A public school in Maine has suspended a middle school student for barking like a dog at another student who regularly crawls around the school on all fours, hisses at other students, and openly identifies as a furry.
“[Student’s Name] will serve a 5-day suspension… for level 2 harassment,” a student incident report obtained by the Maine Wire states.
“He barked at a peer in the classroom yesterday afternoon,” the report states.
“This has occurred previously, which is the reason for the elevated level 2. During this process, [the student] met with the social worker and [Assistant Principal],” the report states.
The victimized student, who is one of as many as 20 students at the middle school who identify as “furries,” called the now-suspended student a gay slur before he barked and hissed at him, multiple sources told the Maine Wire. Yet only the non-furry student has received any punishment.
According to the report, the incident occurred on Tuesday at the Mt. Blue Middle School in rural Farmington, Maine, and resulted in a five day suspension under the school’s “General Bullying/Hazing” policy.
For those unfamiliar with the more esoteric corners of the LGBTQIA+ curriculum now de facto mandated in Maine’s public schools, a furry is a person who is interested in or identifies with anthropomorphic animals, which are animals with human-like traits.
In the case of the Farmington furry at Mt. Blue Middle School, the student apparently identifies as a cat, as students report often seeing her crawling through the school on all fours and hissing at passersby.
The student who was barked at, whom the Maine Wire is declining to name, is part of a clique at the school that is infamous for identifying as furries, with many of them often sporting tails and making animal noises at non-furry students.
“I’ve been told before that they have a furry in the school. I never really paid any attention to it, because I honestly didn’t know what it was,” said Chelsea Biathrow, the suspended student’s mother.
“And then Tuesday came around, and I did some research and did not like what I found. Definitely everything that I find points to a sexual preference or sexual fetish,” she said.
While this story may seem like something from the Babylon Bee or The Onion, it’s all too real for Biathrow, whose shock and confusion only grew as she learned more about her son’s suspension and a school community that has as many as 20 students who identify as furries and regularly behave like animals towards other students.
As Biathrow quickly learned, furry culture is typically associated with adults who engage in niche sexual behaviors while dressed in costumes resembling their animal identities.
Biathrow learned that her son was suspended later that afternoon and proceeded to get the story from her son and other members of the community, as their were multiple other students who witnessed the bark.
According to Biathrow, her son was trying to de-escalate a situation in which a furry-identifying student believed she was being gossiped about, at which point the furry called Biathrow’s son a “fa***t” and began barking and hissing at him.
That’s when her son responded in kind.
“I didn’t know what else to say,” Biathrow recalled her son saying. “So I just barked back.”
That attempt to communicate with an aggressive furry kid in a linguistically appropriate manner would land Biathrow’s son the five day suspension, with three days served outside of school and two days served in school.
Nick Blanchard, a parental rights advocate who learned of the tall tail from a Facebook post Biathrow made to a local Farmington page, inquired with the Mt. Blue superintendent to confirm whether the claims she was making were true.
In the response, which Blanchard shared with the Maine Wire, RSU 9 Superintendent Christian M. Elkington hews closely to the various state and federal privacy rules that prevent him from disclosing the details of his administration’s policies for letting teenagers pretend they are cats.
“Privacy rights do not allow us or me to speak about private information pertaining to individual aspects of a student to the public. What I can share is that some of your question is based on information that is not based on the facts as we know and have investigated them,” Elkington said.
(The inaccurate information Elkington referred to could be that Blanchard, in his question, asserted that the victimized furry student identified as a dog, when the hissing behavior clearly points to a feline furry identify.)
Asked whether the school has furry-affirming policies, Elkington side-stepped the question.
“There are no policies in RSU 9 that allow any student to intentionally engage in behaviors which cause distractions within our learning environment. Students are not allowed to intentionally make others feel uncomforatble [sic]. When either of these situations occur they are investigated,” he said.
In a phone interview with the Maine Wire, the suspended student disputed Elkington’s carefully worded response and described a situation at the middle school where furry culture has exploded while teachers and staff look the other way.
“There’s a whole posse of furries,” he said. “When I’m walking through the halls, there’s one that would just hiss at me for absolutely no reason, like just walking, she’ll bark at me for no reason,” the student said.
The student said that as many as 20 Mt. Blue students identify as furries and exhibit odd behavior towards those students who are not a member of their subculture.
In just one of his classes, the student said there are five furry-identifying students.
“It’s the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen in my life, like they they hug and kiss each other all the time, and like I see them in the hallways, like making out,” he said. “And I’m like, do you guys not stop this? Like, what the hell.”
The student said he’d never witnessed any adult at the school attempt to intervene in the public displays of affection among those students who identify as cats.
“We’ve seen them go behind the school and start making out, and we tell the teachers, and they just like, stop and walk away and act like they didn’t do anything, and the teachers don’t even care,” he said.
The student said he knew of one or two teachers at the school who were opposed to the apparent policy of affirming furry identities, but that that those teachers’ views were disregarded.
Furry-identifying people often have “fursonas” — that is, personas unique to their furry identity. The furry community is indelibly linked with the LGTBQ movement, with many furries claiming that the furry community provides an “inclusive” space for queer and “neurodivergent” people.
Those who doubt the reality of furry culture can learn more by attending the Anthro New England conference in Boston, where furries from across America will unite from Jan. 15-18 for a frontier themed celebration of pretending to be animals. According to its website, ANE is just the 10th largest furry convention in the world.
Last month, Portland hosted an annual Furcation conference at the Holiday Inn by the Bay.
Although the Maine State Legislature, which is currently controlled by Democratic majorities in the House and the Senate, recently abandoned an attempt to mandate LGBTQIA+ education as part of all public school curriculums, the hyper-sexualized content as nonetheless made itself inescapable in almost every school in Maine.
As the video below from a public high school in Rockland, Maine, shows, paraphernalia and symbols celebrating non-heterosexual identities are now as common place in public schools as basketball state championship and sportsmanship banners once were.
