For several months now, right-wingers have been peddling false claims about schools being forced to recognize children who identify as animals, which is what they believe furries are. The claims are a thinly veiled way to spread anti-trans rhetoric as an attempt to show the “consequences” of allowing students to live authentically.

Recently, right-wing and anti-LGBTQ televangelist Andrew Wommack made the bizarre claim that a friend of his in Illinois knows a teacher that “comes to school as a furry and wears ears and a tail and uses a litter box at the front of the classroom to relieve himself.”

Right-wing preacher Andrew Wommack claims to have a friend who "actually knows a teacher that comes to school as a furry and wears ears and a tail and uses a litter box at the front of the classroom to relieve himself." pic.twitter.com/Dc9M2HIPfa

— Right Wing Watch (@RightWingWatch) September 14, 2022

The idea of litter boxes being used in school also seems to have become an outlandish talking point peddled by the religious right. In a recent interview, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) ran with the correspondent’s story of a school in Texas where officials purportedly added a litter box option in a restroom to accommodate children identifying as furries.

“We have to reject them,” said Greene of the children allegedly pretending to be cats. “It’s not about people’s feelings. It’s about the truth and rejecting the lies and we have to stand up.”

And at this month’s conference by the Christian nationalist Truth and Liberty Coalition – which was founded by Wommack – Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) also mentioned the furry conspiracy.

During her vehemently anti-LGBTQ speech, Boebert said that after God created the world, “It wasn’t long before [the people] were living in a pigpen smeared with filthy, filthy inside and out.”

“Refusing to know God, they soon didn’t know how to be human either,” she said, adding, “Furries,” to audience chuckles.

Andrew Wommack is the founder of Andrew Wommack Ministries and Charis Bible College and hosts daily Gospel Truth television and radio shows.

In the past, he has said that gay people should wear warning labels on their foreheads to communicate that their sexuality could be “hazardous” to their health.  He has also voiced support for the death penalty for homosexuality, as well as conversion therapy. He has called conversion therapy bans “the spirit of Antichrist” and said transgender rights activists are “controlled by the devil.”

The pastor said that anti-gay slurs imply death to LGBTQ people, so that’s why he likes them.

“This panic is about punishing ALL gender nonconformity, period.”

He says it’s unscientific for a Black person to play the lead in Disney’s “The Little Mermaid.”

Fox News’ most popular host has given a platform to transphobes whose misinformation has inspired death threats against medical professionals.

His film has been sketchy from its inception and is wildly misinformed at best.

Christopher Rufo described what he believes to be a “profoundly disturbing collusion” between LGBTQ-affirming schools and hospitals.

“COVID-19 is punishment of God for homosexuality in America, and that’s why God killed one million-plus Americans through COVID.”

“Very telling that Ben doesn’t think lesbians exist in every facet of the workforce and not just his fantasies.”

“Are they out there wearing dresses and skirts while they’re playing sports? Are they learning to be a feminine woman?”