Peak friendliness

The “friendly” atheist again, at Religion News Service:

Richard Dawkins has abandoned science to justify his transphobia

Even the title is ridiculous. It’s not “abandoning science” to know that men are not women. Trans ideology is not scientific, it’s all about the fee-fees.

Subhead:

It’s jarring to see the world’s most famous atheist use his massive platform to downplay or deny trans identities.

Wait. Are we talking about science here, or idenninies? They’re not the same, to put it mildly.

And how is it “jarring” to see an atheist deny that claims about idenninies can trump physical realities?

For decades, the renowned evolutionary biologist and atheist Richard Dawkins urged his readers to use science and reason to counter religious misinformation. Now Dawkins is abandoning both to spread anti-transgender rhetoric embraced by religious conservatives.

Other way around, bro. Trans ideology has nothing to do with either science or reason. It’s about fantasy, and bullying everyone into endorsing other people’s (frankly tedious) fantasies. Neither science nor reason tells us we must or should do that.

The podcast episode dropped days after Dawkins wrote an essay for the British magazine The New Statesman answering the question, “What is a woman?” Dawkins’ reductive response boiled down to “A woman is an adult human female, free of Y chromosomes,” as if the absence of a single chromosome answers the question.

Reductive shmeductive. The absurd baroque explanations of trans ideology are too complicated by half.

And author J.K. Rowling, whom Dawkins called “very brave” in his podcast, has couched her inflammatory rhetoric in biological terms.

How very dare she! We’re not biological, we’re divine airy souls self-created by our own sacred minds. How could a famous atheist like Dawkins not understand that???

I can no longer recommend Dawkins’ books to people who want to educate themselves about evolution.

It would damage his soul if he did.

It’s also maddening because Dawkins remains the go-to atheist for reporters and media outlets. There are more atheists who are LGBTQ, women and people of color than ever before, yet it’s Dawkins who often takes center stage whenever there are public conversations about atheism. That’s not his fault, of course: He literally wrote the most popular book on the subject. But it’s irresponsible to use his platforms to spread ignorance on a topic that critics have repeatedly said he doesn’t understand and often gets flat-out wrong.

Which critics are these though? The ones who adhere to the gender ideology. Critics of gender ideology on the other hand take a different view. I for instance think Hemant Mehta is flat-out wrong about nearly everything he says in this sloppy piece.

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