Last weekend an audio recording emerged of a 13-year-old girl being called ‘despicable’ by her teacher at a Church of England school in East Sussex for refusing to respect a classmate’s decision to identify as a cat. The teacher told her she would report her to a senior colleague and she would no longer be welcome at the school if she continued to express the view that ‘if you have a vagina you’re a girl and if you have a penis you’re a boy’.

The Department for Education (DfE) is due to publish draft guidance next week advising schools how to deal with the explosion of children identifying as trans and, judging from a sneak preview in the Sun, it looks quite robust. Schools will be banned from helping children change gender without their parents’ consent, no one can be compelled to use a child’s preferred gender pronouns and, for reasons of fairness, trans-identifying pupils won’t be allowed to participate in competitive sport. But there will be nothing in the guidance about how schools should cope with ‘furries’ – children who identify as animals.

My first thought on hearing about this bizarre subculture was that the kids must be doing it to ridicule woke teachers. After all, if the ‘correct’ approach when faced with a child identifying as a member of the opposite sex is to endorse their self-diagnosis, then schools are bound to adopt the same ‘affirmative’ attitude when children identify as cats or dogs. That seems to be the trap the teacher in East Sussex has fallen into.

But was it all an elaborate hoax? A recent story in the Telegraph about ‘furries’ suggests not. It described a sixth former at a school in Wales who claims to identify as a cat. She – or, rather, ‘catself’, since that’s her preferred gender pronoun – answers every question posed to her in lessons by meowing and gets very uppity if a teacher asks her to reply in English. She sounds like another anti-woke prankster, but other examples indicate these children may be in earnest.

For instance, the Telegraph discovered a child in the south-west who insists her teachers treat her as if she’s a dinosaur and a pupil at a secondary school in England who identifies as a horse. Yet another claims to be a moon and cavorts about in a Harry Potter cloak putting curses on classmates. In every case, the schools dutifully ‘respect’ these identities rather than risk accusations of being ‘exclusionary’. As far as I can tell these girls are not budding Titania McGraths. They’ve genuinely gone mad.

As someone who disapproves of the way schools have embraced trans dogma and welcomes the new DfE guidance, I quite like this weird phenomenon. It may not be intended as satire, but it exposes the shortcomings of schools pandering to trans-identifying children nevertheless. In the past, when I’ve made the ‘where do you draw the line?’ argument to woke teachers, they dismiss the notion that any child might identify as an animal as a ‘red herring’. But it turns out, if you encourage kids to part company with biological reality, there’s nothing to stop them believing they’re cats or dinosaurs – or, indeed, red herrings. This will surely help advocates of a more sceptical approach to persuade schools that a policy of ‘inclusion’ in all circumstances may not be in children’s best interests.

But I worry about the kids who’ve embraced these identities, and not just because they’re clearly disturbed. What if the progressive idealogues who’ve captured schools, universities and the NHS simply take this new subculture in their stride and, instead of questioning the ‘affirmative’ approach, extend it to children who identify as animals? Will doctors nod along enthusiastically when a teenage girl insists she’s a grub and then pack her off to surgery to have her arms and legs removed? Will a Labour government pass an act of parliament enabling ‘furries’ to marry cats and dogs? Woe betide the Anglican vicar who refuses to officiate at such a ceremony: ‘Whiskers, do you take Catself to be your wife, to live together in holy matrimony…’ Then again, there may not be any such rebels, given how captured the Church of England is.

Perhaps the answer is for the DfE to extend its new guidance to include ‘furries’, telling schools to stop pandering to these children’s delusions and try to gently coax them back to reality. I daresay that would be quite popular. As a parent of a 15-year-old who fancies himself a fast runner, I wouldn’t relish him having to compete against a child who identifies as a puma at the next sports day.