Advertisement

Fact check: Photos from 2016 show adult who identified as a cat, not public school student

The claim: Photos show non-verbal student whose cat identity is accommodated at public school

Some social media users are sharing a photo they claim shows a student who identifies as a cat.

The photos show a young woman wearing costume cat ears. In one of the images, she appears to be crawling on her hands and knees.

"This is a young lady who is exceptional (sic) bright, her family petitioned the school board for right to 'identify as a cat," reads part of a Sept. 23 Facebook post featuring the images. "She is non verbal and she crawls around making cat like noises and the school is perfectly fine with this behavior? I understand WHY my daughter home schooled our grandchildren."

The post garnered more than 1,000 interactions in less than two weeks.

But this post tells a story that simply didn't happen. The photos are from 2016 and show a Norweigan adult who is capable of speaking, not a non-verbal, school-aged child.

USA TODAY reached out to the Facebook user who shared the post for comment.

Follow us on Facebook! Like our page to get updates throughout the day on our latest debunks

Photo shows Norwegian adult

The post from Peggy Hubbard, who lost a recent Illinois Republican U.S. Senate primary, implies a connection to a U.S. school district, but the pictures don't show an American public school student – or anything recent.

The photos show a Norweigan woman who was the subject of multiple media reports in 2016 when she claimed to be a cat trapped in a human's body. The woman's name is Nano and she was 20 at the time the images were captured, according to the reports.

Despite Hubbard's claim that the person pictured is non-verbal, the woman can be heard speaking in a 2016 Norweigan media interview about her identity.

The claim was also debunked by Reuters.

USA TODAY has previously debunked other false claims that school districts accommodated children who behave like animals by providing litterboxes or allowing them to lick their "paws" in class.

Fact check: False claim about Boston Children's Hospital's transgender care program

Our rating: False

Based on our research, we rate FALSE the claim that photos show a non-verbal student whose cat identity is accommodated at public school. The photos show a Norweigan adult who claimed to be a cat in 2016.

Our fact-check sources:

Thank you for supporting our journalism. You can subscribe to our print edition, ad-free app or electronic newspaper replica here.

Our fact-check work is supported in part by a grant from Facebook.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Fact check: Photos show adult who identified as a cat, not student