"Do you guys know anyone who identifies as an animal?" offered a young voice, one of a huddle of high schoolers at the bus stop. That piqued my interest. Subtly removing my left headphone — the only working one of the pair — I pretended not to eavesdrop on their conversation.
"Apparently, some girls at a school up north are identifying as cats. It says here they’ve been petitioning for a litter box" one girl said, holding up her phone. "I think it’s the furries".
The furries are a diverse group of people — fans, artists, roleplayers and writers — who create fantastical anthropomorphised animal characters with whom they can identify. It’s a kind of role-playing — similar to dressing up as a superhero, or a wizard.
In 2023, TikTok user @lordpeachy2rumble posted a video of two young women on a night out in Auckland central’s party district. Lord Peachy, who specialises in algorithm-friendly prurient click bait, thinly veiled as politics, asks the girls one of his trademark questions — in this case, a lazy mash-up of identity politics and pornographic online phenomenon OnlyFans.
Showing remarkable good sense, despite the late hour, the young women don’t answer the question directly. However, they are prompted to dive into a story they remember from highschool.
"At Whangārei Girls’ High School, there was a petition to get litter boxes in our bathrooms for furries — girls who identify as cats and dogs and what-not," they say, fumbling their words and speaking over each other. "And they ended up taking s**** in our sinks!"
The video gained online traction fast. Within a matter of days, it had been shared, reposted and reacted to countless times across TikTok, X, and Instagram. When mainstream news media picked the story up, it crossed into the real world’s whisper mill. Before long, everyone knew someone whose grandmother’s postman’s son’s girlfriend could confirm that there were, in fact, furries defecating in sinks at Kiwi high schools. The comments ranged from exclamations to questions about its veracity.
"None of this has any truth to it at all," the school’s principal told The Spinoff. It was June 8, just four days after the video was initially posted. It had already amassed more than 700,000 views. "We definitely haven’t been asked to provide litter boxes, no-one has been defecating in the sinks," he said.
That was more than a year ago. But on a recent morning, I opened my computer to find a concerned mother’s social media post. She admitted that, though she knew it had been intentionally spread as a hoax, she was still suspicious of the litter box rumours.
"What’s the truth?" she asked.
What is the truth? And why have these rumours persisted for more than a year after being thoroughly debunked? Since that initial post by Lord Peachy, the online misinformation around the litter box rumours had snowballed. It seemed that the post had struck a chord with a specific subgroup of people distrustful of traditional media and education systems. Many became more suspicious after The Spinoff’s story. There was a brewing fear that the media might be complicit in a progressive government agenda.
One social media handle popped up again and again.
For weeks after the story had been debunked, @lordpeachy2rumble continued to reply "DM me" [direct message me] to any comment claiming to have witnessed furries advocating for litter boxes in schools.
Peachy had decided to conduct an investigation of his own.
I was curious to understand his motives, and after a few weeks of talking online and sizing me up over Instagram, Peachy agreed to share his findings with me.
"I’ve had people in my DM [direct message inbox] saying ‘I was in their class! I knew the teacher, I knew the girl!’."
Many people have confided in him about the truth of the litter box saga, he says. However, when he asks if they will go on record, they refuse. "I’m not convinced that it’s true, but I’m not convinced that it’s false," Peachy says.
"If it is true, people are too afraid to admit the truth now."
Peachy says he thought The Spinoff’s investigation prioritised information that conformed to the news site’s left wing values.
"They asked the school if it was true — you don’t ever ask the school if it was true!" Peachy exclaims "The school’s not gonna tell the truth. Imagine the school on the phone going ‘yeah, a schoolgirl s*** in the sink’. They won’t say that!"
Rumours of furries and litter boxes have been around since the early 2000s, created as a way to poke fun at a fringe community many don’t properly understand. Before the 2020s, no-one took these stories seriously. So, what happened at the turn of the decade to make people believe such outlandish narratives? Why are these narratives perpetuated — even when debunked in the media?
"A lot of people don’t trust mainstream media any more," Peachy explains, "especially after Covid".
Covid-19, the great divider, left a legacy in terms of the allocation of trust. When politicians started telling the public to stay home, some feared big government was coming for their personal freedoms. In Aotearoa, the concerns were exacerbated by the government’s vaccination mandate, which required some to be immunised in order to go on working.
Peachy tells me that "ever since Covid" he has not had much trust in New Zealand’s traditional media.
Like many people who were against the vaccination mandate for fear of vaccine side effects, or the mandate’s potential as a legal precedent, Peachy says the media’s validation and reinforcement of the vaccine’s safety did it no credit.
Peachy’s misgivings are echoed across the internet. Many have taken to social media to spread alternative narratives. The high school litter box saga was a perfect microcosm of the nature of modern social media — a storming snowglobe, stirred up by a much larger earthquake.
"The fear-mongering around Covid-19 certainly decreased people’s trust in the news media," explains Nick Wilson, fending cats away from his keyboard as we meet up over the pandemic-familiar video call.
Earlier in the day, Wilson agreed to discuss Aotearoa’s misinformation problem with me. He is something of an expert at differentiating the true from the false, and frequently uses his popular social media accounts to debunk internet myths.
"By buying into a conspiracy theory around the vaccine, you believe that the government, medical industry and scientists are keeping information from you."
As Wilson explains the slippery slope from vaccine apprehension to misinformation credulity, I hear the concerns of Lord Peachy and his contemporaries echoed in his words.
Wilson is a high school media teacher, and assures me he has never seen or heard of kids requesting litter boxes or using sinks as toilets in Kiwi high schools.
It seems unlikely that there was ever any merit to this story, but, still, it became a national headline and even prompted information requests to the Ministry of Education.
While Whangārei Girls’ High School is the most famous example of the litter box rumours in Aotearoa, people commenting on the video insist there are litter boxes at schools in Wellington, Auckland, Invercargill and Hamilton. While many of these people are likely affirming the story for shock value, some have a vested political interest in spreading misinformation. The narrative around litter boxes has been distorted to target transgender youth.
What began as a rumour poking fun at furries took on a more sinister tone as some social media users claimed the story was true, and blamed progressive attitudes towards gender identity for ultimately resulting in the fanciful events in Whangārei.
"If you allow kids to identify as ‘theys’ and ‘thems’ and everything in between, and pick their own genders, this is what happens," insists Australian comedian and alt-right online commentator Isaac Butterfield, in a video posted to Youtube.
"This is what happens when you let children make decisions about themselves, and you, as an adult, cater to their every decision. That’s insane, you [expletive] idiots."
There seemed to be an active effort to associate transgender people with those involved in fantasy roleplay, such as the furries.
Some internet users were trying to equate transitioning gender to transitioning species. Suspicion about vaccinations had morphed into mistrust of the media, and now this: the assertion that LGBTQ+ rights movements had caused kids to lose the plot and de-toilet train themselves.
"By creating a sort of false equivalency between the two, you are saying that transitioning or having gender dysphoria is as ridiculous as using the sink as a toilet," Wilson explains.
"The furry litter box story is a hyperbolic way of really pushing the belief that teachers are encouraging kids to identify as anything they want.
"These stories create a sense that trans youth are being encouraged to transition by perverted adults," Wilson explains, "which is not the case, and it’s a danger to both the young people and the teaching staff."
The assertion that litter boxes are part of a progressive agenda did not originate in Aotearoa. In 2021, right before the American midterms, conservative activist and parent Lisa Hansen stood up in a Michigan PTA meeting. "At least one of the schools in our district has installed a litter box in one of the gender neutral bathrooms for kids who identify as cats and dogs," she claimed. "It’s part of the agenda that’s being pushed," she said. "I don’t even want to try to understand."
After that PTA meeting, things snowballed fast. Over the following weeks, Hansen’s concerns were picked up and repeated by various Republican Senate candidates, misinformation spreaders, and popular public figures, including controversial podcaster, Joe Rogan.
After weeks of the media searching for the school in question, the rumours were debunked. As it turned out, a local school did have litter boxes in classrooms, but not for furries. The boxes had been installed for a far more sinister, sobering reason.
Wilson recounts the truth behind the story: "It was actually for children to use as a bathroom, in the event of a lockdown stemming from a school shooter."
He highlights the sad irony of the situation, pointing out that school shootings are an "actual real general danger to children in somewhere like America, unlike this nonsense that’s being pedalled by online grifters".
Despite it all, the rumours swirl yet.
In 2022, Healthline reported that about 2% of the American population was transgender. In 2023, the misinformation busters at Snopes reported that just 2.5% of furries are transgender. The likelihood of being a transgender furry is barely higher than the likelihood of being transgender altogether, so why do people draw associations between these two groups?
"The general population doesn’t understand either group [furries and the transgender/gender-diverse population], so it’s very easy to then do a simple-minded conflation," explains Michael Bronski.
Bronski is a professor of media and activism in studies of women, gender, and sexuality at Harvard University and says this conflation becomes particularly attractive and intriguing when it assists you in justifying or promoting your political opinions.
The whole situation is "an attack on ‘woke’ education", Bronski says.
In our modern social media landscape, something that starts life as a schoolyard tale can have real world implications, particularly when it reinforces someone’s political prejudices. In America, politicians took to the podium to exclaim their outrage at a perceived progressive agenda involving litter boxes, despite the fact that no evidence was uncovered to support their contention.
In Aotearoa, a video shot for laughs in Auckland’s party district during a night out became weaponised in the culture wars around gender rights and trust in traditional media and government.
"Behind all of this misinformation, there are people profiting from it, whether it’s pushing their political agenda to rise up in power or to get clicks and clout," sighs Wilson.
"There are people who are manipulating others; spreading things that they don’t believe in, because they know it will spread easily and well — like a wildfire."
It is clear he is weary of fighting against the intentional spread of misinformation.
The internet is a powerful vehicle for information sharing, but can also provide a degree of separation between people spreading misinformation and the harm they cause.
It’s likely the young women in Peachy’s video who repeated the litter box claims, had no idea their story would be appropriated by those opposed to queer rights.
Peachy did not start his internet career intending to stir up the online political world, and no-one expected his video to create the online storm it did, but that is the power afforded by the internet.
As everyone from Voltaire to Spiderman’s Uncle Ben concurs, with great power comes great responsibility.
