Worshiping the mysterious inner gender
Brendan O’Neill on the idiocy of the atheist bros:
We are living through a great showdown between hysteria and reason. On one side stand the adherents to the cult of transgenderism, hawking their hocus pocus about gendered souls and self-authentication through castration. On the other side stand those of us who know that biology is real…
Not just castration of course. Genital mutilation on both sides, bilateral mastectomies, hysterectomies, cross-sex hormones, puberty blockers.
You’ll never guess which side some New Atheists are taking in this clash between delusion and truth. The crazy side. The side that says a bloke with a beard and balls can literally be a lesbian. Which is infinitely more cranky than the idea that a bloke with a beard and balls can literally be the Son of God. How did rationalist bros, those secularists on steroids, those Dawkins acolytes whose hobby for years was to make fun of the faithful, become devotees of such a strange, post-truth sect?
One answer is massive social pressure. but what the roots of that are I will never understand.
This week a Twitterfeed called The New Atheists slammed Richard Dawkins for becoming a TERF. Dawkins is a rarity in the new rationalist ranks: he thinks people with penises are men, not women, just as bread is bread, not the body of Christ. He is ‘utterly confused’, decreed his angry apostates. Biology ‘isn’t black and white, it’s a full spectrum of colour just like a rainbow’, they said.
And just like a tub of sprinkles.
We’ve witnessed Neil deGrasse Tyson, America’s best-known scientist, bow to the creed of gender-as-feeling. In a TikTok video he said ‘XX/XY chromosomes are insufficient’ when it comes to reading someone’s sex, because what people feel matters along with their biology. So someone might feel mostly female one day but ‘80 per cent male’ the next, which means they’ll ‘remove the make-up’ and ‘wear a muscle shirt’.
What people feel matters, but it doesn’t change certain basic realities about them. What people feel can change their mood, their thinking, their behavior, their politics, many things, but it can’t change their sex any more than it can change their species.
We’ve seen Matt Dillahunty, a leading American atheist, promote the mystic cry that there’s a difference between ‘what your chromosomes are’ and your ‘gender identity’. ‘Transwomen are women’, he piously declares, perhaps keen to prove that while he might be fond of bashing the old religions, he has not one cross or blasphemous word to say about the new religion.
More to do with his significant other, from what I’ve seen in Twitter commentary.
Stephen Fry is another godless lover of science who appears to have converted to the trans belief. Phillip Pullman, Stewart Lee and others who were once noisy cheerleaders for rationalism are likewise strikingly reserved on this new ideology…
I wish. Phillip Pullman isn’t reserved on the subject, he’s all too mouthy on it.
Then there’s Humanists UK. Even Britain’s most influential God-free organisation has thrown its lot in with the Flat Earthism of the post-sex ideology. It entreated the British government not to change the definition of sex in the Equality Act to mean ‘biological sex’. Why? Because some people have a mysterious inner gender – soul? – which apparently counts for more than their biological sex when it comes to the question of which social spaces they should be allowed to enter.
Aka mind-body dualism, which as many have pointed out, humanists should be wise to.
Some women resigned from Humanists UK over what they viewed as its abandonment of ‘compassionate, scientific [and] rational’ principles in favour of the unreality of gender subjectivity.
The link is to Joan Smith.
O’Neill goes on to draw grand (and silly) conclusions about Dawkins and selfish genes and “the soulless technocracy of the New Atheism,” whatever that might be. He’s right about Team-Dillahunty though.
The piece took quite the nosedive in the second half. Dawkins and the New Atheists never espoused that humans should not try to make meaning in their lives. They merely said that our lives aren’t automatically granted a meaning by the universe. O’Neill, and Midgley before him, trip over the is/ought distinction here.
I don’t think it’s godlessness that’s driving transgenderism — kids brought up religious are no less likely to buy into it. But I do think it’s got to do with a search for meaning in modern life. It’s got a bit to do with social media and the world wide web upturning our sense of identity and place in society, so we’re looking to wear gender roles like uniforms that ground us in a sense of purpose and meaning. But it’s got to do with a whole lot of other things, too. It’s silly to try to blame atheists for it.
Beyond ‘social pressure’ there is also the ‘enemy of my enemy is my friend’ rationale. You used to run across it with atheists talking about pagans, too, though it was less full-on agreement since the neo-pagans are still open about their beliefs constituting a religion, which makes it harder to square that circle.
Still, there is a very strong knee-jerk reaction among atheists that boils down to, “If the ultra-right Christians say it is wrong, it must be right.” So the modern Trans Rights brigade was well-primed to be an ally of choice for many lefty atheists, on the general belief that anyone Tucker Carlson hates must be a-okay.
Yeah, all of that, and more. The desire to be special, and noticed. The desire to be marginalized (without actually suffering marginalization). The increasing focus on gender roles, like the gender reveal parties that are horrendous stereotypes…and reinforce the idea that gender is important. The narcissism of modern society, the idea that everyone has to win, the idea that we are all special snowflakes, the idea that all ideas are equally valid – all these lousy ideas seem to have converged in this one crazy space.
I’m currently reading The End of the World is Flat. It’s uncanny how well Simon Edge is nailing the transgender ideas.
Pretty sure all of the “Four Horsemen” aren’t down with the stupid (presumably Hitchens would’ve been in this camp had he lived)…
Loving all this nonsense where “wokeness is all your fault and wasn’t it better when nasty individuals like myself were in charge”. A ridiculous number of people with that message seem to at least play act at being Catholic as well.
More on that… I’d hazard that most of these supposedly New Atheist (though they were all A+ which is only a strand of New Atheism) “true believers” in transgenderism converted for much the same reason that Lindsay Graham did: fear/opportunism.
The shape of O’Neill’s argument sounded sufficiently familiar that I recognised an echo of Joseph Schumpeter:
…capitalism creates a critical frame of mind which, after having destroyed the moral authority of so many other institutions, in the end turns against its own; the bourgeois finds to his amazement that the rationalist attitude does not stop at the credentials of kings and popes but goes on to attack private property and the whole scheme of bourgeois values.
O’Neill just needs to substitute “atheism” for “capitalism”, “philosophical materialism” for “private property” and “rational inquiry” for “bourgeois values”.
That is very interesting.
While I don’t really agree with the caricature of Dawkins views in the second half, but I do now live with the fear that transgenderism is filling a god shaped whole in a lot of irreligious/atheistic peoples lives. I don’t know if there’s much to this observation but a lot of the atheist friends I’ve lost were atheists. Through what I’d previously thought of as good fortune, they were never exposed to religion as children, never went to church or Sunday School, one of them told me that even his R.E teachers were atheists. They never had to reason their way out of a faith and as a result had no immunity when a new and novel form of bullshit arose in the form of Transgenderism.
Not Stephen Fry! I love Stephen Fry, oh crap.