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As a small child, one of my favorite cartoon characters was that brave sword-fighting shell-bearer Touché Turtle, whom I used to prance around the garden pretending to be, hitting other equally violent neighborhood kids with toy plastic blades as I went. It now transpires this habit made me innately qualified for a fulfilling adult career as a valued American public health professional.

A self-professed anarchist named JD Holt, who also goes by the name of “JD Terrapin” on Facebook, has just been roundly mocked for turning up to an online board meeting and introducing herself to her fellow participants by announcing that “I use they, them, and turtle for my pronouns,” reportedly because she self-identifies as being an actual marine reptile.

Disturbingly, the board meeting in question was held by the Oregon Health Authority (OHA)—and specifically dealt with the medical subarea of mental health. Myrtle the Turtle was acting as a public lay-member of the committee, whose role was to help determine best practices and policies in mental health for the state going forward. Apparently, it was vital to have people with “lived experience” of having “experienced behavioral health challenges” on the medical board, this being a polite euphemism for quite literally letting lunatics take over the asylum.

Previous OHA mental health board members included a man named Luke, who seemingly self-ID’d as being “A Shooting Star.” The OHA’s regular two-year budget, by the way, stands at $35.8 billion. Maybe the man/elephant/turnip who OK’d that particular eye-watering sum self-identified as an accountant.

Homos in a Half Shell
How common is it to flop around the place on all fours naked but for a giant green-painted cairn of egg boxes sellotaped onto your back, gently emitting ping-pong balls from your anus, squawking, “Look at me, I’m a giant turtle”? It could be more common than you may initially have expected.

Alongside all the usual made-up genders and sexual identities we are so familiar with from the world of Queer Studies these days, like transgender, pangender, lesbian, and suchlike, there are also now things out there called “xenogenders,” meaning the identities adopted by people who self-ID as being things wholly other than human, like elves, ghosts, extraterrestrials, fungi, or animals.

One of these is “turtlegender,” often described as being interchangeable with “tortoisegender.” There are actually substantial morphological differences between turtles and tortoises, but if mentally ill gender benders think people with penises can really be people with vaginas and vice versa, they’re probably not going to be overly concerned that, for example, turtles live primarily in the water and usually have flippers, whilst tortoises are primarily land-based and have feet. Turtlegenderists even now have their own special gay-flag, created in 2021: It’s just a standard queer rainbow one, but with the black bird’s-eye silhouette of a turtle superimposed over the top.

A brief bit of research indicates that mental health professionals these days are actively encouraging patients to go around pretending to be turtles as a simple stress-coping mechanism. A characteristic example might be the handy online guide “Stress Management the Turtle Way: Balancing Your Protective Shell and Relationships,” which advises persons with anger- or stress-management issues to “Try to be like the turtle—at ease in your own shell.”

Such guides do not literally advise mad people to self-ID as turtles or tortoises, just to metaphorically imitate them by retreating into their figurative emotional shells for their own psychic safety whenever confronted with difficult personal situations they find it hard to cope with, rather than just lashing out at everybody nearby with a large blade, Touché Turtle-style, as they may have done previously.

Shell Shock
Problem is, this idea has now spread to the nursery-age classroom and kindergarten, where tiny tots really are being encouraged to imagine they are anthropomorphic turtles. Child psychology guides such as “Turtle Time! A Calming Technique” advise teachers to always have a cuddly turtle puppet on hand in the schoolroom, and to ventriloquize through its beak a special educational “turtle technique” to calm their pupils’ fury whenever they feel a temper tantrum building.

As soon as they begin to feel angry like the Hulk, kids are exhorted to visualize themselves as being a different green entity instead—a turtle. Then they are to immediately envision retracting their head deep inside their imaginary shell, and calm down in there. It is even suggested every classroom should from now on possess a special “Turtle Time Space” to act as a metaphorical “shell” into which furious kiddies should be trained to retreat and act out pretending to be tortoises just so they don’t stab one another in the face with broken milk bottles anymore.

A “scripted story” book designed to be read aloud to students, Tucker Turtle Takes Time to Tuck and Think, about a “terrific turtle,” now exists too, designed to get kids to “think like a turtle” and tuck their anger safely away inside their armored carapace—despite its title, I can assure readers it has absolutely nothing to do with me.

Possibly the idea has some merit when applied to managing the behavior of some very small problem children. But, taken too far, can this kind of exercise end up making some of the more mentally unstable kids grow up to become actual wannabe humanoid turtles like JD Terrapin thinks she is? No less an individual than Vladimir Putin would say yes.

Close Encounters of the Furred Kind
“Lycanthropy” has been a well-known psychological disorder for millennia. Literally, it refers to mad people who think they are wolves, this being the core presumed origin of the old werewolf legend. But in a modern-day clinical sense, the word just refers to people who think they are animals of any kind. Cases are on record of people thinking they are snakes, crocodiles, gerbils, rabbits, even bumblebees. Conversely, “anthropy” is the clinical term used to describe the condition of an animal who wrongly thinks he is a human being, as with the actual turtle in a suit who went around pretending to be Republican Senate Leader under the adopted name of “Mitch McConnell” until quite recently.

Until about five minutes ago, the universal opinion of psychiatrists about such persons was that they were complete loonies. Now, as the sad case of JD Terrapin suggests, certain susceptibly woke-minded head-doctors in America and Europe seem more minded to affirm sufferers in their therianthropic delusions as yet a further new manifestation of the unquestionable modern-day religion of queerity.

Not in the Russkiy Mir, though, where a bizarre social panic has recently arisen. Following Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the idea has grown that the West, unable just to attack Mother Russia directly for fear of being nuked straight back, has instead cunningly decided to attack in a more underhand fashion by attempting to encourage the flower of Russia’s previously innocent youth to turn into werewolves, weredogs, and werecats in the name of spreading gayness.

The scare seems to have begun in nearby Uzbekistan last year, when incredibly strange images of a woman taking her son for a walk on a leash, with the child scrambling around on all fours dressed as a cat, went viral, raising many questions—not least, who walks a cat on a leash?

Rather than being a weird one-off, it transpired this was part of a wider pattern, with other Uzbek animal-children reportedly causing chaos by roaming the country in quadrupedal form, demanding passersby pat their heads, tickle their chins, and stroke their fur, before biting those who refused. Uzbekistan’s Interior Ministry began considering plans to fine the parents of any children who went outside dressed as animals the equivalent of $150, around 200 years’ annual wages for the average local Borat.

Insanity Claws
What was going on? The actual answer seems to be that kids across the Russosphere had latched onto a niche Western trend called kvadrobing in native Russian, known as “quadrobics” over here. This is a mere simple exercise trend, invented by Japanese sprinter Kenichi Ito, an expert in running down racetracks on all fours. Ito noticed monkeys can run on all fours faster than humans can, so he tried copying their techniques, speeding to the finish line in record-breaking time by adopting the rough ambulatory mannerisms of an ape in a hurry.

Impressed, some Westerners in search of a novel new form of workout routine copied Ito’s idea, as running on all fours helps build muscles and flexibility in all your limbs—the practice has even been profiled in Vogue.

The idea gained its fans in Russia, too, especially amongst the young, some of whom started off a fad of dressing up as your favored animal whilst exercising, too, primarily cats, dogs, wolves, and foxes (no traditional Russian bears, oddly enough), and filming themselves dancing to music in costume. The whole thing seemed perfectly innocent, but then, in Uzbekistan, some teenage tearaways began taking it way too far, leading many Russians to guess kvadrobing was really just a weaponized imported offshoot of the Western queer xenogenders phenomenon, as with JD Terrapin.

Top Russian teen pop singer Maria Boyko made headlines after a lost 8-year-old girl dressed in a cat mask was ushered up onto her stage to be reunited with her worried parents, before Boyko took one look and asked, disgustedly, if she was “God forbid, a kvadrobic?” Being answered in the affirmative, Boyko publicly humiliated the child, stating, “Today a kitty, tomorrow a doggie, and the day after tomorrow she will decide she is now a boy,” at the behest of the Pentagon.

Kvadrobe Malfunctions
Putinista politicians are equally concerned, proposing any and all child kvadrobers be forcibly removed from their parents and placed inside kennels and catteries immediately, whilst compliant Orthodox priests and Cossacks have been marched into schools to lecture the students on the perils of one day pretending to be a puppy, the next day booking a vet’s appointment to get your dick spayed by an undercover American agent, all covertly funded by USAID.

Vyacheslav Volodin, Russia’s Parliamentary Chairman, explained the “true” origin of the craze thus:

“Washington and Brussels are losing their dominance. In order to continue ruling the world, they are implementing the ‘Dehumanisation’ project. Offering to [allow naive Russian children to] try themselves in the role of animals, fictional characters, mythical creatures. Such manifestations only at first look like a game and a joke. Behind this lies a serious program of rejecting humanity and everything human.”

“Ha ha ha!” say Western media like the BBC, when mockingly exposing such overexaggerated misinterpretations of a simple, innocent novelty exercise regime. “Aren’t those primitive, socially conservative Russkies all doped up on turps and vodka, thinking gay Western groomers are out to turn their kids queer by encouraging them to pretend to be transspecies animal-people? What a bunch of bigoted, far-right loonies!”

And then the Russians turn on their TV sets, see some footage of a mad leftist queertard woman in Oregon who’s allowed to help run a mental health board despite the fact she thinks she’s a turtle, and conclude Mr. Volodin must have been correct in his claims after all.