"... over working women and day care. Four decades later, the country is once again in a moral panic about monstrous things being done to children, with teachers and entertainers accused of 'grooming' them for abuse. And once again, it’s driven in large part by unease over rapidly changing gender roles and norms. ... Many middle-aged liberal parents I know have different ideas about gender than their more radical adolescent kids, and I assume the gulf must be even larger in many conservative families. Christopher Rufo, the right-wing activist leading a crusade against Disney for its opposition to the Don’t Say Gay bill, told me a friend of his sent his middle-school daughter to an all-girls choir camp over the summer, 'and a third of the girls came back saying that they were nonbinary or queer or gender nonconforming.' Faced with a gender landscape that they find unnerving or worse, conservatives are trying to use schools to turn the tide.... The Trumpist website American Greatness recently celebrated the term 'groomer' as a right-wing attempt to do 'what the left always does: coin a novel political epithet.'"
From "Why Are Seemingly Functional Adults Falling for the ‘Furries’ Myth?" by Michelle Goldberg (NYT). The headline refers to the gullibility of some conservatives who believe some schoolkids are identifying as cats or dogs and that teachers are taking this seriously pursuant to a trans-friendly policy.
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I reject the parallel to the satanic panic. That was imaginary but in the present case we do in fact have transvestite story hour and gay teachers talking to their kids about sexuality and rainbow parades for kindergarteners. None of this is made up. And if 1/3 of girls return from camp with some strange sexuality claim, esp trans which can lead to hormones and surgery, this is not some joke about furries (which is tame in comparison).
Probably because they actually exist, and like transgenderism, it’s becoming more popular.
https://lisbdnet.com/people-who-identify-as-animals/#What_is_the_word_for_identifying_as_an_animal
https://www.vice.com/amp/en/article/mvxgwa/from-dragons-to-foxes-the-otherkin-community-believes-you-can-be-whatever-you-want-to-be
you know michelle goldberg is always lying and always malicious,
Of course, the Leftists have it all backward. The reason for the satanic panic was suggestible children trying to please the adults who were questioning them by affirming false accusations and increasingly bizarre stories. Many of these children came to believe their own stories. Likewise, suggestible children are being convinced that they are "trans" by adults who pounce on any behavioral quirks, confusion or questions from their students and then leap to the conclusion that they must be gay, queer or trans, or "+" .
What a surprise--another lazy journalist too impressed by nifty "gotcha!" story to bother making sure it works before running with it.
Furries are not a myth. This has been a gay/non-conforming sex subculture for a long time. The Second Life platform had (mostly gay) avatars dress as all sorts of animals since 2004 or so -- moving big city adult clubs into virtual reality.
https://secondlife.com/destinations/roleplay/furry
Dressing up need not be different from Halloween, Trekkies, CosPlay (comic book costume players), leather-clad tattooed bikers, 1980s spacey clothes with asymmetrical haircuts, nor from the 1960s long-haired bead-wearing bra-burning unshaved androgynous hippies. Half of any type of dress up is innocuous fashion, and half is the mainstreaming of an extreme appearance, niche lifestyle, or fetish culture.
It'll surely be reduced to ever more mild forms of weirdness and become less threatening as it becomes popular. Fashion always erodes to be unseen and boring. Let those who reproduce and create the next generation adjudicate whether there was ever a problem.
Same reason millions fell for the fake Russian Collusion hoax.
They have a calendar full of events. Doen't look like a hoax to me...Otherwise there sure are a lot of conspiracy theorists having conventions.....https://furrycons.com/calendar/
I think the crazy people that want small children masked are a much better example of a modern irrational panic.
Is this another deceptive, liberal 'Muddy the Waters' think piece or was Goldberg born yesterday and/or too stupid to do any research?
I'm not not sure how she made the connection to Satanism but the daycare scandals were the result of a disturbingly aggressive government task force created to search for and prosecute daycare abuse. In their zeal they brainwashed children into testifying they were sexually abused and innocent workers were unjustly incarcerated. Once the mistakes were exposed, overzealous freaks continued to pursue the workers. See Martha Coakley...
...the conservatives up in arms about grooming are concerned about groups sexual predators- some of whom work for Disney- becoming politically powerful and pursing an agenda that makes it easier for pedophiles to brainwash very young children into gender dysphoria, and/or making it easier for pedophiles to prey on their targets.
This is a textbook example of how our society can no longer examine one damn thing like adults.
New ideas overturning thousands of years of norms, such as endless genders, are introduced to the masses and simultaneously declared out of bounds for debate.
The Progressive Movement has reached a point of such dominance that it's main purpose has become to put down any notion that it can ever exhibit excess, on anything.
We COULD slow down and discuss these changes BEFORE they are implemented, like a mature society. But we're not that.
My friend who is a teacher works at one of the local schools where this rumor blew up last week. It's insane ... people really believe the story about litterboxes in bathrooms?
Like with witches, proving a negative is impossible.
I would love to have the addresses of people who believe this as I have a bridge to sell them, maybe a open records request for info on who demanded the Superintendent release a statement about the hoax.
This is a textbook example of how our society can no longer examine one damn thing like adults.
New ideas overturning thousands of years of norms, such as endless genders, are introduced to the masses and simultaneously declared out of bounds for debate.
The Progressive Movement has reached a point of such dominance that it's main purpose has become to put down any notion that it can ever exhibit excess, on anything.
1. Implement extreme changes without discussion or debate.
2. Paint the anti-extremists as extremists. ("Can you believe they buy the Furries thing?")
3. Use constant coercion to declare disagreement out of bounds for decent Americans.
We COULD slow down and discuss these changes BEFORE they are implemented, like a mature society. But we're not that.
It’s always entertaining watching progressives mock conservatives for wondering WTF crazy liberals are doing, as if they were open about their schemes. Oh wait! Disney did in fact acknowledge their fervent desire to “add queerness” to everything Disney and then gloat about all the same sex couples they’ve slipped into children’s movies and TV shows. And instead of welcoming all of us they will purposely stop calling guests “ladies and gentlemen.” But sure, this is just like the McMartin preschool panic. What’s mocked and unthinkable today is just tomorrow’s agenda before it’s ripe for dissemination.
The Left's reaction to COVID is a better recent example of a Moral Panic.
Because it IS a thing...and there are many articles ABOUT it. https://www.todaysparent.com/kids/preschool/imaginative-pretend-play/
a friend of his sent his middle-school daughter to an all-girls choir camp over the summer, 'and a third of the girls came back saying that they were nonbinary or queer or gender nonconforming.'
For some reason, I'm thinking if 1/3 of those girls had came home insisting that Trump had won the election or that trans people suffered from a body dysphoria not unlike anorexia she would not be so sanguine.
Many middle-aged liberal parents I know have different ideas about gender than their more radical adolescent kids
And where are they getting those ideas?
It wasn't the case in the 80's that "Many middle-aged liberal parents have different ideas about Satanic rituals than their more radical adolescent kids"
The 80s panic was over a partial archetype, the completely innocent child and the therefore completely evil adult. It happened to get great ratings.
Selling transgenderism on the other hand is just going to be puzzling to kids who are still in the girls-are-icky boys-are-awful stage.
They ought to be old enough to spot agendas first.
It is passing strange to me that if I open the paper I see pictures of fresh corpses in the streets of Ukrainian towns and if I turn my gaze to Althouse's morning harvest of NYT stories I am asked to care what the Progs think the Deplorables think the kids think.
There's a profound, surreal, disconnect. We just aren't serious anymore. The binding forces of civilization seem to have been dissolved.
It will not end well, and unfortunately it looks as if it will end very soon.
as Biotracker said...
suggestible children are being convinced that they are "trans" by adults who pounce on any behavioral quirks, confusion or questions from their students and then leap to the conclusion that they must be gay, queer or trans, or "+" .
Parents aren't imagining This sh*t..It's Happening, and the Teacher's Union is trying to distract us with "furries"
Hey! Teachers.. Live Those Kids Alone!!!
Goldberg, conflating transgender conversion therapy, through surgical, medical, and psychiatric corruption, and furry fantasies #NoJudgment #NoLabels, identifies with a strawclown in wolves' clothing.
Hmmm, let see ..
1980s - private citizens running childcare facilities hounded out of business and put in jail by overzealous prosecutors and cops who elicit fantasy testimony by suggesting to young children they were subjected to sexual acts.
2020s - public schoolteachers attempting to elicit sexual fantasies by suggesting sexual acts to young children given protection by cops, prosecutors, school boards, and school administrations who prosecute the upset parents.
Totally comparable. I can how Goldberg got those all mixed up in her head.
The Left's reaction to COVID is a better recent example of a Moral Panic.
Excess deaths at planned parent/hood in several Democrat districts (e.g. Michigan, New York) was real. Denying and stigmatizing early, effective, affordable, safe treatments was real. Social contagion spread to justify Mengele mandates was real. The collateral damage from forcing people, children to take a knee and follow the cargo cult, not the science, was real.
“ you know michelle goldberg is always lying and always malicious,”
Your lips to God’s ear, narciso!
The fact that brainless liberals are trying to dismiss it in major Enemy of the People media is a clear sign that it is indeed occurring.
It's a very simple rule: If it's harmful to America and not occurring, Enemy of the People media will say it is occurring. Case in point, there are many but let's start with Trump-Russie Collusion and Alfa Bank.
The corollary of course is that if it is harmful to America and is occurring, Enemy of the People media will say it is not occurring.
And in a corollary to a corollary, if a Government Education bureaucrat says it is not occurring, you can be your bank roll on the fact that it is.
Just wait a couple days and the weasel words will soon appear. And then the limited walk back. And then the defense of said thing.
Just like clockwork, this is our Enemy of the People media at work.
Why Is A Seemingly High Paid New York Times Columnist Falling For The 'Don’t Say Gay Bill' Myth?
(I'm assuming that she's high paid, I'm sure she could easily write a column on what a downtrodden victim she really is.)
I guess one could interpret the apparent contagion of transgenderedness, or whatever the proper term is, especially smoking young girls, as a sign of what has always lain beneath but has only now, in our enlightened times, been able to come out into the light.
But considering that we are animal creatures and the product of evolution and natural selection, I doubt it.
The 1980s moral panic about "recovered memories" was driven largely by the decisions by insurance companies to limit payment for clinical psychology treatment. The whole recovered memory thing was even being taught in workshops at psychology conventions. It was a new scam to generate income.
The The end of that hysteria was the lawsuit by Gary Ramona, an accused father, which imposed serious liability on the therapists.
The recovered memory hysteria vanished in a few months once psychologists could not get malpractice insurance for that practice.
The "Satanic Abuse" and "Preschool abuse" hysterias took longer to subside. The Massachusetts experience was the most disgusting.
Childless harpies should really just STFU when it comes to raising kids
Two years of never-ending panics (Russia collusion! Evil police! America is basically the same as it was pre Civil War! No masks = child murderer!) and now someone is worried that opposition to, for example, putting pornographic comics in schools is a fanciful moral panic? Okay.
I should add that I have no problem with adolescent uncertainty about sexuality. I do have a problem, however, with adults' suggesting to adolescents that they are very likely to "be" (since you're "born this way") either gay or trans or one of the other letters.
And I have a very big problem with encouraging and facilitating adolescents' use of permanent, life-altering treatments to "affirm" what they recently "discovered" they "were."
For the person who actually does have gender dysphoria that doesn't resolve, it undoubtedly won't be awesome to go through adolescence feeling unfit in one's body. But there are also adolescents who suffer leukemia, diabetes, anorexia - all manner of things that make their young lives hard, some of which can be cured or overcome and some of which they'll always have to deal with. At least in the case of transness, they can know that their temporary suffering, to the extent that they suffer (I couldn't say), will not render them sterile.
Here's a current difference between left and right: we aren't having to endure a bunch of blue checkmarks publishing stories in their mainstream outlets about this furry bullshit.
Now if they would only notice what else might be false or stupid.
This is happening in Omaha. If it is happening in Omaha, it's happening everywhere 10x.
This is a case of "This isn't happening, but I'm glad that it is."
Nack in the olden days (2010) the kids laughed at the Gay teachers who wanted to talk about their "gayness". Withering AND abusive remarks from the students. I have seen tje occasional gay teacher with tears in their eyes after being roundly insulted by student for deploying their gayness in the classroom. This would have been in a 50%+ black student population with the remainder if the students immigrants and refugees from very conservative countries where gays were routinely tortured, killed or worse. But like a principal once told me "time and things change".
Wow! Those NYT reporters are whip-smart, knowledgeable and insightful! No wonder you keep reading -- and quoting! -- the thoughtful and incisive reporting they turn out on a daily basis! How very, very much we all owe to The Gray Lady, America's Newspaper of Record, the First Draft of History.
I wonder what those poor people in Massachusetts and North Carolina think about Michele Goldberg's late-in-the-day assessment of their innocence in the Satanic Abuse fiasco. At the time, people like Goldberg were leading the lynch mobs.
Personally, I am OK with the appalling public school teachers being left out of discussions about an individual child's gender identity between the ages of four and eight. Let's leave that to the family, shall we?
If there were any question, the teachers showed whose side they are on during the past two years. Hint: they don't care about the well-being of the children.
Christopher B. Beautiful concentration of the issue. Masterful.
Kids have always identified with animals and animal characters, which is to say most grow out of it.
A little harder to do after you're given puberty blockers... by your vet.
What a crappy comparison. Last I checked, those daycare workers weren't advertising satanic worship and quitting their jobs if somebody tried to stop them.
The groomers today aren't even trying to conceal their intentions.
Mark said. Possibly the issue is it didn't happen in your friend's school. There are others. The rape in Loudoun County schools didn't happen in your friend's school, either. Proving what?
Herewith: https://www.louderwithcrowder.com/teacher-caught-kindergarten?fbclid=IwAR2AIYNkqlTzDlpkt-Kl8znevTVGy7v-waa_kj9Mzmj73MyaKEPMBZvA7RY
After those thousands of Republicans poisoned themselves by drinking bleach, you would think they would be more skeptical of these wild rumors.....Goldberg advances an argument that completely refutes her own argument. Very economical use of words. If children can be convinced they've been raped in Satanic rituals, how hard would it be to convince them they're gay or transgendered?
Nothing that is horny is foreign to me, but I must admit the furry phenomenon is baffling. Mascot outfits are uncomfortable and rather the opposite of seductive. But apparently there are several thousand people who are into it. I wonder how such people ever got together before the internet, or perhaps it was the internet that made such a phenomenon possiblle.
I read Richard Webster's critical biography of Sigmund Freud. Among his other accomplishments, Freud should be remembered as the father of recovered memories. He psychoanalyzed his daughter. He asked her to confide her masturbation fantasies to him. She was in awe of the great man and complied. During the analysis, he insisted that one of her earliest fantasies was of him, Daddy Freud, spanking her. She had no such memory but after analysis, she was able to recover what he claimed was the repressed memory....Freud used to be one of the great prophets of our era. He was right up there with Marx and Darwin. Advanced people like Michelle Goldberg used to preach his doctrines. It took people like her quite a while to catch on that quite a lot of Freud was wrong.
I was working in emergency psych in the 1980s and Goldberg is just making up a convenient reason for the cause of the satanic ritual abuse panic. We don't actually know what causes these things most of the time, but people enjoy making shit up that makes their opponents look bad. I think I could make a better argument that feminist social workers and psychologists uncovering real trauma and incest caught the public imagination and we started finding it everywhere. It was deeply related to the Recovered Memory hoaxing as well, which in turn was based on a false idea of how memory works and the last gasp of the Freudians to tie everything in to early sexual conflict. The adherents of each set of rumors tended to strongly overlap with the others.
Anxiety over working women indeed. She should show evidence. The day care panics got a lot of press, but those cases were rare. Most of the examples were of 1980s personality disorders claiming they had been abused or made to have children for sacrifice in the 60s.
The Great Culture replacement requires android young units who never conceive or raise surplus people.
Typical Leftit argument. Take the most outrageous, outlying bit of the issue (furries) to argue against ignoring tranny story hour and gay kindergarten teachers who feel the need to share their “truth” with five year olds. ALSO act like this was a natural progression this generation reached on their own and not that the LGBTQ crowd and their “allies” were indoctrinated in college. Find me a non Christian teacher’s college in the US that isn’t 100% on board with the gay agenda. Heck even most of the Christian colleges are now pro LGBTQ.
This generation has been guided to these ideas for years. The amount of gay propaganda on social media that is geared towards tweens and teens is unbelievable. When I looked into one who was pushing this crap on young teens I know on their Instagram who claimed to be a teen girl who loved bi boys he was in reality a gay middle aged man. Why isn’t there somewhere to report these freaks that are brainwashing kids? I called the cops and they said it wasn’t illegal as long as he wasn’t trying to meet kids for sex and they couldn’t do anything anyway because he was in a different state. Great.
What was it, not so long ago, No Boundaries!
Only moral panics the Times approves of will be allowed, like the moral panic on race they've been pushing for several years. Just like only protests the Times approves of will be allowed--the other protests will be crushed by the government.
The people who assert that anyone can start and stop and start again being a man or a woman just by declaring it so are calling other people gullible?
I must say that the substitute teacher one did strike me as potentially truthful. The litterboxes, no.
But, as several people report above, "furries" as a form of cosplay have been around for many years. It is interesting that Michelle Goldberg has never heard of the phenomenon. It goes back even as far as Susan Faludi's Backlash (late 80s?), in her chapter on Robert Bly. Of course, Bly's cohort was (mostly) straight men who playacted being wolves in the wilderness; the more directly kinky, "genderqueer" variant is much more recent. But as adult cosplay it's a niche market, to be sure, but a substantial one. The only new part is the suggestion that young children are now involved.
Assistant Village Idiot (and one or two others upthread) is quite right that the recovered-memory business of the 80s and 90s is mostly scam. The Bible of this is The Courage To Heal, a book that has done vastly more damage than have the Satanic daycare cases, foul though those were.
If children can be convinced they've been raped in Satanic rituals, how hard would it be to convince them they're gay or transgendered?
Transgender spectrum. She walked with gay abandon and prideful conceit into that one.
I wonder how many women sacrificed their baby... "burden" for social, redistributive, clinical, and fair weather causes because they were convinced by progressives that it was the rite and ethical Choice. How many boys and girls were subject to transgender conversion therapy, including: surgical, medical, and psychiatric corruption.
Once the mistakes were exposed, overzealous freaks continued to pursue the workers. See Martha Coakley...
Let's not forget Janet Reno while we're at it.
The furries are the Bailey, gay and trans are the Motte. If you complain about furries they say, “we’re not talking about them, but look at the gays.” Then later they start talking about furries again. Teens can have a gay experience and not be committed to it as they grow up. But trans is a more permanent physical modification that is harder to revoke, ( which is why it is more useful to democrats), and once you get 60 percent of your body tatted up you are not going back into normal society unchanged, you will have to be a radical to survive.
Not only are there FURRIES...but there are Bronies....men who are obsessed with My Little Pony tv cartoon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bronies:_The_Extremely_Unexpected_Adult_Fans_of_My_Little_Pony
I forgot yesterday to mention a short story by Ruth Rendell, "Loopy." It came from an anthology now apparently out of print, so it's likely pretty old (Rendell died in 2015). A man takes to dressing privately in a wolf suit; his mother discovers this and makes him a new one, and one for herself, and they have these little frolic sessions in his apartment. All's well until his wife (I think) arrives home unexpectedly. Wearing her new lambskin coat . . .
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