It’s a seemingly innocent question. Certainly, it is one that you might expect a 13-year-old student to ask if one of their fellow students declared that she was, in fact, a cat.

Young children, whatever else they might be, are not cats. Nor unicorns. Nor space aliens, right? However unique we all might be, being grounded in a basic reality is a requirement for life itself. If you believe you are a rock and insist you don’t need food, you are not only wrong but soon to be dead. Feed the person, not the delusion.

Still, in these ideologically charged times, suggesting to one’s classmate that their unique view of the universe is out of sync with, well, the universe is “despicable.” Despicable means “deserving of hatred or contempt.”

Hatred.

That is the lesson that a Church of England teacher at Rye College in East Sussex imparted to her students last week, as she chastised students for not embracing her lesson on Diversity and Inclusion.

One of the students does, indeed, insist that she is a cat. Another asked the obvious question: “How on Earth can you believe you are a cat?” Because, indeed, she is not a cat. Anybody with half a brain could see that. Even Biden and Fetterman could see that, I think, or Biden would say something like “God love you; you are so brave!”

A recording has emerged of a teacher scolding a 13-year-old female pupil for refusing to accept her classmate's self-identification as a *cat*. The teacher told the girl that her opinion was "despicable" and she was no longer welcome at the school. ⬇️ https://t.co/zLSHUTPmSH

— Paul Embery (@PaulEmbery) June 19, 2023

The levels of absurdity here defy exploration. The poor girl who believes she is a cat is of course in need of counseling. She is not despicable either; she is deluded, assuming that she isn’t just engaging in a form of attention-seeking. In either case, she could benefit from some counseling. To the extent that she is being bullied–and there is no implication at all in the story that anybody was, in fact, bullying her–the bullying should be stopped. But catering to the delusion helps nobody.

But that isn’t what is being suggested here. Rather, the teacher is insisting that for all intents and purposes the girl who believes she is a cat is, in fact, a cat. It is her truth.

A Church of England school teacher told a pupil she was “despicable” after she refused to accept that her classmate identifies as a cat.

The 13-year-old girl and her friend were reprimanded by their teacher at Rye College, in East Sussex, on Friday at the end of a Year 8 class on “life education” in which they were told they can “be who you want to be and how you identify is up to you”.

The row, which has infuriated parents, was allegedly sparked by one of them asking a fellow pupil: “How can you identify as a cat when you’re a girl?”

Their teacher told them they were being reported to a senior leader and were no longer welcome at the school, part of the Aquinas Trust, a Church of England network of 11 schools, if they continued to express the view that only boys and girls exist.

The Telegraph has heard a recording of the heated exchange taken by one of the pupils, in which the teacher starts by saying “how dare you – you’ve just really upset someone” by “questioning their identity”.

The pupil responded: “If they want to identify as a cat or something then they are genuinely unwell – crazy.”

That last sentence is, to put it mildly, a statement that is obvious on its face. Perhaps it could have been phrased more artfully–“in need of counseling” would have been more tactful–but if somebody identifies as a cat then they are psychotic. Psychosis is: “a severe mental condition in which thought and emotions are so affected that contact is lost with external reality.”

A human being who believes they are a cat is suffering from a break with reality, assuming that you still believe reality exists. If you don’t, well, there is no point in talking since we have no referents that we share. We are all alone floating in our own universes, and you better hope somebody who does believe in reality provides you food and shelter. Otherwise, you are doomed.

The battle over cathood was of course really about human genders and not species. I sincerely doubt that even the teacher believed that it is healthy for a young girl to believe that she is actually a cat. But since her ideological prior is that identity is entirely chosen, she felt she had to defend the position and only then expand it to human gender identity:

The teacher said that “gender is not linked to the parts that you were born with, gender is about how you identify, which is what I said right from the very beginning of the lesson.”

She added that “there is actually three biological sexes because you can be born with male and female body parts or hormones” and “there are lots of genders – there is transgender, there is a gender who are people who don’t believe that they have a gender at all”.

The girls said they “don’t agree with that” and that you “can’t have” a gender because “if you have a vagina you’re a girl and if you have a penis you’re a boy – that’s it”.

The teacher interjected in a raised voice: “What do you mean you can’t have it? It’s not a law … Cisgender is not necessarily the way to be – you are talking about the fact that cisgender is the norm, that you identify with the sexual organ you were born with, that’s basically what you’re saying, which is really despicable.”

The teacher suggested they were homophobic and confused, which the girls denied. When the pupils said their mothers would be on their side, the teacher responded: “Well that’s very sad as well then.”

The teacher said that “if you don’t like it you need to go to a different school”, adding: “I’m reporting you to [senior staff], you need to have a proper educational conversation about equality, diversity and inclusion because I’m not having that expressed in my lesson.”

What is truly striking about this conversation–besides the fact that a middle-school teacher would viciously insult her students in this manner–is how even the teacher understood that her argument about gender identity must lead her to deny that there is a species barrier as well. Biology itself has to be denied as relevant to identity or else the entire intellectual edifice falls down.

This point is so important that in order to prevent the possibility of bullying based upon a suffering student’s identity crisis the teacher feels that she must, in fact, bully everybody else. Remember, she called these students “despicable” for not accepting that a person can be anything they identify as.

I am 100% on board with punishing bullying and inculcating the value of decency; if you believe that when you encounter somebody who is mentally ill you have the right to abuse them, it is you who is the bad guy. If somebody berates you for denying that a person who claims they are Napoleon is actually Napoleon, it is they who are the bad guy.

One person’s delusion does not demand everybody else accept it. Rather, the opposite is true; compassionate people try to help others who are divorced from reality to return to its fold and become reconciled to it.

The bully in this case, and she stands for millions more ideological bullies, is the teacher. Firing her would of course be a good start, but the problem is hardly her. It is the entire infrastructure that produced her, put her in front of children, instructed her to push this insanity, and promoted the idea that using tyrannical, hateful methods to inculcate this ideology in children is right.

Anybody who has had the ire of the Left turned on them knows that there are few limits to their willingness to destroy lives in service to their ideology. Even this teacher, whose power is very limited, immediately threatened to use its full extent to enforce compliance: do what I tell you or get expelled.

It’s appalling. And so very common.