There is a 23rd Sept. Facebook (FB) post by Penny Hubbard which claims to show a ‘young lady’ who is exceptionally bright and who identifies as a cat. The claim is that her parents have asked her school to grant their daughter the right to identify as a cat.
Hubbard also claims that her parents are ‘feeding into her mental illness’. The post says that the young lady is ‘crying for attention’ and is allowed to have a litter box.
She crawls around and makes cat sounds. Her school accepts it.
But in this case USA Today News has exposed the FB post as a lie. They say ‘this post tells a story that simply didn’t happen. The photos are from 2016 and show a Norwegian adult who is capable of speaking, not a non-verbal, school-aged child’.
The newspaper reached out for a comment from Hubbard, as I understand it.
I don’t know where USA Today News got their ‘facts’ from. But they are confident that the Hubbard FB post is fiction.
And if true it supports the view that FB users need to be cautious about what is claimed to be true on social media. I guess we all knew that already.
The newspaper tells us that Peggy Hubbard lost a recent Illinois Republican US Sen primary. Apparently, the post suggests that there is a connection to a US school district, but I don’t see it. There’s nothing in there which implies that the young lady in the Facebook post attends an American school.
In fact, the photographs show a 20-year-old Norwegian woman, Nano, according to the newspaper. They say she was subject to multiple media reports in 2016 when at the time she claimed to be a cat trapped in a human body.
And in support of this false Facebook post, the woman in the photographs has been heard to speak in a Norwegian media interview made in 2016.
The news agency, Reuters, also debunked this Facebook post. USA TODAY also state that they have debunked other false claims that schools accommodate children who identify as animals and provide litter boxes to them. They provide a long list of examples including Nano.
They state that, for example, on January 26, 2016, the Daily Mail reported on a woman who believed that she was born the wrong species. The woman claimed that she was a cat trapped in a human body and she hissed at dogs. She also claimed that she can see better at night and hates water.
There is a lot of fiction out there on social media and I don’t know why people make these things up, but it is difficult sometimes to take Facebook and other social media posts on face value.
However, there appears to be a bit of a movement towards being a ‘furry’. If true it might indicate stress and anxiety issues among school children. This squares up with reports in the UK on self-harming by school kids.
School accused of installing cat litter trays for students who identify as ‘furries’
