The cat litter thing is true, but not how you think
Right wing politicians were going around in their stump speeches and campaign conversations talking about cat litter in schools. For them, it’s a dog whistle for homophobia and transphobia. Schools have cat litter in them, rightwing politicians say, because they’re letting students identify as cats.
The subtext is less than subtext: ‘gender ideology’ —basically just being nice and inclusive of a spectrum of experiences when it comes to who we love and who we are—is so out of control in our schools that teachers, principals, and school boards are encouraging students to think of themselves as felines rather than humans.
That’s pretty awful stuff, to which less monstrous political tendencies have responded by calling it false, made up, and absurd.
But the truth is actually much worse.
It is true that schools stock cat litter for their students. That’s not made up. And indeed, the fact that things are out of control in this country is what compels schools to do this. It even has something to do with gender too.
Schools buy and maintain cat litter for their classrooms as part of their emergency lockdown strategies for potential school shootings. They have toilet seats and boxes and cat litter so that kids can go to the bathroom if they’re locked in the classroom for such a long period of time that they can’t leave.
This was reported on NBC and confirmed to me on Twitter by a teacher who actually does this. (The image on NBC is actually really interesting.)
Let’s remember that the political tendency most permissive of school shootings—the ideology that’s pro-gun, anti-gun safety, and champions the proliferation of automatic weapons—is the right wing. Whenever gun regulation is on the table, even sensible rules against weapons of war, proposed in the wake of children being gunned down, they block it.
Further, school shootings are committed categorically by young men under a rubric of toxic masculinity. The calls for mental health, thoughts, and prayers—the first of which never materializes because right wingers are against public healthcare measures—are a cover for the gender ideology so rampant among the gun-lovers: men so violently repressed they lash out in gruesome ways.
So when these right wing politicians talk about how schools are sticking cat litter because gender ideology is taking over, we can agree with them, but no for the reasons they think. Schools have to adopt some extreme measures when bloodthirsty young men acquire automatic weapons and storm the halls of their schools, which the right wing appears to condone in their refusal to address gun safety and toxic masculinity.