News comes from Scotland that a child has "species dysphoria" and identifies with a wolf¹. So far, so good! All the boys of my generation, during recess, identified themselves either as a cowboy or an Indian. Once we were "in line", the dysphoria stopped and if one of them thought he was a cowboy in class, he received a slap like my father (the teacher) knew how to give out.². But the problem is that this kid was taken seriously by teachers and the teaching staff! The Daily Mail tells us that "this is the first known case in Scotland in which a school has acknowledged that a pupil identified with an animal."

The first? Does this mean that there are, that there will be others? Scotland had already distinguished itself by locking up in a women's prison a man who identified as a woman, which did not prevent him from being convicted of rape and of course allowed him to reoffend on the spot. Self-service sheep in the sheepfold: wolves love it!

The Daily Mail also tells us that "an increasing number of schoolchildren are adopting the personalities of creatures such as foxes, dragons, birds, snakes, sharks and even dinosaurs". Kindergartens will soon be zoos and school nurses will have to have veterinary training or call on the Humane Society. This is not so new: a turbulent child used to be called a "funny zebra". The worry may come when a schoolboy in the same class as this wolf declares that he is a lamb. ³. On the day of the (animal) carnival, everyone will be able to choose… The teaching team said they offer “personal support” and “more specific support” with the help of a “social worker”, including counselling and learning support, adding: “There is very little specific advice on species dysphoria”. They explained that they follow the Scottish Government’s Getting It Right For Every Child (Girfec) guidelines and use a kind of algorithm called the “wellbeing wheel” to support pupils whatever barriers to learning or challenges they face. This is a diagram to identify where children can be helped to overcome inequalities and ensure their voice is heard in “decisions that affect their lives, with support where necessary”. It seems to me that it is a very positive thing to aim to ensure that all children have the best possible school life! Except that it has little to do with this mind-boggling identification with an animal.

A Conservative MEP in the Scottish Parliament said:

“Teachers who are already under considerable pressure from SNP funding cuts should not feel they have to work around problems in the classroom. Given all the other challenges facing schools, ministers must ensure that teachers are confident they can take a common sense approach when these situations arise.”

This statement is interesting because it reveals a leak of (common) sense and great hypocrisy: is it really getting around a problem to accept that a child makes fun of the teaching staff in this way? Isn't it rather creating a problem for oneself? Invoking common sense in the face of such a situation is absurd. Could saying: "I am a wolf" be performative when one is not one? It is, we are told, about "treating children with kindness, dignity and respect at all times". The woke victim industry thus defines educational standards.

It seems more reasonable to me to consider two reasons that explain the resignation of these teachers: fear and ignorance. The first is fear: fear of alienating this semblance of "public opinion", which is an ultra-minority in Scotland as in France but which imposes, often by violence, woke ideology. As activists seek to get across at all costs the idea that transitioning from one sex to another is legitimate and banal, they can only support anything that may appear to be an extension of their "fight": changing sex, changing species, it's all the same. And if you come to contradict their mantras, going from "a trans woman is a woman" to "a wolf child is a wolf⁴ "In this case, you will be mistreated, harassed, vilified. The ransacking of the Café Laïque in Brussels is an example of this. Teachers live in fear⁵ : fear of not being in the wind of "progressivism" used in all sauces; fear for their professional integration, revocable with a stroke of the pen - we have seen it; fear for their physical integrity and their property. The second is ignorance of the psychology of the child; the young are playful by definition, in all species of mammals, it is essential to their development. They play at dressing up, at "being" other than what they really are, to see "how it feels". I did not study psychology, but I had children and grandchildren: I "spent four hours" with them in their play kitchen, trembled with fear in front of a masked Zorro equipped with a sword, stretched out my arm towards the syringe extracted from a doctor's panoply⁶. Serious, imperturbable, children play, they know they are playing, and they know that we know they are playing. What happens in their heads if they realize that we do not "know" that they are playing? I do not know. Yet this is exactly what is happening in this school where a thirteen-year-old boy wants to believe that he is a wolf. I am not sure that taking what he does for fun at face value is really appropriate for "ensuring his mental well-being." What judgment does he make of these adults who do not "pretend" to believe him but firmly believe everything he says?

Let us extend the idea opened by what I persist in calling a game: what if they had made themselves up with lampblack?⁷ ? Ah, there, things would not have happened the same way. Getting blackface is unacceptable: two kids who had put a dark green anti-acne cream on their face that turned black were kicked out of their high school.⁸ ; woke activists stopped a performance of Aeschylus’s The Suppliants in Paris because they believed the masks mimicked the (disparaging) make-up of white actors in the 19th century; Yale students got a professor, Erika Christakis, to resign after she said students could wear whatever costumes they wanted to celebrate Halloween without worrying about “propriety.”⁹, etc.

A "white" schoolboy who had "transitioned" because he had a "feeling" of being a schoolboy from a diverse background might have been severely reprimanded, his parents summoned by the school hierarchy and ordered to follow a course of solemn renunciation of "white privilege". Gender dysphoria, yes; species dysphoria, why not? But "race" dysphoria? Never!