That begs the question of whether or not transgenderism is a “higher emotion”; to my knowledge it doesn’t appear to be. It’s a body/brain mismatch; an animal might not suffer from some of the higher-level social/identity issues a human does, but they’ll still suffer the mental distress caused by hormone incompatibility, the sense of dysmorphia, and so on.
Have they captured this lioness and done an exam? If she’s growing a mane I’d guess she’s some kind of hermaphrodite or has some other hormonal problem, perhaps due to a tumor, not transgender. Quite a few mammals are born physically inter-sex due to chromosomal abnormalities or birth defects, but being transgender is a different thing altogether. Being transgender means you are physically one sex and feel you should be the other one, so I guess the brain didn’t get the correct message during development. I don’t dispute the condition exists, I just can’t figure out how you’d tell if a non-verbal animal was experiencing it or was capable of experiencing it.
True. I wasn’t trying to start a nature/nurture debate, I have no doubt sexual orientation is ‘hard-wired’ in the brain. But it’s consequences in terms of social norms and acceptability simply don’t really apply that well to the animal kingdom.
I would dispute that. If one grants that there is such a thing as “brain gender”, or whatever one calls it, then having one’s brain gender not match one’s genitalia gender would just be yet one more type of inter-sex condition, no different in principle from not having one’s genitalia match one’s hormones or chromosomes.