He talked more about Donna in a dutch interview. He said that Donna didn't show interest in sex. She also never had a baby. Hope this helps ;-)

He's more so saying how one chooses to self-socialize starts before puberty. If you compare humans with chimpanzees. The only times chimpanzees ostracize others is when they are harmful to their society. Otherwise variants are well integrated into society. However, humans are ostracizing on more than just harmful individuals. Scott tries to ask about the labeling question. But Frans's response is that humans insist on rules and labels but it really doesn't help the situation. Chimpanzees don't care about none of that. And he goes on to use racial labeling as an example where chimpanzees don't treat others differently based on their color at all unlike humans. So when Frans refers to transgenderism starting before puberty. All he's saying is that the development of one's self-socialization starts before puberty. A subset of that will involve self-socializing in a way that aligns with transgenderism. And of course the brains of these people will be wired differently as well. He's not saying this is evidence that their brains were born in the wrong bodies. You've completely missed the fact that he's a primatologist if that's your takeaway. And he would agree that transgenderism is a phenomenon that occurs in response and in context of historical social-cultural precedent. That these ostracizations are happening because of reasons that would never occur in chimpanzee society. And therefore transgenderism would be a nonissue in chimpanzee society, because without that historical social-cultural precedent in the first place, there cannot be transgenderism. Frans may come off as pro-transgenderism. But it's more accurate to say that Frans is pro- be like chimpanzees. Which is integrating and treating others as individuals as long as they aren't obviously bad actors.

"Even more so of an argument for learned behavior" That's not true, as de Waal alludes to in is orangutan anecdote and when he mentions differences in the brain. "It's like saying..." Your analogy fails because it is a false comparison. A child's simple liking of a color, is a preference so drawing conclusions about what that might say about the discrepancy between brain and body would be nonsensical. Though what I'm more curious about is, if before puberty supports observational learning, and you also seem to leave more toward social learning; is there an argument that can be made against both?

@@CatharsisEffect Frans was making a false comparison. If so called male or female traits display in both sexes before they get their huge doses of behavior and morphology changing sex hormones kicking in at puberty, maybe the mistake is our culture categorizing those traits as male or female in the first place.

@@oldsoul3539 Puberty begins the process of us becoming the adult versions of our sex, physically and specifically for reproduction. Labels and categories have their limits but but they are effective means of communicating ideas. The issue with humans seems to be how we interpret these labels and how rigidly we adhere to our conceptions and meanings.

@@oldsoul3539 Puberty starts the process of us becoming the adult versions of our sex, physically and specifically for reproduction. Labels and categories have their limits but they are effective means of communicating ideas. The core issue with humans seems to be how we interpret said labels and how rigidly we adhere to our conceptions and meanings of them. Again, as Francis alludes to when he refers to how accepting the orangutans were of their kin who displayed masculine behaviors despite being a female. How was Francis making a false comparison?

"When commenting on disputes amongst academics and scholars past and present... He seemed tending more towards straw manning than steel manning." I'd be interested in hearing examples. His depiction of Dawkins seems about right to me, but Dawkins - de Waal nails this too - is prone to equivocation on what he does and doesn't mean by "selfish gene." At any rate, if de Waal is strawmanning Dawkins, he is by no means the first to do so in the very same way. Philosopher Mary Midgley and Stephen Jay Gould are just two others that come to mind. What examples are you thinking of? Maybe I'm missing something.

By the way, if the Dawkins bit is what you mean, Midgley's critiques are particularly good, because she goes into a VERY DEEP reading of what Dawkins actually wrote, and highlights the many problems when the metaphor he uses becomes more than metaphor.

@@kevincurrie-knight3267 Those are criticisms I've read and heard before and are even familiar by now. They seem more about reactionary politics of academia and individuals, than about science. They likewise, seemed to me to be weak and in Midge's case petty. You're probably right, that it's that dispute he's reliving, but it seemed to me particularly hollow at this point. It's like hearing some old people rekindling their passion over the tone someone else used in a discussion decades ago... People take some petty stuff all the way to the grave I suppose.

I will definitely be making some reference to de Waal's newest book in my Intro to Diversity college course. But in reference to this comment, the way I explain it to students is that there seems to be four sources of diversity in humans and the latter two are, if not unique to humans, ramped up in humans beyond other species: biology, environment, culture, individual choice. We are, to put it simply, the cultural animal, the one Camus said always strived to be what it is not. So, categorization is surely one of the big problems, but categorization exists because language and a very sophisticated cognition (with the possibility of abstraction at a high level) exist. And we are a symbolic species, where the categories we make we also make some level of meaning from. Not only can we create and theorize differences, but we can make stories about why the difference is impermissible by our social norms, where the difference comes from (your inferior genes, probably!) and all that. A really interesting new book related to your comment is "If Nietzsche Was a Narwal" by Justin Gregg. His radical hypothesis is that while human intelligence can be a great thing, it is led us into many more problems that we just don't see in other animals, hatreds like racism being just one. I think he overplays the difference between us and others - not giving enough credit to the goods human intelligence produces - but it is a really interesting book.

I listened to Frans on UK radio today. It sounded very much like he was saying that a specific female chimpanzee liked rough and tumble, and seemed to imply that this was an example of transgenderism. He used the phrase "gender identity" several times but not in a critical way. It didn't sound like he was being gender critical at all (I am gender critical). Did I misunderstand his position? I'm not really sure why he would discuss chimpanzees and transgenderism at all. Why not discuss stereotypes and typical behaviours and socialisation etc. Transgender is so subjective, it doesn't even have a clear definition, so it's impossible to draw any real, evidence-based conclusions regarding "trans" as a result.

People who support trans folks don't say you must be a man if you are masculine. They say that if you identify as a man you are a man. There are masculine men and more feminine men, masculine women and more feminine women, there are people who dont fall into the binary who are on stereotypically masculine, feminine or androgynous sides of the spectrum and there are androgynous men and women all of whom may or may not be trans or cis. People who accept trans people are not trying to be prescriptive in any way, they are recognizing that people themselves identify in many nuanced ways and those identities cone from nuanced understanding of self and how people authentically relate to gender markers, constructs and roles. Apes wouldn't have the same relation with identity since they dont have the same relationship with labels and self concept even though they may exhibit behaviour that is more or less typical of patterns seen across their sex. If a masculine female ape could relate to gender identity the eay humans do, maybe theyd consider themselves a trans man ape or a cis female ape or non binary, but that specification doesn't matter. Supporting trans people isnt asserting trans identity wherever you see divergence from stereotypical gender roles or behaviour, its believing people on who they say they are and accepting that. Studying this as it relates to apes isnt about proving apes can be trans, but moresoe that the nature of gender expression, roles and sex may not be definitive or binary even amongst non human animals