Mehta has constructed several NYT crossword puzzles, including late-week hard ones that were actually pretty darn good, but does that make him a soooooper genius in all things? He is the kind of person to accuse scientists of stepping out of their lane, but will he not gladly hop over the line himself?
Oh, no! He’s an NYT puzzle constructor, too? Dammit I hate this guy; he’s ruining all my favourite hobbies. Trivia, atheism, crosswords. He better stay away from German opera or I swear…
Biological sex in humans is a binary, based on gamete size. Trans ideology on the other hand holds that one’s sex is something you personally feel (aka “gender identity”), which isn’t even wrong. Feeling and acting like the sex you’re not doesn’t make you the opposite sex, it just makes you gender non-conforming. (Based on sexist stereotypes of course.) Which is fine, until it begins to infringe on things based on sex, like locker rooms and such.
Richard Dawkins, who spends more time these days spreading anti-trans lies than explaining evolution….I went through what he said and why he got it so wrong.
For an ideology that depends so heavily on dishonesty and doubletalk, the “Friendly” Atheist’s got his work cut out for him. I’m not a biologist, a philosopher, or even a Jeopardy contestant, but I know who’s going to rack up more lies, more quickly, in this exercise.
I actually started to read Hemant’s sub stack, then I started skimming, then I skimmed faster. It reminded me why I didn’t read his stuff years back. Shallow whafflegarb at best. Doesn’t engage with any serious or technical points raised by Dawkins, or anyone else for that matter. Comes across as an uninformed high-schooler who’s already made up his mind based on what someone else told him at the morning tea break. I can’t make up my mind is he’s grifting his audience, a true believer, or just lazy. Maybe some sort of combination?
How is Dawkins supposed to explain the wonders of evolution without the whole sex thing coming up? You can’t really understand evolution without understanding sex as well.
I gave up on The Friendly Atheist several years ago. I don’t remember why, but I think it was before he became so wrapped up in trans propaganda. Anyway, you post has prompted me to read what he says in his recent article about Richard Dawkins. In it, he says
The binary thing is literally not true, as just about any biologist could tell you, and it’s embarrassing that Dawkins is repeating it.
That seems to be a straight-out lie. I’m more of a biochemist than a mainstream biologist, but I have known plenty of biologists over the years, and it would be difficult to find one — let alone “just about any” — who would spout such nonsense.
Richard Dawkins may not be right about everything — the “Dear Muslima” letter springs to mind — but he knows vastly more biology than Hemant Mehta will ever know.
There’s a bunch of higgling over the fact that Dawkins said “Sex” but the real issue is “gender, don’t you see.” Even DJ Grothe, former of the CSI, was spouting that having a trans gender identity was similar to his being gay, and telling trans kids they are wrong is just like telling young gay DJ that he wasn’t really gay.
That’s one of the core lies that keep the train rumbling down the tracks to nowhere, that sex/gender distinction. That’s basically a reality/pretending distinction. Bodies have a sex BUT golly gee people can dress up as the other sex and that’s called “gender” – well sure they can, and they can dress up as the Eiffel Tower or a tiger or a grapefruit; what’s your point?
If gender is separate from sex then why make an [inevitably doomed] attempt to change your sex? And on that note, the TRA’s should sit down and decide once and for all if it’s impossible to change your sex and that nobody who is trans says that they do that, or if trans people actually can and do change their sex, since some of them publicly claim that they have.
I followed the links. Hemant’s attempt to explain why Richard Dawkins gets the biology so wrong seems to focus more on morality than science. He brings up several shallow, often-debunked criticisms of the science (intersex; Michael Phelps) but the real meat of the essay seems to consist of Hemant expressing incredulity about Dawkins’ curious lack of concern:
Never once does Dawkins correct Joyce when she misgenders people. He doesn’t ask her to show trans people the respect he claims to have for them. He just rolls with it because it doesn’t actually bother him.… Questioning trans identities is nothing more than a fun little hypothetical for him. Meanwhile, trans people are subject to political attacks and dehumanizing laws. Dawkins has not used his massive platforms to denounce those attacks. .…Nowhere in the essay did he point out the injustices faced by trans people just trying to get through the damn day while facing conservative-created obstacles to their well-being. He doesn’t care….
The problem with Dawkins’ argument, in other words, is that he’s not making it in good faith. It’s just a bit of fun, intellectual puffery. Genuinely engaging with the topic starts with assuming trans people “know who they are” and after that the challenge is not so much intellectual as emotional, involving sympathy and respect. A good faith argument looks at the issue of sex in its entire context: the Religious Right and their political agendas to impose their religion on others. It’s perhaps an easy enough mistake for an evolutionary biologist to make — but really, how could an atheist miss it?
Hemant’s attempt to nail Prof Dawkins isn’t convincing. It’s as if he’s writing it to a group of people who already agree with him, and share the same well-worn hammer.
I have that lack of concern problem too. Have all along, pretty much. I just can’t see it. I just can’t see much to the claim that they’re The Most Persecuted yadda yadda. I can see that it’s difficult to convince people that one is the other sex, but I can’t see that as particularly tragic or unreasonable. It’s just part of life that it’s difficult to convince the world that one is [an infinite list of things one is not].
And the trouble is, the fact that it’s difficult makes it quite self-centered to try, and keep trying, and whine about lack of success. No, everyone in the world doesn’t have to pretend to believe absurdities just because you want to play dress-up for real. It’s inherently narcissistic to expect it.
Add the power imbalance between men and women and the mental barriers become insuperable.
@sastra – I removed Friendly Atheist from my Feedly feed a couple of years ago, and part of the reason was that any time the trans subject came up, the comment section filled with people who agreed with his position on it. And the only comments I saw presenting a counterpoint were yours. Do you still fight the good fight over there?
Against my better judgment I went and looked through the comments of the F.A. piece and yep, I should have known better. Might as well be a food fight for all the actual argument being made there. The habitual deletion of comments made from the opposing POV is never a good sign.
In a way, trans ideology resembles a religious Accomodationist argument. Trans people, like the devoutly religious, are seen as a uniquely vulnerable, needy group utterly dependent on their belief. It provides them with their foundation for meaning and sense of self. Without the reassurance that there is this one thing they can know and depend on, their life shatters.
It comes back to New Atheism, which as I saw it was a reaction not so much against religion, but against Accomodationism. In Accomodationism, arguing for the truth of atheism was insensitive at best, a cruel intellectual exercise which ignored the grieving widow in need of a future heavenly reunion and the young person in need of the knowledge that God loved them. Dawkins and his book The God Delusion were trying to take this away. Calling their experience a “delusion” was not only disrespectful, but denied their reality. Even if there really is no God, religious people can’t handle the truth, the Accomodationists said. If you can’t reassure them, then at the very least shut up.
A foundational tenet of New Atheism was that no, the religious CAN handle the truth. Life’s meaning and human ethics don’t require supernatural foundations. The Magic of Reality, the Poetry of Reality — Dawkins’ constant theme is that Nature alone is sufficient for everyone. Reason works. The religious aren’t too fragile. They can do without the delusion. They would do better.
Compare this to the Gender Critical belief that the transgender could and would be capable of accepting Nature, too. It’s not true that everything about them as a person depends utterly on their not being the sex they were born as. Therapy, time, and reason could work wonders. Trans people are more capable of resilience than they think they are. They can do without the delusion. They would do better.
Unfortunately, New Atheism’s stance on aggressive religion’s relationship to the religious was often misunderstood. Its premise that ordinary people were being controlled by a toxic religious ideology was often flipped into the claim that toxic people were creating an ideology for the purpose of controlling others. This lead to an Us vs Them mentality where criticizing religion entailed criticizing the religious. The world is thus divided into Black and White: the Good Guys, who is Us, and the Bad Guys, who is Them.
Needless to say, the belief in transgender identities is enmeshed in this demonization of the other side. What Hemant and other former New Atheists took away from New Atheism was an attitude and approach to the Opposition which wasn’t originally there. The Accomodationist position was that the problem with religion is the nasty people in it — condemn them, but give religion a pass because it helps the weak ones who need it.
Somehow, New Atheism inspired some followers to become Accommodationists. If you can’t reassure trans people, then at the very least shut up.
No, after about a year and a half of arguing for the GC position as tactfully and respectfully as I could, one day over a year ago I was banned without warning or explanation. Everything I’d written in the last 4 months or so had been erased and replaced with something like “This Comment is Spam.”
But there’s “spam gender critical sausage and spam,” that’s not got much spam in it.
That seems to be a straight-out lie. I’m more of a biochemist than a mainstream biologist, but I have known plenty of biologists over the years, and it would be difficult to find one — let alone “just about any” — who would spout such nonsense.
One recent year, in our annual meeting of the entire science department across all our campuses, the topic came up, and there was not a single one of us – biology, chemistry, or physics – that saw anything but delusion in the idea. The next year, they added Psych 101 to the hard sciences so students could have an easy science course. That year, the Psych 101 teacher joined us. Because she got offended by anyone who didn’t believe TWAW, we ended up never having that conversation again.
Articles from Religion News Service occasionally cross my news feed. I respect the service, I think they present a good spread of articles from a variety of religious perspectives, including nonbelief, and they tend to do a decent job of showing the warts of various religious traditions and organizations. They have had some helpful articles on the turmoil in the Southern Baptist Convention, and on the schisms in the United Methodist Church, for instance.
Today I saw a headline: Richard Dawkins has abandoned science to justify his transphobia. I thought: oh dear, someone else has jumped onto that bandwagon. I thought I’d take a look; I figured it might make an interesting comparison with this nonsense from Hemant Mehta.
It’s by Hemant Mehta. It’s probably the same article, although I didn’t look closely. Mehta is just spreading his nonsense wherever can can find a willing publisher, I suppose.
Hemant is an embarrassment to Jeopardy! as much as anything. I happen to love that show, and he’s not worthy of the title of Jeopardy! winner.
Mehta has constructed several NYT crossword puzzles, including late-week hard ones that were actually pretty darn good, but does that make him a soooooper genius in all things? He is the kind of person to accuse scientists of stepping out of their lane, but will he not gladly hop over the line himself?
Oh, no! He’s an NYT puzzle constructor, too? Dammit I hate this guy; he’s ruining all my favourite hobbies. Trivia, atheism, crosswords. He better stay away from German opera or I swear…
@Artymorty,
If you’ve ever seen “What’s Opera, Doc?”, you should know that Brünnhilde was AMAB.
Biological sex in humans is a binary, based on gamete size. Trans ideology on the other hand holds that one’s sex is something you personally feel (aka “gender identity”), which isn’t even wrong. Feeling and acting like the sex you’re not doesn’t make you the opposite sex, it just makes you gender non-conforming. (Based on sexist stereotypes of course.) Which is fine, until it begins to infringe on things based on sex, like locker rooms and such.
For an ideology that depends so heavily on dishonesty and doubletalk, the “Friendly” Atheist’s got his work cut out for him. I’m not a biologist, a philosopher, or even a Jeopardy contestant, but I know who’s going to rack up more lies, more quickly, in this exercise.
I actually started to read Hemant’s sub stack, then I started skimming, then I skimmed faster. It reminded me why I didn’t read his stuff years back. Shallow whafflegarb at best. Doesn’t engage with any serious or technical points raised by Dawkins, or anyone else for that matter. Comes across as an uninformed high-schooler who’s already made up his mind based on what someone else told him at the morning tea break. I can’t make up my mind is he’s grifting his audience, a true believer, or just lazy. Maybe some sort of combination?
Would someone be able to tell me some of the things that Dawkins is saying that Hemant describes as “transphobic lies”?
J.A., that is a brilliant summary!
How is Dawkins supposed to explain the wonders of evolution without the whole sex thing coming up? You can’t really understand evolution without understanding sex as well.
I gave up on The Friendly Atheist several years ago. I don’t remember why, but I think it was before he became so wrapped up in trans propaganda. Anyway, you post has prompted me to read what he says in his recent article about Richard Dawkins. In it, he says
That seems to be a straight-out lie. I’m more of a biochemist than a mainstream biologist, but I have known plenty of biologists over the years, and it would be difficult to find one — let alone “just about any” — who would spout such nonsense.
Richard Dawkins may not be right about everything — the “Dear Muslima” letter springs to mind — but he knows vastly more biology than Hemant Mehta will ever know.
There’s a bunch of higgling over the fact that Dawkins said “Sex” but the real issue is “gender, don’t you see.” Even DJ Grothe, former of the CSI, was spouting that having a trans gender identity was similar to his being gay, and telling trans kids they are wrong is just like telling young gay DJ that he wasn’t really gay.
That’s one of the core lies that keep the train rumbling down the tracks to nowhere, that sex/gender distinction. That’s basically a reality/pretending distinction. Bodies have a sex BUT golly gee people can dress up as the other sex and that’s called “gender” – well sure they can, and they can dress up as the Eiffel Tower or a tiger or a grapefruit; what’s your point?
If gender is separate from sex then why make an [inevitably doomed] attempt to change your sex? And on that note, the TRA’s should sit down and decide once and for all if it’s impossible to change your sex and that nobody who is trans says that they do that, or if trans people actually can and do change their sex, since some of them publicly claim that they have.
Incoherent, contradictory and non-falsifiable.
Or a collie.
I followed the links. Hemant’s attempt to explain why Richard Dawkins gets the biology so wrong seems to focus more on morality than science. He brings up several shallow, often-debunked criticisms of the science (intersex; Michael Phelps) but the real meat of the essay seems to consist of Hemant expressing incredulity about Dawkins’ curious lack of concern:
The problem with Dawkins’ argument, in other words, is that he’s not making it in good faith. It’s just a bit of fun, intellectual puffery. Genuinely engaging with the topic starts with assuming trans people “know who they are” and after that the challenge is not so much intellectual as emotional, involving sympathy and respect. A good faith argument looks at the issue of sex in its entire context: the Religious Right and their political agendas to impose their religion on others. It’s perhaps an easy enough mistake for an evolutionary biologist to make — but really, how could an atheist miss it?
Hemant’s attempt to nail Prof Dawkins isn’t convincing. It’s as if he’s writing it to a group of people who already agree with him, and share the same well-worn hammer.
I have that lack of concern problem too. Have all along, pretty much. I just can’t see it. I just can’t see much to the claim that they’re The Most Persecuted yadda yadda. I can see that it’s difficult to convince people that one is the other sex, but I can’t see that as particularly tragic or unreasonable. It’s just part of life that it’s difficult to convince the world that one is [an infinite list of things one is not].
And the trouble is, the fact that it’s difficult makes it quite self-centered to try, and keep trying, and whine about lack of success. No, everyone in the world doesn’t have to pretend to believe absurdities just because you want to play dress-up for real. It’s inherently narcissistic to expect it.
Add the power imbalance between men and women and the mental barriers become insuperable.
@sastra – I removed Friendly Atheist from my Feedly feed a couple of years ago, and part of the reason was that any time the trans subject came up, the comment section filled with people who agreed with his position on it. And the only comments I saw presenting a counterpoint were yours. Do you still fight the good fight over there?
Against my better judgment I went and looked through the comments of the F.A. piece and yep, I should have known better. Might as well be a food fight for all the actual argument being made there. The habitual deletion of comments made from the opposing POV is never a good sign.
In a way, trans ideology resembles a religious Accomodationist argument. Trans people, like the devoutly religious, are seen as a uniquely vulnerable, needy group utterly dependent on their belief. It provides them with their foundation for meaning and sense of self. Without the reassurance that there is this one thing they can know and depend on, their life shatters.
It comes back to New Atheism, which as I saw it was a reaction not so much against religion, but against Accomodationism. In Accomodationism, arguing for the truth of atheism was insensitive at best, a cruel intellectual exercise which ignored the grieving widow in need of a future heavenly reunion and the young person in need of the knowledge that God loved them. Dawkins and his book The God Delusion were trying to take this away. Calling their experience a “delusion” was not only disrespectful, but denied their reality. Even if there really is no God, religious people can’t handle the truth, the Accomodationists said. If you can’t reassure them, then at the very least shut up.
A foundational tenet of New Atheism was that no, the religious CAN handle the truth. Life’s meaning and human ethics don’t require supernatural foundations. The Magic of Reality, the Poetry of Reality — Dawkins’ constant theme is that Nature alone is sufficient for everyone. Reason works. The religious aren’t too fragile. They can do without the delusion. They would do better.
Compare this to the Gender Critical belief that the transgender could and would be capable of accepting Nature, too. It’s not true that everything about them as a person depends utterly on their not being the sex they were born as. Therapy, time, and reason could work wonders. Trans people are more capable of resilience than they think they are. They can do without the delusion. They would do better.
Unfortunately, New Atheism’s stance on aggressive religion’s relationship to the religious was often misunderstood. Its premise that ordinary people were being controlled by a toxic religious ideology was often flipped into the claim that toxic people were creating an ideology for the purpose of controlling others. This lead to an Us vs Them mentality where criticizing religion entailed criticizing the religious. The world is thus divided into Black and White: the Good Guys, who is Us, and the Bad Guys, who is Them.
Needless to say, the belief in transgender identities is enmeshed in this demonization of the other side. What Hemant and other former New Atheists took away from New Atheism was an attitude and approach to the Opposition which wasn’t originally there. The Accomodationist position was that the problem with religion is the nasty people in it — condemn them, but give religion a pass because it helps the weak ones who need it.
Somehow, New Atheism inspired some followers to become Accommodationists. If you can’t reassure trans people, then at the very least shut up.
@Mike Haubrich:
No, after about a year and a half of arguing for the GC position as tactfully and respectfully as I could, one day over a year ago I was banned without warning or explanation. Everything I’d written in the last 4 months or so had been erased and replaced with something like “This Comment is Spam.”
But there’s “spam gender critical sausage and spam,” that’s not got much spam in it.
[…] a comment by Sastra on Hemantsplaining biology to a […]
So very friendly.
One recent year, in our annual meeting of the entire science department across all our campuses, the topic came up, and there was not a single one of us – biology, chemistry, or physics – that saw anything but delusion in the idea. The next year, they added Psych 101 to the hard sciences so students could have an easy science course. That year, the Psych 101 teacher joined us. Because she got offended by anyone who didn’t believe TWAW, we ended up never having that conversation again.
Articles from Religion News Service occasionally cross my news feed. I respect the service, I think they present a good spread of articles from a variety of religious perspectives, including nonbelief, and they tend to do a decent job of showing the warts of various religious traditions and organizations. They have had some helpful articles on the turmoil in the Southern Baptist Convention, and on the schisms in the United Methodist Church, for instance.
Today I saw a headline: Richard Dawkins has abandoned science to justify his transphobia. I thought: oh dear, someone else has jumped onto that bandwagon. I thought I’d take a look; I figured it might make an interesting comparison with this nonsense from Hemant Mehta.
It’s by Hemant Mehta. It’s probably the same article, although I didn’t look closely. Mehta is just spreading his nonsense wherever can can find a willing publisher, I suppose.