Clever non-verbal teenage girl identifies as a cat

NEWS AND COMMENT-MELBOURNE PRIVATE SCHOOL: A year eight student at a Melbourne private school who is described as being 'phenomenally bright' but is non-verbal has decided to identify herself as a cat. There's been a trend of adopting a furry animal identity and there is a kind of a culture among some kids in some schools to do this. People take a different attitude towards it.

School kids. Pic: Getty Images.

Those who support the woke movement are very sensitive towards it and the school is providing support staff to deal with a range of psychological issues. The school said that some students were presenting with a range of issues including mental health, anxiety and identity issues. These sorts of issues are present in a sizeable percentage UK school kids according to reports. Self-harming comes to mind as well as a manifestation of these pressures.

The school in question is tackling the issue gently and their approach is to always take matters on a student-by-student basis and seek professional advice.

At the opposite end of the spectrum are the right-wing types such as Sen Ralph Babet who has criticised the Melbourne schoolgirl in a tweet (see above). He said that the girl identifying as a cat is:

"...a symptom of allowing the woke radical left in society to run rampant, unchecked. Can we just put a stop to this garbage right now. You go to school to learn reading, writing and arithmetic. You are not a cat. You are a little girl. The end".

That, it seems, would reflect a lot of people's views who don't believe in the woke movement.

I do not think that it is appropriate to talk to a girl who identifies as a furry like that. I don't think people should either encourage them to be furries or criticise them. You have to address the underlying cause of it sensitively. That is the only way forward in my view. From the child's perspective it is very real. You can't just shout at them and criticise them.

There was a recent story, in January, when a group of students at a Michigan, USA school identified as furries and the news went viral because there was a report that the school was providing litter trays for those kids who identified as cats. This was denied by the school.

RELATED: School accused of installing cat litter trays for students who identify as ‘furries’.

Psychologists, Judith Locke, living in Brisbane, Australia, said that she wasn't surprised at this trend of young girls and boys identifying as animals because they romanticise them in their lives and through television and film. And a lot of kids have difficulties in accepting themselves. Comment: Facebook does not help with influencers presenting perfect bodies thanks to photo-editing. Kids are going to hate their bodies.

Another Australian psychologist, Michael Carr-Greg, said that he had a patient, a boy, who identified as a dog but once stressors in his life were removed, he resorted to identifying as a human being. He has only dealt with one patient with this sort of psychological problem.

Furries tend to be teenagers and young adults although there are some in their late 20s and 30s. You even find some 70 and 80-year-old furries.

Comment: I feel I've got to make a comment about this. I'm not a psychologist or psychiatrist. But if a child, a 13 or 14-year-old in a school in Brisbane, Australia, commits to identifying as a cat and behaves as a cat as best they can by, for example, being non-verbal, this has to be a mental health issue and they clearly don't want to be themselves. They want to be something or somebody else.

And that desire must be based upon the fact that they don't like what's happening around them, it seems to me. They want to escape the human world and transition into the animal world where perhaps they think that they will be treated better. I sense a desire to escape the human world which places unacceptable pressures upon some teenage students. Arguably adults - the grown-ups - are creating a world that is unacceptable to our kids. And this does not surprise me because it is also unacceptable to the grown-ups too!!

If that is correct then the adults have to do something to improve the lives of teenagers. And I wondered too whether the woke movement encourages teenagers to identify like this. There is a massive discussion about children identifying as the opposite sex and in the UK, there's been a scandal about an NHS clinic (The Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust) providing the permanent means for children to transition from male to female and female to male without doing proper research and taking a more holistic approach. 

They took what is called the 'affirmative approach' which means that if the child affirms that they want to be the opposite sex that was enough upon which to provide them with life changing treatments. That clinic is going be sued by about a thousand people because they ruined some lives.

And the argument is that the woke movement encouraged the so-called experts to go down the wrong path and encourage opposite sex identification when the patients were not ready to really know what they wanted and needed. I think this case is a bit similar to that. Teenagers don't really know how to cope with life's pressures. 

The cure it seems to me would be to alleviate those pressures and teach schoolchildren how to cope with the pressures that remain.