It started off innocuously enough – a leaked snippet of teenage pupils at a school debating whether a person could identify as a cat.
But within days, and thanks to a media frenzy, Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer were being asked about the remarks. And by the end of the week, Kemi Badenoch was demanding the school be urgently investigated by Ofsted in case there were safeguarding issues.
All this, despite the school itself saying no children had identified “as a cat or any other animal”.
The controversy began when a student secretly recorded the discussion involving year 8 pupils at Rye college in East Sussex. In the excerpt posted to TikTok, a pupil describes the idea of another pupil identifying as a cow or cat as “crazy” and extends her remarks to include biological sex and gender as binary.
A teacher is heard telling the student that their views were “despicable”, threatening to report them to a senior colleague and saying: “If you don’t like it, you need to go to a different school.”
The audio was prominently reported by the Sun, and the Daily Mail began warning of outbreaks of so-called “furries” in schools.
