What apes can teach us about gender

[TumbleFryer]

I’ve just been listening to the following piece on BBC Inside Science:

And from the Royal Society science book prize, we’re talking sex and gender with primatologist Frans De Waal whose new book is entitled Different: What Apes Can Teach Us About Gender.

www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001fd08

And what was the conclusion??

And?

No doubt there is evidence of trans primates, eg males who act feminine and females who act masculine. 🤣

Gender is also a social construction of behaviour in primates too, they are social beings like us 👍

There’s a lot of evidence of males who ‘act feminine’ in many species. It’s called ‘sneaky male syndrome’ and it’s a well documented mating strategy of less dominant males gaining access to females.

starts at around 22 minutes into the programme

I've just paused it to bring you the exciting news that the scientist is about to define 'gender'. I'm going back in...

well that was something and nothing

what did you make of it OP?

There’s a lot of evidence of males who ‘act feminine’ in many species. It’s called ‘sneaky male syndrome’ and it’s a well documented mating strategy of less dominant males gaining access to females

Yeah, I’ve met a few men like that.

This is the book:

royalsociety.org/grants-schemes-awards/book-prizes/science-book-prize/2022/different/

The author says that sex isn't properly binary because of "intersex".

No doubt there is evidence of trans primates, eg males who act feminine and females who act masculine

This is about right, it seems that the author is motivated to find gender in animals in order to prove it has a biological basis in humans.

I missed it, but I'm going hazard a guess that the conclusion was that if you call some behaviour "male" and some other behaviour "female", then quite a lot of that behaviour will not, in fact, be totally exclusive to the sex you decided it belonged to.

(Unless it's actual insemination or childbearing.)

that was pretty much the size of it

he was in the usual cleft stick scientific genderists find themselves in

sex is real and can materially affect our live

but sometimes males display typically feminine behaviour and females display typically masculine behaviour

of course their sex hasn't changed, and so bloody what?

I studied a group of chimps years ago and there was indeed a sneaky young male who hung round with the females, copying their behaviour. The older female chimp told him off when he tried it on with the young female chimp, when he thought older female wasn’t looking. Interestingly she didn’t go full out shrieking as that would have alerted the thuggish males who were terrifying. I reckon she’d be on this board if she was human 😁.

Seriously though, there are so many differences between the other ape species and us as an ape species. It makes me laugh when gender ideologists go all the way back to clownfish and seahorses to try and justify ideology!

A bit like TRA then 🤣🤣🤣🤣

I half-listened to this and am sure I heard the scientist use the phrase transgender chimpanzee and transgender child. Not sure which was worse, tbh.

Was it not a non-standard term, something like "cross-sexual" that was used in the programme?

Indeed! That somehow seems to have been missed by the primatologists. Idiots!

I’d like to adopt this as my gender identity ie I’m still sometimes interested in sex but mainly the menopause is making me grumpy.

I heard “intersex” and so turned it off.

We’d a thread about trans chimps last month too - though it wasn’t quite clear what the OP had actually been inspired by, it might’ve been de Waal plugging their book somewhere.

Really hope we’re not going to have to put up with a load of nonsense about primates totally having genders & some being trans. As I said on last month’s thread, research indicates [female] bonobos, at least, are absolute TERFs, if anything…

Apparently the whole chimps are from mars, bonobos are from Venus argument is largely explained by ecological issues that make cooperation more or less viable anyway.

The concept of ‘gender’ is dubious enough in explaining human behaviour. It is fundamentally unhelpful to apply it to other species. Especially when it’s clear that sex-related behaviour is more or less variable in those species (and responds to environmental considerations).

Anthropomorphising other species is bad scientific practice.

As Barracker so memorably said and I'm paraphrasing, if some males display behaviour that society says is female behaviour and vice versa, it just proves that none of this behaviour is innate to a specific sex. Quite the opposite.

neither does it change sex, of course.