Florida's Brevard County school board recently passed a new dress code policy that prohibits students from dressing like animals.  Citing complaints by fellow students about "furries," the board forbade attire emulating "non-human characteristics."  Cat ears and dog collars, for example.

However, some claim that the county's new dress code violates President Joe Biden's proposed Title IX regulations.  The controversy over the proposed regulations apparently centers on the redefinition of "sex" to mean "gender identity."  What, exactly, does "gender identity" mean?

Well, 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."  (Sure.  Now tell me you'll still respect me in the morning.)  Yet if gender identity is nothing more than a "mental, emotional, and spiritual state," in no way determined by reproductive anatomy, why should it be confined to human anatomy?  Why couldn't a girl — or boy — legitimately decide to identify as a kitten?

Who's to say that little Johnny or Joanie can't claim to be a kitten, a skunk — or a lake trout, for that matter?  Are we that intolerant, that bigoted, that closed-minded?  Anatomy is entirely inconsequential, arbitrary...moot.  We don't even know what it is there for, or if there ever was a reason for sexual differentiation or complementarity.  Is not the science "settled" on that?  Who would deny furries their inalienable rights?  Their fight must become our fight.  And it just might become the most important civil rights movement of our time.  Unless the righteous drive for pansexual acceptance does.  Or the push for the legalization of polyamory.  Or bestiality.  Or necrophilia.

There is so much work yet to do if we are to achieve that most precious and laudable goal of becoming a judgment-free society with equal outcomes for all!  The fact that man-caused global warming currently —and disproportionately — affects non-binary, pansexual furries is a stain on our nation.  Shame!  Shame, I say!

The preposterous claim that the ridiculous gender identity movement also somehow encompasses animal identification has been promulgated by Gender Spectrum, a gender identity advocacy organization that purports to have "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."  The group has apparently partnered with the National Association of Secondary School Principals, the National PTA, the American School Counselors Association, and the School Superintendents Association, among others.  Moreover, in 2015, Gender Spectrum co-authored a report titled "Schools in Transition," which was sponsored and promoted by none other than the National Education Association itself...and may well have been the first major policy paper arguing that schools should socially gender-transition students without their parents' knowledge.

Why not stand in solidarity with Gender Spectrum?  I mean, if a young student wants to identify as — or should I say actually become — a mouse, moose, or a beaver, why should schools be allowed to prohibit them from wearing the outfits that match their species identity?  And there is certainly no need to inform the parents.

Title IX doesn't go far enough.  It's okay to prohibit sex-based discrimination in any education program or activity that receives funding from the federal government, but why not ban species-based discrimination as well?

Meow!

Woof!

Note to readers: Sarcasm is abundantly employed here, pretending to advocate madness.

Photo credit: Liliana Drew, Pexels license.