Reviews | Why do adults fall for the "Furries" myth?

Many of Pembroke’s goofy, moshing boys look, on the surface, a lot like the jocks I remember hurling anti-gay slurs at. It is obvious th...

Many of Pembroke’s goofy, moshing boys look, on the surface, a lot like the jocks I remember hurling anti-gay slurs at. It is obvious that more children will come out in high schools where they will be accepted and celebrated than in those where they will be bullied and abused.

There is, of course, an even greater generational shift with trans issues. Many middle-aged liberal parents I know have different ideas about gender than their more radical teenage children, and I suspect the divide must be even wider in many conservative families. Christopher Rufo, the right-wing activist leading a crusade against Disney for its opposition to the Don’t Say Gay Bill, told me that a friend of his sent his college daughter to a girls’ choir camp this summer,” and a third of the girls came back saying they were non-binary or queer or gender non-conforming.

Faced with a gender landscape that they find unnerving or worse, conservatives are trying to use schools to turn the tide. The result has been an explosion of book ban orders and educational gags, including proposals even more extreme than those in Florida. Although this state’s Don’t Say Gay bill severely limits what teachers can say about gender and sexual orientation, a proposal in Tennessee would ban public school classroom materials “that promote, normalize, support, or address lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender (LGBT) issues or lifestyles.”

Some of these things, no doubt, are purely cynical. The Trumpist American Greatness site recently famous the term “groomer” as an attempt by the right to do “what the left always does: invent a new political epithet”.

But school culture wars are also driven by alarm and confusion. Last year I wrote about a sexual assault in a Virginia high school restroom that was wrongly attributed to trans-friendly restroom policies. The victim’s family was interviewed by the conservative website The Daily Wire, and the ending stuck with me. The girl’s mother, fighting progressive policies on trans children on her daughter’s behalf, complained that the girl herself had become increasingly progressive.

“Where do these ideas come from? From school, obviously,” the mother said. “It’s not from us.”

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