The Forbidding Unlawful Representation of Roleplaying in Education, or FURRIES, Act, filed by Austin-area Republican State Rep. Stan Gerdes, would “prohibit any non-human behavior by a student, including presenting himself or herself, on days other than exempt days, as anything other than a human being.”
The law would allow for exempt days, such as Halloween and other school dress-up days.
The law defines “non-human” behavior as “any type of behavior or accessory displayed by a student in a school district other than behaviors or accessories typically displayed by a member of the homo sapiens species,” with provided examples being:
Using a litter box for the passing of stool, urine or other human byproducts
A personal or outward display, except during a school play or by a school mascot, through surgical or superficial means of features that are non-human such as using tails, leashes, collars or other accessories designed for pets
Using fur, other than naturally occurring human hair or a wig made to look like human hair
Artificial, animal-like ears
Other physiological features that have not historically been assigned to the human race through a means of natural biological development
Students who bark, meow, hiss or make other animal noises that are not human speech
Licking oneself or others for the purpose of grooming or maintenance.
Man they are still caught up on that fake story somebody sent to one of these morons claiming kids were using litter boxes in school. It never happened but they’re going to try to legislate it away anyway.
The lesson here is don’t troll these idiots, they’ll fucking believe it and then start passing idiotic laws for non-problems.
And when you try and tell anyone who bought it they say there is evidence, while never being able to provide any.
They will say this legislation proves its real. Why else would this legislation exist? I’m sure the lawmakers have all the evidence.
I’ve just taken to saying “provide me with evidence or shut the fuck up” usually followed closely by “how about one that’s from multiple independent sources and not from a fox opinion piece or personal blog”
The lesson here is don’t troll these idiots, they’ll fucking believe it and then start passing idiotic laws for non-problems.
Throwback to when 4chan started memeing about pizzas, and the resulting chain of events led to a real pizza parlor being shot up by a right-wing nut job who thought it was full of pedophiles.
I don’t see how they ignored an actual case of sexual assault at a pizza parlor…oh it’s because he was a Republican mega donor.
Also, the Google results for ‘Vander Esch assault pizza ranch’ have at least five different “digital newspapers” pushed to the top of the results with a different story that does not match the record of the legal proceedings.
The weird thing is for some reason people will lie to perpetuate these falsehoods
Like I do therapy and I talk to teenagers regularly because teenagers need mental health support, obviously. And sometimes they’ll bring up shit like this: “my school installed a litter box because of these woke kids”
But even the most basic of prodding: “did they really” with a tone of like “come on” and they’ll backpedal, “well no, but like there are kids that have fursonas and shit”
It’s crazy to see it start so young. They’re realizing at like 16 they can get adults to gang up on the kid they think is weird by being dishonest, and adults buy into it because it’s a chance to bully someone weaker and politicians jump on it because it’s a new wedge issue to distract people from class consciousness
And what’s crazy is that by some perspectives if I call them out on this dishonesty and point out this cycle I’m indoctrinating them
It’s funny a Portuguese person just told me the same story happened in PT to justify anti-trans positions. So it’s the same bullshit story, localized, and repeated.
Just like how antisemitic stereotypes with no basis (blood libel etc.) have been repeated in many countries for hundreds of years. Even before the internet, memes were used for the effective spreading of suspicion and hatred.
Yep, we had the exact same fake news story spread in Canada, and used as cover for anti-trans policies. Can we put some tariffs on disinformation please?
This hoax actually started out in PEI and then spread everywhere.
Huh I didn’t know that! Fine, export taxes on disinfo then
I always love using that example to dismiss some concerns about deepfakes sparking national conspiracies.
Nobody even tried to fake a picture of it. I’ve seen photos on lemmy of people shaving their heads in weird ways or making some horrible bean-themed food just for the karma. Throwing an empty litter box in an empty classroom takes much less effort yet nobody even bothered.
Ok, I’m new here and I HAVE to ask what’s up with beans. If it’s not too uncool to ask
Beans were just some sort of meme that popped up randomly. I think it was one of those “mods are asleep quick post [x] before they wake up” types of things, and it quickly spiraled until half of everyone’s feed was just beans.
I was around when it happened, and even I don’t understand it.
Beans are amazing. What else do you need to know?
Go beans
Ugh. So uncool. ~j/k I dunno either~
I did a small dive and found an account of an apparent legit case of a litter box in a school, but it was for an option for extended school shooting drills
https://www.denverpost.com/2018/03/03/school-shooting-preparations/amp/
That’s how this whole “kids are identifying as cats and using litter boxes at school” shitshow started.
Yup, camp toilets are a similar concept. It’s just a 5 gallon hardware store bucket with a snap-on toilet seat lid. You line it with what is essentially a trash bag, just to make disposal easier. Then you use a gelling agent (just like what is in disposable diapers to allow them to soak up a bunch of moisture) to reduce sloshing and smell. It’s handy for when you’re going to be away from toilets for a day or two, but don’t want to (or aren’t able to) dig a hole to shit in.
But the same concept applies for when you’re going to be trapped somewhere (like a classroom) for an extended period of time. Like, for instance, during a school shooting. When you have 30 kids in a classroom, there’s a very good chance that at least one of them will need to piss after an hour or two. And nobody wants to deal with human waste in something like an open trashcan during a lockdown.
And as an added bonus, the bucket can be used to store all of active shooter supplies when it’s not in use. So everything is in a single location to quickly grab and prep. Active shooter happens? Great, just grab the big bucket out of the closet, dump all of the supplies out, and you’re ready to go. Now all of your tourniquets, styptic bandages, etc are accessible.
But it quickly got distorted into “they’re making kids use litter boxes to indoctrinate them” instead.
These are the same sort of dumbfucks that absolutely believed the “LSD stickers/tattoos” bullshit way, way back and would insist on schools passing out flyers based on that stupid urban legend.
I remember being in sixth grade when they had a bout of that going around our school, and I was like, wait, what? And I had a lot of doubts. And that’s when I was in sixth grade. Years later, you could look it up and see what nonsense it was. Anyway, I was at TWO different jobs where someone was trying to “inform parents” with some printouts they had about you guessed it, the bullshit LSD stickers nonsense. The first time, I told them “you know, this is urban legend, right?” I get immediately treated like I’m some kind of criminal that does not want to protect the children.
I suspect the bullshit around litter boxes will have a similar lifetime among those that are hard of thinking.
The lesson here is don’t troll these idiots, they’ll fucking believe it and then start passing idiotic laws for non-problems.
Exactly this. Just like flat earthers (and that super bizarre one about time cubes or whatever), the rubes will gobble it up and eventually people will get hurt over it.
Another one is the Birds Aren’t Real meme, which I think is pretty funny, but you just know that an innocent birdwatcher will get shot some day because an extremely mentally unwell person will assume that they’re some government spook checking on the “drones”.
IIRC it did have a hint of truth, like most things do. They then spun a totally different story from it. The hint of truth is it was for school shootings where they couldn’t leave the classroom for an extended period of time.
Instead of addressing the real issue, which is that school shootings have become so common that preparations like this need to be made, they spun it into a story that the schools were pandering towards furries. As always, it’s all smoke and mirrors to keep people distracted and give them an enemy, so they don’t force representatives to actually help them.
what? absolutely troll these idiots now that you know they are very susceptible.
just do it in a way they pass good laws out of fear instead.
This idiocy must be weaponized
While you’re right about that being fake, it’s just pandering to their base who do take issue with forms of self-expression that are common amongst queer, trans and/or autistic students. Things like wearing a collar, a tail or cat ears are absolutely relatively common and this bill targets those all the same.
My daughters love wearing cat-ear headbands. It’s cute, they like it, end of story. Nobody has thrown a fit about it yet… 🤞🤞
The lesson here is don’t troll these idiots
Maybe the lesson is to troll harder until they legislate themselves into ruin?
The lesson here is to actually troll these idiots, but with stuff that lead to idiotic laws so inconvenient that even their voter base will hate them for it.
Give them enough rope, and they’ll hang themselves with it.
Or they’ll lynch us.
Besides them being stupid as hell to conduct this ridiculous culture war, I take issue with another thing, the name:
Forbidding Unlawful Representation of Roleplaying in Education
It’s not unlawful until you forbid it. So the title makes no sense. You’re not forbidding the unlawful. You’re forbidding the previously lawful, making it unlawful.
Stupid assholes.
Plus the acronym rules are inconsistent. It should be FURRE or FURRORIE
Repugniklan Anger Withering our Rights
Forbidding Unlawful Representation of Roleplaying in Education
In Texas parties only lawful alignment is allowed. We don’t care if your Good or Evil, as long as your not chaotic or neutral.
Maybe the constitution of the United States of America says something about this? Maybe like the first thing in the bill of rights? Nah I must be mistaken.
Schools have to maintain a certain level of order and conformity to function as intended. Courts have already ruled as much. You can’t engage in behavior which would prevent the system from working as intended e.g. walk around topless, yell profanities, play loud music, etc - things which you can obviously do in other public spaces. Wearing full body animal costumes or barking randomly, claiming its your identity, is just as ridiculous and just as disorderly.
With that said, schools probably already had the tools they needed to stop this, so I’m not sure why a law was needed. Unless there was actually some furry zealot fighting against a school board.
I just had a read through the bill and, as written, it would prohibit elementary school children from playing pretend as animals on the school playground during recess. Obviously, if a student were using that as pretext to, like, bite someone, you’d want a supervisor stepping in, but to straight-up ban harmless elements of play-pretend like this is frankly asinine.
yeah ok but like schools can make policy. If someone is doing something thats an issue there’s a dean for a reason.
Also, I don’t think a headband with ears is really the biggest issue of our times right now. This is entirely useless and just for control. Same with banning books, there’s already systems in place. Globally banning things -that AREN’T an issue- does not help anybody at all.
This is ONLY for erasure of demographics and control over the people. Starts with furries, then men in skirts, then anything queer at all.
You can’t engage in behavior which would prevent the system from working as intended
So, enforcing uniformity?
To the degree necessary for education, absolutely.
That doesn’t matter anymore
Man they keep coming back to the litterbox thing, it really freaks them tf out. Even though its been debunked dozens of time, my conservative friends all swear they know a guy that knows a guy that swears he saw one for real!
Oh, the litter boxes are real…
It’s just that their purpose is to be used during a school shooting lockdown.
I would not be able to stop myself from laughing if i saw that happening for real but these people think of it as a threat to their existence, as a crime.
What a witless world we live in.
They’re going after easy targets like schools because if they targeted furries in the state government, all of the IT infrastructure would crumble.
Hah, that made me chuckle. I recently attended an outdoor market in my area that for some reason had an unusually high number of furries wandering around it. I was really curious what the bus factor of that market would actually be.
Yeah in this case I kind of meant the corollary to a bus factor. Essentially if everyone at that market disappeared, how many companies would be severely impacted?
No worries, I understood what you meant. It’s like that photo of all the furries on an airplane… Pray it doesn’t crash or else the world infrastructure is done for 😂
I’m frankly shocked it hasn’t already, the pay for government IT jobs is kinda shit, and they’ve been trying to slash federal employee benefits for years (theres been recent rumors of increasing mandatory FERS deductions and turning insurance into a voucher program). they’ve started going after anyone LGBTQ+ federally as well.
Ultimately the problem is that that works in their favour. Remember the Republican position is “The Government doesn’t work and if you put me in charge of it I’ll prove it!”, so the only thing they need to do is destroy anything they can get their hands on. The only part of the government they care about (other than their specific seat) is the military. They will gleefully watch everything else burn and then point at the ashes as proof they were right all along.
They piss on the DoD and call it rain too, just not as much. Contractors generally make more than the civilian employees at the cost of potentially getting screwed over at the end of the contract or during a shutdown (realistically, I’ve heard it doesn’t happen that often, they’ll usually just get hired by whoever gets the next contract), and civilian employees just get more stable work hours and benefits (separate annual/sick leave pools, insurance, etc); if shit needs done after hours, they’ll call the active duty folks in, and if they cant make things work it’ll wait till morning.
Edit; forgot where i was going with this and rambled a bit. TL;DR, they want to replace everyone DoD with contractors and active duty. People who can easily be fired (ran by companies that bribe politicians) and people who can be imprisoned for saying “no.”.
Trump is attacking the military too. He hates anyone who swears an oath to anyone or anything but himself, and also the military is one power center that could (and should) remove him and his cronies from office. The military leans right, but takes a very dim view of treason.
So a furry suit made from human hair is ok? Asking for a friend
My barking at people is protected under the first amendment.
Unfortunately students give up their first ammendment rights when they go to school.
That needs to be challenged in court. I get having rules in a school setting, but locking up misbehaving children is mental.
False Tinker v. Des Moines asserted that students at public schools can be forced to not be disruptive to learning, but retain their rights as held under the first amendment within those grounds.
In fact, if the Supreme Court practiced common law and based their decisions on anything other than bribes, pre existing beliefs, and whatever they pulled out of their ass I’d say that this law was blatantly unconstitutional and would get thrown out immediately
100%
Sooooo much freeedommmm… By limiting self expression.
Texans, next time you look at the prices in the grocery store, remember that this is what your representatives are spending their time on.
Or, you know, when your kids are dying of measles.
Or when your kids are dying from school shooters…
Students who bark, meow, hiss or make other animal noises that are not human speech
I’m not quite sure what it is exactly (/s), but maybe—just maybe—this is yet another attempt to fuck over and ostracize transfem and autistic people, but instead of being direct about it, using furries as the boogeyman.
Also to arrest basically any kindergartner.
There are very many normal human sounds that are not speech, including, but not limited to: laughter, crying, yelling/screaming/yelping (in surprise, pain, fear), groaning, moaning, yawning, sneezing, coughing, vomiting, singing, whistling.
What constitutes human speech? There are languages that have sounds that don’t exist in other languages (said as someone still trying to get a hold on rolling my Rs).
In any case, we should all learn some sign language. Seriously, it’s useful to be able to communicate silently or just visually (e.g. Across a noisy room), plus it makes life way more inclusive for Deaf people.
For once Im halfheartedly glad it’s not related to transgender. Still shitty nonetheless,
I fully agree but it’s really only associated with transfem people because of the high rates of autism in our community
What world do these people live in? I just can’t imagine this is a issue and i imagine that passing a law like this will just lead to kids definitely shitting in litter boxes because breaking the law is fun, imagine the court case of a kid dressed like a cat and pissed in a box… straight to jail
Play Duck Duck Goose? Jail
Face paint? Beleive it or not Jail
Old McDonald? Straight to jail
Unless it’s blackface
Play Stray? You better believe it, jail
Red rover? Also jail
Cat’s Cradle? You better believe that’s jail.
Leapfrog? Execution.
Can we still say “what’s up, dawg?”
It is funny that the litter box story was taken as gospel.
What a time to be alive.
Yea, but you can’t say “I got that dawg in me.”
Only if there’s an updawg leak in the school.
What’s a leak?
Like a really big spring onion
Not much, leak. What’s a dawg with you?
Depends on who you are. If you’re Brock the quarterback, you’ll be fine. If you look a bit queer or neurodivergent or are from a racialised minority, probably not a good idea.
It’s incredible that republicans can constantly waste tax dollars on worthless shit like this and still be viewed as the party of financial responsibility by their dumb ass voting base
Bigotry is a big seller with that crowd.
That’s a really good point I didn’t consider. Just like it was with “eggs”, the “financial responsibility” crap really is just a front they put up in bad faith to avoid admitting that it’s all about racism
Imposing this bullshit on children who often have vivid imaginations and like to play make believe shows just how much the Republican party actually cares about children.
