Stories are how we make sense of the world around us. Stories are what turns a bunch of names and events and numbers into something we can understand without having to take notes and draw diagrams and work through evidence. So stories are a really important part of spreading conspiracy theory.
In fact one way to understand conspiracy theories is to think of them as really compelling stories that give us an “aha!” feeling. Stories that convince us before the logical thinking part of our brain has a chance to get involved.
Crafting good conspiracy theory stories isn’t easy. Ideally they should embody the values of your outlook, and they should have a “hook” that’s sexy, funny, horrifying or ridiculous. But if you get it right, people WANT to share your story so much they won’t check if it’s true.
And that’s how a ridiculous story that began as an American urban legend made it all the way to New Zealand unharmed by skepticism or basic fact checking.
Perhaps you too heard about the growing crisis of schools all over the world having to provide litter boxes for the children of ‘woke’ parents, children who are identifying as cats, or ‘furries.’
Bemused media coverage of the litter box hoax started in 2020, when a 13 year old girl in Florida told a teacher she was questioning her gender and the school was neutrally supportive of her self identifying. Her mother was upset by this, so she ‘did her own research’ and discovered that schools in Florida had received training from Equality Florida, a group that advocates for civil rights and protection of LGTBQ+ residents. Equality Florida partnerships with schools started in 2016, prompted by the Pulse Nightclub shooting.
The Florida mother sued the school, and lost. Not taking no for an answer, she contacted Ron De Santis the Republican governor of Florida. The angry mother’s story fed into his “war against the woke.” As he took up the case and fed the story, another mother stood up at her school board meeting in Michigan to say she’d heard that kids were now identifying as cats because “gender ideology” had gone too far. Jon Ronson covers this phase of the story in an episode of BBC podcast Things Fell Apart.
The domino effect continued, from Florida to Michigan and so on, until even Australian media were reporting that children in Melbourne were being supplied with litter boxes for kids identifying as furries.
You might think New Zealand media are immune to that kind of silliness, but the New Zealand Herald republished a story from an Australian news outlet with the headline “Year 8 girl identifying as cat at school in Melbourne”. David Farrier debunked the story and the New Zealand Herald removed it.
However the damage was done. By repeating fake news the New Zealand Herald helped to solidify it. It was all perfectly timed to intensify the anti-trans hate around Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull AKA Posie Parker’s visit. “Separately, both classrooms and bathrooms have become battlegrounds in the larger culture wars. The litter box rumour has perhaps been so successful because of the way it combines the two.”
It’s all quite bonkers, so it was no surprise that our usual New Zealand conspiracy influencers lapped it up. Sue Grey used any attention she had during local body elections to propagate the litter box myth.
Carlene Hereora also shared the claim on social media.
Members of Brian Tamaki’s Destiny Church vandalised rainbow crossings after a sermon that referenced the litterbox hoax.
Predictably, Voices For Freedom and its media outlet “Reality Check Radio” welcomed the rumour with open arms. In a 2023 interview, an RCR host said that New Zealand children were identifying as furries and school principals were instructing liberal parents to condone it.
The false claim fits with VFFs broader anti-trans narrative. RCR has firehosed its audience with misinformation and hyperbolic half truths about trans people. There are at least 30 discussions in the past year, maybe more (we lost count) advertised on the RCR FB page about trans people and their allies.
And that’s fundamentally the appeal of this story to many who spread it. It advances a narrative that says that any attempt to assert gender identity is ridiculous, as ridiculous as saying you are a cat. Which makes the hoax too useful to give up, even for some people who should know better.
When Kyle Chapman, a far right activist known for trying to burn down a marae shared this hoax again recently he was unlikely to be challenged. Which is sad.
So what we’ve seen is that a story motivated by “trans panic” has managed to spread across the world, spark government action, garner uncritical media coverage (though to be fair plenty of debunking too) and appear in innumerable online forms. And what’s interesting and worrying is that even though it’s be shown to be false, it’s still circulating – sometimes through people who find it too good to check, sometimes through people who know it’s false but think it advances their aims.
It pays to be on the alert when you read an engaging story that seems to really embody a bigger claim or a whole outlook. Maybe it is just that perfect example. But maybe it’s just… not true.
