sunak wrote. “I know what a woman is – and I’ll protect women’s rights and women’s spaces.”
Sunak and Starmer’s spokesman’s comments follow years of transphobic coverage in the UK media, even from normally left-leaning outlets like The Guardian. Even the country’s state broadcaster was not immune. The BBC published a story originally headlined “We’re being pressured into sex by some trans women.” The piece quoted former porn actress Lily Cade. Cade had a history transphobic remarks, including calling for trans women to be lynched. The same article also used a survey from an anti-trans activist group to bolster its claims, even though the survey was not just self-selecting, but had a laughably small sample size of 80 people.
Featured image by Chris McAndrew, used under the Creative Commons license.
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