Hemant Mehta – remember him? – has written a snotty abusive post about Jerry Coyne and his failure to subscribe to trans ideology. It’s not an intellectually respectable attempt.
In an essay published in print yesterday, on the Trans Day of Visibility, biologist Jerry Coyne wrote in the Wall Street Journal (archived link) about his recent self-own against the Freedom From Religion Foundation.
Weeds already. They do dash into them, the gender-worshippers. The sanctimonious “on the Trans Day of Visibility” is downright childish. Wtf is “the Trans Day of Visibility” and why should anyone care and above all why should anyone consider it a sanctified day on which it is unacceptable to say that trans ideology is bullshit? Hey, heads up, today is Listen to Gender Critical Women and Shut Up Day, and so is every other day. Sauce for the cis goose sauce for the cis gander.
And then the “self-own” – who says it was a self-own? Why, Mr Friendly, of course. It’s just so silly to say anything remotely skeptical about trans ideology, which is so obviously both true and beneficial.
The article predictably paints Coyne as the arbiter of good science, leaving out all the lies he told along the way.
There are journalists who have been sued for calling people liars without evidence. Just saying.
If you’re wondering what this is all about, you can read the whole backstory here. But in short, Coyne wrote an article in December that briefly appeared on FFRF’s website titled “Biology is not bigotry.” In it, Coyne wrongly insisted that sex is binary, lied about trans women, and pushed for discrimination against trans people.
Crude stuff. Wasn’t Mehta supposed to be a thoughtful intelligent guy? That seemed to be his reputation, as far as I knew, though I never paid much attention to him – I’m not a huge fan of people who attach hooray-words to their own names. I’ll decide for myself if you’re friendly or not, thank you, and judging by the above I would say you’re not even close.
Nowhere in the piece did he describe the countless ways the trans community is under attack, largely by people making similar misguided arguments.
Oh shut up. People declining to believe in trans ideology does not equal the trans communninny being under attack. If you say you’re a turnip and I say you’re not, you’re not under attack from me.
The article was so devoid of facts and empathy that FFRF soon took down the piece and posted their own statement explicitly backing LGBTQIA-plus rights and saying that publishing Coyne’s article “was an error of judgment [that] does not reflect our values or principles.”
Oh rilly? Well if it was that devoid of facts and empathy why did FFRF publish it? Why did they take it down only when some of its gender-addled younger staff pitched a fit? Why wasn’t its horrid nasty bad meanness obvious from the beginning?
Mehta quotes a bit of Coyne’s essay and then comments
Written like someone who’s still never had a single conversation with a trans person but pretends to be an expert on the subject anyway…
I’m less interested in explaining biology to him—he’s obviously not interested
Well no, there’s something else he’s even more obviously. A biologist.
I stopped reading at that point. It’s not good writing or thinking.
Comments
7 responses to “Angry Mr Friendly”
Even in the before times I ignored Mehta. He was both smugly self satisfied and shallow. Bad combo. Now though, he’s neither friendly nor an atheist. So any utility he possessed is gone.
Speaking of “The article predictably paints [the author] as the arbiter of good science, leaving out all the lies he told along the way”, we have:
Mehta describes his article to a T.
Nice of him though to accidentally admit the ‘attacks’ are just people disagreeing with the theory: “largely by people making [incisive] arguments”.
Oh and it’s time for a deeeeep riiiift between us, Ophelia: he is a turnip.
As for the friendly moniker, the impression I have is he considers himself that because he did not write quite so belligerently as others such as PZ. And that may have been true in terms of openly demeaning writing, he has always been friendly in a smarmy, greasy, backhanded way.
I don’t need “a single conversation with a trans person” to know that the claims of genderism are bullshit. There is no “expertise” required. No such conversation would be capable of persuading me of the truth of of these claims . You might as well try to convince me of the validity of astrology or theism. It is not hatred or bigotry to say that they are wrong or mistaken. The hatred and bigotry comes from those who are bullying and browbeating others into accede to genderist bullshit, or threatening them into silence. As far as I can tell, that’s all going in one direction, and Mr. Not-so-Passive-aggressive Atheist is joining in.
I have never visited a single psychic; would Mr. Friendly think that means I am not qualified to call psychics frauds or deluded?
@iknklast
I used to think Stephen Hawking was pretty smart fella until I realised he’s never spoken to so much as a single black hole.
*If you could delete my previous comment – my keyboard got feline interference.
I remember when Mehta’s was pushing Tyson as a sexual assaulter, I suspect with Mehta that he sincerely wants to be the good guy.
At the end of the day the investigations into Tyson went nowhere, and his employers decided there wasn’t enough evidence to fire him. Really it was the sort of situation which one should step back and wait on, but Mehta’s needs to be the good guy.
And that is the core problem with the whole trans activism scene. They want so desperately to be fighting the good fight, that they’re not thinking all that critically about it.
So when someone comes in and points at that there are real problems with their position, you get articles like this where Mehta pretty much proves Coyne’s point.
Consider this for second:
Jerry Coyne, is a biology professor. He specialises in ecology and evolution. Mehta is a former high school mathematics teacher.
Who should be lecturing whom?
I was interested in this so I clicked through the hyperlink, to try and find out just who this hate group is supposed to be. He doesn’t say. Looking at the hyperlink from that article, it appears fairplayforwomen, which is to say a lobbying group that opposes trans activism.
That is not enough to qualify as a hate group, unless Hemant thinks the FFRF are themselves a hate group given their lobbying against religious involvement in US politics. Anyway the relevant bit:
Even if trans people are less likely to go to prison than cis people, the fact that the prisoners are more likely to be guilty of sex offenses would still be an argument for not putting them in women’s prisons. We’re not dealing with the general population here, unless Mehta thinks all trans people should be locked up in women’s prisons.
In which case I’ve got to ask who the transphobe is here.
But aside from that, that data comes from the UK’s Ministry of Justice and the UK Census. Is the UK government a hate group?
I honestly think one of the major problems the trans activists have, is that they think that labelling someone as conservative, or alt right, or a transphobe or anything like that, is the same thing as discrediting them. I don’t know if Mehta hasn’t noticed, but the US president is a right winger.
If you’re going to discredit what someone is saying, you need to actually, I don’t know, deal with what they’re saying rather than just insist “they’re lying, trust me bro”, or “that data was published by a hate-group”. Is the data true?
@7 surely you don’t want to censor your cat’s free expression of her/his opinions?