Amber was a young female chimpanzee who lived at Arnhem Zoo in the Netherlands. One day, the primatologist Frans de Waal saw her limping in, holding an old broom head against her stomach as if she were carrying a newborn. For weeks, she mothered this object as if it were a child. In Uganda, female chimpanzees have been seen doing the same thing with logs. When great apes are given a rag doll, the males may tear it apart to see what is inside. The females treat it gently, hold it against their body and take care of it.
When I learned that activists were protesting against the absence of a trans figure in the committee of elders created by the Minister of Families, Suzanne Roy, to study gender identity, I asked myself: why not wouldn’t we appoint a primatologist there? To understand the difference and the links between sex and gender, nothing is more enlightening than the point of view of these great ape specialists, of whom we still share 96% of the genetic heritage.
Moreover, if I may say so, we could not suggest more enriching reading for the wise people of this committee than the excellent book by Frans de Waal entitled Different. Gender seen by a primatologist.
Nothing like it, in fact, to call into question a certain number of clichés about the feminine and masculine that the media throw at us every day. After several decades spent closely observing the great apes closest to us, chimpanzees and bonobos, de Waal is convinced that it is false to claim that men have a more dominant nature than women. He notes in particular that competition and the sense of hierarchy are as strong among females as among males, even if they manifest themselves in a less violent manner.
De Waal compares gender to a “cultural cloak” that the sexes wear and walk around in. But he disagrees with this radical thesis, otherwise called “gender theory”, according to which gender is an arbitrary construction entirely distinct from sex, as if a coat could work by itself! On the contrary, he notes in both monkeys and humans, the vast majority of children take pleasure in imitating adults of their sex, so much so that “this allows us to think that evolution has endowed our children of a tendency to feel good when they conform to their gender.”
This obviously does not prevent exceptions, which it is certainly not a question of repressing. But for Frans de Waal, there is no doubt that the feminine and masculine have a biological origin. Even if, he reminds us, biology and culture influence each other, neither can claim true autonomy.
For the primatologist, it is therefore as ridiculous to believe that women are condemned by biology to only perform tasks traditionally considered feminine as it is to claim that everyone can at leisure, by the force of the mind alone, choose their own gender — and even more so his sex.
When he was a student, de Waal was active in a feminist group. Until men become responsible for all the evils on Earth and we all consider them rapists and wife beaters. A few years later, they were excluded from the group. Contrary to this fantasized idea of a “rape culture”, he notes on the contrary that “our closest relatives show no sign of adaptation to rape”, which remains a minority and repressed among all primates. And even more so in humans, who are the only primate to have invented the family.
Frans de Waal criticizes today’s feminism for wanting to completely ignore the body and for adhering to an archaic conception of man, which sees him as a pure spirit. This radical negation of biology, seen as a simple adjustment factor that can be manipulated at will, has today reached an unprecedented peak with trans ideology. As de Waal writes, “to flee one’s body is to flee oneself.”
No more than the Sun revolves around the Earth, no one anywhere in any society has ever “changed sex.” A dream beyond the reach of science, like immortality, since sex depends on the genome and concerns physiology and hormones as well as the brain, the latter itself being influenced by certain organs, such as the uterus. You can certainly wear the clothes of the other sex or undergo an amputation, but this will still largely amount to cross-dressing. For the psychoanalysts Caroline Eliacheff and Céline Masson (The making of the transgender childL’Observatoire), the very idea of ”changing sex” is not only an “abuse of language”, but a scam intended to justify what they consider to be one of the biggest “health scandals” of our era.
If our wise men had only recalled a few of these elementary truths, they would not have been useless.