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Does Title IX protect furries?

by Summer July 17, 2023 0 comments

By: Summer

If A Man Can Identify As A Woman, Why Can’t A Kid Identify As A Kitten?

Last month, Florida’s Brevard County school board passed a new dress code policy to prohibit students from dressing like animals. Citing student complaints about “furries,” the board forbade attire emulating “on-human characteristics,” e.g., cat ears and dog collars.

Some say that Brevard’s new dress code violates President Joe Biden’s proposed Title IX regulations.

The public controversy over the proposed regulations centered on the redefinition of “sex” to mean “gender identity.” But what exactly does “gender identity” mean? The regulations do not provide a definition.

The New York State Department of Education defines “gender identity” as “a mental, emotional, and spiritual state that is not determined by a person’s anatomy.” If gender identity is a “spiritual state” not determined by reproductive anatomy, need it be confined by human anatomy? Why couldn’t a girl decide that her gender identity was “kitten?”

That sounds like a really fringe proposition. But it depends on how you define fringe.

The notion that gender identity encompasses animal identification has been promoted by Gender Spectrum, a leading gender identity advocacy organization that has “trained thousands of schools and school districts … building the capacities of tens of thousands of teachers, administrators … and other leaders to create gender inclusive environments.”

Gender Spectrum has partnered with the National Association of Secondary School Principals, the National PTA, the American School Counselors Association, and the School Superintendents Association, among others.

In 2015, Gender Spectrum co-authored a report titled “Schools in Transition,” which was sponsored and promoted by the National Education Association. That document was, to my knowledge, the first major policy paper arguing that schools should socially gender-transition students behind parents’ backs. If that report had come across my radar then, I would absolutely not have deemed it worthy of writing about.

It would have struck me as far too fringe, and I would not have believed that schools would actually do that. And yet, today, ten million students and counting go to schools that implement secret social transition policies.

These policies require school staff to address students by their preferred pronouns. What grounds, exactly, would a teacher have in refusing to address a student by an “eo-pronoun” that referred to what the Human Rights Campaign calls a “xenogender?” “If,” the Human Rights Campaign says, a person “uses the word Kit to identify, you would simply say ‘Kit brought the coat for kitself, which was in kit’s grandmother’s coat.'” As the New York Times explains, “a neopronoun can also be a so-called ‘noun-self pronoun,’ and — [n]oun-self pronouns can refer to animals — so your pronouns can be ‘bun/bunself’ and ‘kitten/kittenself.'”

Now, I personally doubt that the federal civil rights apparatus will effectively force a teacher to say, “Please pass that worksheet to kittenself.” But under the letter of the proposed regulation, it certainly could, and arguably should. If a student wanted to bring a complaint that a new dress code prohibiting cat ears targeted her and her peers on the basis of gender identity, she would have a very strong case that her civil rights had been violated.

As a matter of political discretion, it’s nearly impossible to imagine the Biden administration coercing schools to let kids wear cat ears. But as a matter of law? The Biden administration intends to redefine “sex” to mean “gender identity.” But it does not define what “gender identity” means. Leading organizations promoting gender identity ideology in schools implicitly or explicitly insist that it can encompass animal-identification.

Maybe the Biden administration will specify in their final rule that “gender identity” encompasses only two human genders. If not, then furries will have an excellent case for protection under Title IX.