Children identify as cats and schools must comply
Konstantin Kisin said:
“There's people in British schools who identify as cats and go in to, to school and every- well, everyone's supposed to respect their identity.”
This claim circulated widely in UK media in 2022 and was reported as fact by several outlets, so a viewer who encountered those stories would treat it as established.
This story was investigated thoroughly and no school, no policy, no incident was ever found. It began as an anecdote at a political conference, got picked up and repeated as though it had been verified, and by the time journalists and fact-checkers went looking for the actual evidence, there was none. The reason it keeps circulating is precisely because it is so vivid, a claim that ridiculous sticks in the memory whether or not it is true. What it does in practice is drag trans pupils into a story about something that never happened, so that every time a child asks to be called by their name or their pronoun, someone in the room is thinking about cats instead of about a young person who needs to feel safe at school.
What I said at the time:
“But is it not true? No, no, it's not true.”
Trans pupils, who are lumped in with a fabricated story to make gender identity as a concept appear absurd, undermining the case for their own recognition and support in schools.