So let’s talk about gender.

First let me stipulate that I care deeply about the feelings of every one of you, and of every one of the people not reading this, too.

Let me stipulate that I’m taking the greatest care not to wrench any of those feelings.

Let me underline that I would never cause any bruising to anyone’s feelings if I could possibly help it.

Let me add that I understand profoundly and abjectly that intent is not magic.

Let me insist that your feelings and the feelings of everyone are the first thing I think about when I wake up in the morning.

Let me say that I love you all more than I love Talenti raspberry … Read the rest

There’s an aspect of the recent clusterfuck that I think needs more attention, and that is the way the rhetoric and some of the thinking around it – and around trans activism in general – often has a religious flavor, or an Oprah-therapeutic flavor, or both.

For instance it’s a very popular trope to claim that the enemy of the moment, or the remark or joke or blog post or magazine article or book of the moment, is “hurting trans people.” Just today I saw a claim that trans people have “been hurt by Ophelia’s actions,” and that’s not the first claim of its kind that I’ve seen. You know what that sounds like? The all-too-familiar claim that an atheist … Read the rest

This is quite funny, in a sad sort of way – a piece by Greta C. in Free Inquiry and republished on her blog.

“Fundamentalist believers want everything to be simple. They want their moral choices to be straightforward: they want a clear rulebook that outlines their choices, written for them by a perfect god. They want the world divided up into clearly labeled categories, with good people in one box and evil people in another. It’s so childish. The world isn’t like that. And the world shouldn’t be like that. It would be horrible. Why would they even want that?”

Lots of atheists I know say stuff like this. I say it myself.

See what I mean? Funny.… Read the rest