Steps to expunge the award
Professor Richard Dawkins has been stripped of an award by the American Humanist Association, after the organisation said his statements on transgender rights “demean marginalised groups”.
Voting to withdraw a 1996 “humanist of the year award”, the AHA said that the evolutionary biologist and author of The God Delusion was no longer “an exemplar of humanist values” after his tweets appeared to question whether people can choose their gender.
Or, rather, their sex.
Dawkins, 80, claimed that the loss of the award would have little practical effect on him because he had never used it. “Apparently the honour hadn’t meant enough to me to be worth recording in my CV,” he said.
That’s the burn. Not bad.
“In 2015, Rachel Dolezal, a white chapter president of NAACP, was vilified for identifying as black,” he said on April 11. “Some men choose to identify as women, and some women choose to identify as men. You will be vilified if you deny that they literally are what they identify as. Discuss.”
See? He didn’t say “gender.” He also didn’t say “sex,” but he didn’t need to. His point is that “identifying as” something is different from actually being that something. It’s not a magic phrase that can transform anyone into anything. We see the absurdity if an adult says “I identify as an excessively large container ship,” but we’re supposed to pretend we don’t see it if an adult claims to “identify as” the other sex. (Unless of course the adult in question is a TERF. They are not allowed to avail themselves of identifying as privilege.)
Dawkins said that he had accepted the decision of the AHA and taken steps to expunge the award. “Thinking to do my duty by deleting the entry, I opened up my CV,” he said. “Only to discover that there was nothing to delete.”
Slap some ice on that burn.
I identify as a giraffe; but only on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. Where do I go to claim my award?
There’s an award for identifying as a giraffe?
My agents (one of whom knows a TERF) tell me so. But only on those days.
Heh…Daniel Dennett piles on
https://twitter.com/danieldennett/status/1384879170216513537
Re #4, the responses to that tweet are interesting. Paraphrasing: “It was unclear what he meant, which is exactly why there needs to be discussion and clarification.” “He needs to apologize immediately for failing to note that these two cases are entirely different.” “If Dolezal dug back far enough, under the One Drop Rule, she might discover a black ancestor and the whole situation would be completely different.” FWIW, a fair number of people are disagreeing with Dennett’s take, I’m pleased to see.
Dawkins is decidedly tone-deaf, something that I have noticed even in non-controversial contexts.
But I read a piece just recently (can’t remember where, sorry) by someone who had lunch with Dawkins. They related that Dawkins routinely throws out questions that he genuinely doesn’t know the answer to in the hopes of generating conversation and maybe learning something.
I’ve read some of Dawkins’ books where he asks question like this. Sometimes I think I know the answer; sometimes I think the answer is pretty obvious, and my reaction is like, do you really not understand this, or are you just writing this way to get your readers to think about the question? Apparently, he really doesn’t know the answer, and is hoping to find out.
The person who had lunch with him found this refreshing, and considered it a valuable trait for a scientist.
I saw that & was going to do a post on it so waaaait for meeee
I can understand revoking a past award for misconduct. The military for instance does this. What the AHA has done though by revoking its award to Dawkins is cheapen it. Say what you may about Dawkins personally, he has done a great deal to promote humanism over a long and distinguished career. Revoking its award on the basis of a single inoffensive tweet shows how little the AHA cares about humanism, as opposed to placating bullies on Twitter.
Is the AHA reneging on the award to Dawkins akin to Trump granting Limbaugh the Presidential Medal of Freedom Fries? Just a whole cheapening of the entire intent?
Good question. I’d never heard of the AHA medal before and I’m not clear on how thrilling an honor it really is. (So that’ll be me crossed off their list now.)
I used to be a member of the AHA. The magazine has quotes and articles referencing this or that Humanist of the Year winner, pretty much every issue I think, and when they announce the year’s winner there is some amount of hoopla. So I would have said it’s a pretty big deal within the organization. I don’t know that it makes any difference outside.
Sigh. At one time I was a member of all of the Big Five*, but I no longer find membership in most of the organizations useful to me. I can support the ones I like through donations rather than membership.
*American Humanist Association, American Atheists, Americans United, Freedom From Religion Foundation, Center For Inquiry. Five major US secularist advocacy organizations. I retain only CFI right now.
Good choice. CFI still lets me write a column for FI.