Another back stabbed
Another heretic shunned, this time by the group The Atheist Community of Austin.
Statement from the ACA Board of Directors
Recently, the ACA Board of Directors was made aware that guest co-host Stephen Woodford (YouTuber “Rationality Rules”) had made ignorant and transphobic videos and statements on his social media platforms in the weeks leading up to his appearances on ACA shows. We would like to make it clear that we do not share or condone his opinions or attitudes, and that we fully and actively support equal rights for the LGBTQIA+ community.
We acknowledge that the ACA did a poor job showing our support by allowing Mr. Woodford to make appearances on our shows without either addressing his controversial views on the air, or asking him to refrain from appearances until he released a clarifying statement on his channel. We also failed to communicate our feelings and intentions in a timely manner to our volunteers and fans.
We sincerely apologize for the pain and anguish our failings have caused our viewers, volunteers, and our ACA family all over the world. We love the trans community and are deeply distressed to have caused anyone harm. We have let you down, and we intend to do our best to earn back your trust.
The ACA is working quickly and diligently to ensure that this kind of mistake does not happen again. We will be coordinating with hosts, co-hosts, and staff to communicate any potential issues with a guest well in advance of when they are set to appear on any ACA production. The ACA will not knowingly allow any ACA production or publication to be used in a manner that’s inconsistent with our mission and position statements.
We would also love to hear from you, our ACA family. If you have any ideas or feedback on how we can do better, please email us at board@atheist-community.org
Sincerely,
Board of Directors
The Atheist Community of Austin
Woodford had made a video on the subject of transgender athletes; he now says he “made some mistakes” in that video, which I suspect means he violated some asserted orthodoxy or other as opposed to making a genuine (factual) mistake – but more to the point, he also says that making mistakes is not being “transphobic.”
There are currently 1.7 thousand comments on the Facebook post I linked to. I’ll sample a few.
- I’d like to post a poll to simply aid the ACA leadership in understanding where those they represent stand. Just a simple yes or no, “Should ACA withdraw its statement and apologize to RR for characterizing him as transphobic?” However, they don’t seem to be letting any new threads like that which could be deemed critical of the ACA through moderation.
- Very disappointed to see the way discussion is being squashed not just here but now with mass deleting of comments on the Talk Heathen show. Way to stay open to dialogue and discussion and criticism ACA.
- Once again…thank you to the ACA for standing up for the trans community and not bending to the will of the endless cis dude parade.
Feel free to reply, but I won’t be reading or responding.- I am looking forward to Stephen’s follow up video. Hopefully he can put the record straight.
For the record I am 100% supportive of trans athletes competing as the gender they identify if fairness can be achieved for them and the athletes against whom they are competing.
I have to say something about that one. I would guess that everyone is 100% supportive of trans athletes competing as the gender they identify [as] if fairness can be achieved for them and the athletes against whom they are competing, but when it’s people with male bodies competing against women fairness can’t be achieved, which is the whole point.
- Oh please. ‘XX women’ AKA cis non-intersex women do not get to police who identifies as a woman just because we happened to be born into a body that matches society’s ideals. Read about the term ‘TERFs’.
- Inviting someone onto several of your shows, using them to gain increased audience figures, denouncing them as soon as they leave your sight, putting out hyperbolic statements without clarifying or supporting them and then censuring and limiting any debate on the topic is certainly something, but ‘brave’ might not be the word I use….
Some “community” huh?
H/t Aratina Cage
Is there a single “atheist” organization left that is not an actual, real-world cult?
What the hell is the point of a movement to promote freethinking and critical thinking if it can’t recognize irrationality and popular delusions as they occur? Or worse, fails even to address and examine the claims involved?
Rhetorical question.
Chilling. I gave up on “organized” atheism a while ago. But I guess I still believed that self-declared iconoclasts wouldn’t be quite so eager to adopt an orthodoxy of their own.
It is a sad and deflating event all around and all because of folks who live in their heads and don’t know it and other folks are either too afraid or unaware of that fact to be supportive of them without losing perspective.
Great! So I can make a quick fortune by reviving the tulip-mania of the 17th century! Who’s with me?
Oh, fuck off! I am absolutely sick and tired of this infantile bullshit. Are there masses of people being rushed to ERs worldwide suffering life-threatening injuries because a man on their screens said that men aren’t women? Has Woodward’s appearances on the ACA shows caused a global shortage of morphine and ketamine?
It’s all just so utterly, pathetically childish; why can’t people grow the fuck up?
To read the wailings and gnashings of teeth of the TRAs, one would think just that is happening. One comment by one commenter on one social media site is enough to send hundreds of trans-women to the poison bottle or the knife drawer.
In reality, it seems to send them to the smart phone so they can exercise their Twitter thumbs calling women every name in the book and throwing the word TERF at anyone who gets in their way. Then getting people de-platformed, fired, called by the police…just for having a biological based reality.
It’s funny how we are said to be oppressing and keeping them down, but I haven’t been seeing a lot of TRAs being deplatformed, fired, kicked off social media, called by the police, beaten up for being gender critical. In fact, people who say “don’t punch Nazis” seem unwilling to say “don’t punch TERFs”.
Once again, women are the group it is okay to hate.
Which is causing cognitive dissonance for the TRA’s who equate TERFs with Nazis.
Mind you, I see a certain woke professor* and certain of his followers are now happily talking about guillotining the opposition (even if said professor thinks a tumbril is a ‘tumbler’). I’d assume they were were just kidding or speaking metaphorically were it not for his recent post saying that ‘it’s just a joke’ is no excuse for saying shitty things.
*he’s suddenly started to referring to his grandchildren as ‘grandbaby 1 & 2’ rather than grandson and granddaughter. Still not quite woke enough yet, he still says ‘he’ and ‘she’. I don’t think his heart’s fully in the gender pronouns thing when it comes to his own family.
To be fair, said professor does not advocate actual violence, as far as I know and I have known him personally. (Not having anything to do with him any more, after his penchant for rhetorical violence caught me in the crossfire.) He doesn’t seem to have any self-awareness when it comes to his own shitty online behavior though.
Their thread over on the FTB page is blowing up; it might actually be useful to participate in there as the conversation is considerably more restrained than in PZ’s pit of vipers.
What thread?
J.A., he has had threads on the topic of nazi punching in the past, and came down on the pro-punching side. Not that I think he ever will do such a thing, he and multiple others there that advocate for punching nazis would never dream of doing something that might lead to real world consequences for themselves, so they content themselves with their fantasy punches against nazis while being smugly condescending – or outright vitriolic – to those that argue against them. Myself being one such person.
What thread?
#11 OB
https://freethoughtblogs.com/axp/
I don’t think the hosts themselves really spend time curating the comment sections there, but each episode of The Atheist Experience get a page with comment thread there. The threads for the two most recent episodes contain conversations about the ‘transphobia’.
Holms, thanks for the link and the recommendation. It does seem to be a place where an open discussion can be had about the subject.
Thanks Holms.
I’ve just had a brief look at the most recent thread there and, well, the discourse might be more civil than at PZ’s but the arguments are pretty much the same, right down to the gender/sex/race conflation. I did see one new one, though. It was in quite a long comment but as far as I could tell seemed to boil down to ‘the phrase ‘tomboy’ is 500 years old; people tell others to “man-up” or to ‘grow a pair’; therefore transwomen are women’. I…I…..Jeez!