Why Are Seemingly Functional Adults Falling for the ?Furries? Myth?

And once again, it’s driven in large part by unease over rapidly changing gender roles and norms.Arguing for Florida’s so-called Don’t Say Gay bill last month, a Republican state senator, Dennis Baxley, described speaking to his psychiatrist son about the number of school kids coming out as L.G.B.T.Q. Christopher Rufo, the right-wing activist leading a crusade against Disney for its opposition to the Don’t Say Gay bill, told me a friend of his sent his middle-school daughter to an all-girls choir camp over the summer, “and a third of the girls came back saying that they were nonbinary or queer or gender nonconforming.”Faced with a gender landscape that they find unnerving or worse, conservatives are trying to use schools to turn the tide. While that state’s Don’t Say Gay bill sharply limits what teachers can say about gender and sexual orientation, a proposal in Tennessee would ban public school classroom materials “that promote, normalize, support or address lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender (L.G.B.T.) issues or lifestyles.”Some of this stuff, no doubt, is purely cynical.