In a season filled with dumb things, one of the dumbest but also most hilarious was a rumor that began making the rounds on social media earlier this year. A couple of school districts, including one in Iowa, had supposedly begun putting litter boxes in the school restrooms to accommodate students who “identify as cats.” The rather insane meme became prevalent enough that the superintendent of the Carroll School District was finally compelled to send out a letter to parents and students assuring them that the story about the litter boxes was “simply and emphatically not true.” One person who was apparently not copied on the Superintendent’s distribution list was Nebraska Republican state senator Bruce Bostelman. During a televised debate regarding a bill he had introduced to help children with behavioral problems, he cited the litter box rumor, saying he was “shocked” to learn that the school was taking such insane measures. But shortly afterward, Bostelman was forced to walk back his earlier comments, saying he had confirmed that there were no such incidents with a fellow lawmaker. (Associated Press)

Hours after his remarks, Bostelman backtracked and acknowledged that the story wasn’t true. He said he checked into the claims with state Sen. Lynne Walz, a Democrat who leads the Legislature’s Education Committee, and confirmed there were no such incidents.

“It was just something I felt that if this really was happening, we needed to address it and address it quickly,” Bostelman said.

The furor over public school restrooms comes as a growing number of conservative states seek laws to ban transgender students from using bathrooms that match their gender identity.

Aside from the badly needed humorous value of this story, it’s worth bringing up for more serious reasons. After reflecting on the report a bit, I quickly concluded that what we really need is more claims such as this showing up on social media and drawing the attention of parents around the country. Such incidents might possibly get parents and teachers involved (finally) in a serious and science-based discussion of just how preposterous the ongoing debates over school policies regarding transgender access to bathrooms, locker rooms, and showers have been.

Real, clinical cases of people honestly believing that they are the opposite of their biological gender at birth have traditionally been very rare, thankfully, but they do occur. The condition is described as gender dysphoria, as most of you likely know by now. And when I say “honestly believing,” I’m excluding the increasingly widespread fad, particularly among young people, of claiming that they fall into one of the dozens of newly invented categories of gender.

In that regard, the school litter box story can also be lashed to some actual science. There is an equally rare phenomenon in the medical literature where psychiatric patients are equally convinced that they are “were animals” such as werewolves and werecats. This is known as clinical lycanthropy. Another such malady is Cotard’s Syndrome, where patients fervently believe that they are part of the “walking dead.”

Up until very recently, before the American Medical Association succumbed to wokeness and lost its mind, they treated all three of these conditions in the same fashion. No person has ever been discovered to have the DNA of a canine or a feline and the ability to morph into such a creature. And no patient walking about upright was ever determined to lack a pulse, respiration, or brain waves. They falsely believe things that are simply not real and medically impossible.

Is true gender dysphoria any different? Show me one person born with a Y chromosome, a penis, and testicles who can become pregnant through natural intercourse, go through gestation and deliver a baby. Show us one patient with two X chromosomes, born with a uterus and ovaries who can impregnate a woman with sperm that she produced herself. Those examples don’t exist.

But in order to begin that conversation on a broader level, perhaps we need parents from all around the country to receive notification that the schools their children are attending have installed litter boxes in the bathrooms for the students who identify as cats. When they show up to complain and exclaim how stupid and outrageous such a policy would be, you should agree with them wholeheartedly and follow that up by saying, “Good. Now do transgenerism.”