A conspiracy of cats: The curious case of the litterbox lie

Abstract

This article concerns the curious case of what I label the ‘litterbox lie’: a false narrative propagated on social media that litterboxes are being installed in grade school classrooms for kids who identify as cats. This lie, first circulated in Canada in 2021, has been raised by rightwing forces in response to the perceived accommodation of transgender children in public schools. This article deploys discursive and semiotic analysis to critically reconsider three entwined areas of ideological intrigue that inform this litterbox lie: cats, computers, crap. This terminological trinity contours the keywords of the litterbox lie – what I cheekily call its CATegories. I follow this conceptual round-up with an exploratory unravelling of the litterbox lie, and conclude with a ‘clawback’, as I answer the rightwing ridiculous with some radical ridicule of the queered cat creative kind, including the inter-species academe of trans studies stalwart Sandy Stone. Across its pages, this article re-presents the litterbox lie as a paradigm of present-day conservative conspiracy theories, one that pulls from persistent gender panic patterns and successful social media strategies of the cat kind. In a conclusion that refuses respectability, I offer some ‘catty’ examples of semiotic guerilla warfare as enabling trans-cat alternatives to this online anti-trans disinformation and hate.