Buhbye
Dear Annie Laurie and Dan,
As you probably expected, I am going resign my position on the honorary board of the FFRF. I do this with great sadness, for you know that I have been a big supporter of your organization for years, and was honored to receive not only your Emperor Has No Clothes Award, but also that position on your honorary board.
But because you took down my article that critiqued Kat Grant’s piece, which amounts to quashing discussion of a perfectly discuss-able issue, and in fact had previously agreed that I could publish that piece—not a small amount of work—and then put it up after a bit of editing, well, that is a censorious behavior I cannot abide. I was simply promoting a biological rather than a psychological definition of sex, and I do not understand why you would consider that “distressing” and also an attempt to hurt LGBTQIA+ people, which I would never do.
Anyway he couldn’t do it, because there are no such people. No one is lesbian and gay and bi and trans and queer and intersex and asexual. We shouldn’t encourage their lumping together all those categories by repeating the 8 letter catchall. But that’s a detail.
Further, when I emailed Annie Laurie asking why my piece had disappeared (before the “official announcement” of revocation was issued), I didn’t even get the civility of a response. Is that the way you treat a member of the honorary board?
I remain surprised as well as shocked by that. It’s all too typical, but it’s still shocking.
The gender ideology which caused you to take down my article is itself quasi-religious, having many aspects of religions and cults, including dogma, blasphemy, belief in what is palpably untrue (“a woman is whoever she says she is”), apostasy, and a tendency to ignore science when it contradicts a preferred ideology.
Exactly.
After all this time, I still don’t understand why that doesn’t repel all those new or gnu atheists who used to be our friends.
I don’t entirely agree with Coyne about trans — I find him too placating, excessively deferential, and overindulgent of the trans activists’ patently bullshit arguments. But in this case that works rather well in favour of my less compromising stance, as it makes clear no matter how much one bends over backwards to appease the zealots, anything short of total subordination will get you completely cancelled.
The fence is not a comfortable place to sit for very long.
Arty: There is ultimately only ever one kind of submission: total.
Wonderful formulation. Many issues do not call for a middle-of-the-road stance. For instance, if FFRF says 2+2=3 and Ophelia says it is 4, agreeing to ‘split the difference’ at 3.5 is not an appropriate compromise. There are places where what you say is what is – for instance, your favorite ice cream or your favorite color. But if you try to say that your favorite ice cream is the only ice cream worth eating, and try to force everyone else to agree with you, then what you say is no longer true, and is repressive. No one would go along with a ‘middle of the road’ position where they agree that what you say is delusional, but we need to be nice to you. People would feel free to eat different ice cream.
That’s different in one major way from the trans issue: there is no scientific evidence to show what the best ice cream is. That is wholly subjective. There is scientific evidence to support what a woman is, whether one can truly change to the opposite sex, and why this is important. There is scientific evidence that men have distinct physical advantages over women. There is evidence to demonstrate that putting men in women’s spaces, even if they say they are women, poses a clear and present danger to women.
Why is this so hard to see? (Rhetorical.)
“Why is this so hard to see? (Rhetorical.)”
The thing that really smacks me upside the head is, “Why is this so hard for women to see?”
I don’t care if “transmen” come into men’s restrooms or changing rooms, because women have never posed a threat to me. Transmen are not stampeding into men’s sports because the strength differential between women and men is significant.”
Weird sort of blindness going around.
Arty, yes, I too find him way too placating and deferential on the subject, but then how fascinating it is that he gets every bit as much venom and aggression as we refuseniks do.
Yes, I found it rather odd and off-putting how often Coyne used the words “transwoman/transwomen” in his editorial, given that he was writing about the reality and immutability of biology. Using the deliberately confusing, preferred terminology of the viewpoint you’re critiquing isn’t going to help the power or clarity of your argument; in fact it cedes far too much ground to trans dogma. If you’re saying that men can’t be or become women, why retreat and call them “women” of any kind at all? That’s just taking “framing” a step too far. I wonder if this might have been part of the “bit of editing” he mentions?
On the other side of the coin, any opposition is completely unacceptable. In trans activists’ view, resistance to letting males compete is women’s sport is no different than plotting trans genocide. The least bit of questioning or pushback is tantamount to calling publicly for the murder of trans people. Thus we get Kat Grant accusing Coyne of “stochastic terrorism” and his posing a “danger” to trans people in her gloating little victory-lap piece published in celebration of the memory-holing of his article, which was amongst the most mild and tentative criticisms of trans ideology I’ve come across in a long time. But there is no such thing as “mild” or “legitimate” criticism. I’m glad Coyne resigned, and didn’t stick around for the compulsory re-education that would have been the required next step if he’d stayed. “Listening” can’t help you if you’ve heard enough; sometimes “doing better” means leaving.
But this isn’t really surprising any more. In the short term, gender ideology doesn’t have to make sense to win,; we’ve seen that already. But its victory is more difficult in the face of any questions and criticism, and the ultimate defeat of its foundational dishonesty and reality-denial is inevitable. If you’re building a house of cards, the softest whisper or the slightest breeze can bring it all tumbling down. Can’t have that. The only safe space you have to build it in is a vacuum. Of course, there’s always going to be gravity…
My understanding is that thanks to intersectionality, atheism has to also include any and all social justice causes. See also how “dictionary atheism” is now used as a slur on those who don’t include one or more said social justice causes.
But what intersection is that? Atheism isn’t a social justice cause, it’s an epistemic position. (That of course is why Atheism+ was a thing.)
But I suppose the gnu atheists were social justicey atheists, so maybe that is the answer.
Because it’s a cuuuuuuult.
BITE model, Emotional control:
It’s worth checking the list to see just how few items don’t apply.
Because it’s a cuuuuuuult.
I have no problem mixing my atheism with my social justiceyness. Sure, one is an is and the other is an ought. And I know how to treat them separately in their respective nonoverlapping magisteria, to borrow Stephen Jay Gould’s coinage for the distinction between facts and values. But in some contexts ises and oughts — facts and values — can be synthesized together to form a complete, humanistic worldview. The fact that atheism is true is one thing, but I wouldn’t care much if the god question didn’t have any real-life impact on the wellbeing of humanity. God’s nonexistence would still be a fact, but I wouldn’t put it high on my priority list of things to advocate about if it didn’t actually matter in people’s lives. One of the great successes of the New Atheist movement was that it focused on the message that the truth of the god question actually matters in the real world. So in that sense, New Atheism did indeed combine ises and oughts — epistemology with at least some degree of progressive or humanist ideology.
The same goes for the fact that the biological sex binary is true. And that’s where I part ways with the gnus and the pluses: they can’t grasp the connection between the truth of biology vis-a-vis gender ideology, and the real-life impact on the wellbeing of humanity — specifically, that the sex-realist worldview, in both an epistemic and ideological sense, is not just deeply, fundamentally true but that it’s also deeply, fundamentally good for humanity, and conversely, that the gender-ideological worldview is not just deeply, fundamentally untrue but more importantly than even the fact that it’s bunkum is that it’s catastrophically fucking harmful to all of society, and especially to the groups it purports to help, the groups who get ensnared by its convoluted logic traps: women, gays, autogynephilic men, socially awkward autistics, vulnerable youth, etc.
I can almost see where the “woke” atheists are coming from, because like them, I do indeed truly care about the wellbeing of those who have been marginalized by society because of their sex, or because of their same-sex attraction, or because of their behavioural and presentational nonconformity to society’s prevailing stereotypes about sex and sex roles.
That’s the ghetto I grew up in, raised by a feminist single mother and then working in gay and trans bars. I know those people well. But it’s because I know feminist women and gay and trans-identifying people so well, I also know that pseudoscientific gender identity beliefs are not helping but actively harming them. Even when they labour under the delusions that their gender beliefs are saving them. Just as the angry Scientologists are paradoxically among that cult’s biggest victims, so too are the angry trans-identifying activists among the biggest victims of gender identity ideology: they’ve wrecked their bodies and their social networks and their lives trying to make the impossible come true instead of finding happiness through a deeper understanding of the real world and their real bodies. And then they turn around and try to drag others into the trap they fell into.
That’s perhaps yet another reason the gender activists rely entirely on apeals to emotion and claims of vulnerability instead of arguing on the facts: that’s just the way cults entrap people’s minds.
To penetrate the minds of their misguided allies in the skeptic/atheist-sphere, I think we need to do more than just argue on the matter of biology’s truth, we need to additionally persuade them of that truth’s practical usefulness — and indeed, its necessity — for the wellbeing of LGB and T people, and for everyone else, too.
But Atheism must be intersectional and include Muslims, Christians, Hindus, Jains, Animists, Buddhists, Mormons, and even Presbyterians.
If it’s not inclusive, is it really Atheism at all?
Of course secularism (i.e. separation of church and state) does not imply atheism, and atheism does not imply critical thinking. I still think the consistent application of critical thinking leads to “atheism”, but that doesn’t mean atheism leads to critical thinking. Atheism is just a specific conclusion. There is no shortage of people who arrived at this conclusion for reasons that have nothing to do with critical thinking, whether it’s in protest of the historical crimes of the church, a reaction to the horrific misogyny, homophobia, or general nastiness of the Bible, being offended by self-appointed representatives of God telling others what to do, a fallout with their religious community, or even feeling “betrayed by God” because of a personal tragedy.
As I may have mentioned earlier, one of my personal favorite entries from my old blog (R.I.P.) was called (the Norwegian equivalent of) “The Right Conclusion for the Wrong Reason”. In it I argued that just because someone happens to reach a correct conclusion doesn’t necessarily mean they arrived at it through sound reasoning and that “skeptics” should be critical of bad reasons, even when they are used to support a conclusion we agree with. The blog post was written out of frustration about Bill Maher receiving the Richard Dawkins award for promoting “science” and “critical thinking”. It was probably one of my least popular posts ever.
Speaking of “skeptics”, at least they claim to care more about epistemology, careful thinking, methodological rigor etc. than specific conclusions (like “atheism”), but of course we have seen what that amounts to in practice (Science-Based Medicine, anyone?). When I was a student back in the 1990s we were still required to take an introductory course in philosophy. According to the (almost certainly grossly oversimplified and caricatured) portrayal of ancient Greece presented to us, there were people (the good guys) who called themselves “philosophers” and saw themselves as seeking wisdom, and there were other people (the bad guys) who called themselves “sophists” and saw themselves has having wisdom (and hence being able to teach it to others for money).
Even if this portrayal is a caricature, I think something similar goes for critical thinking and Movement Skepticism™. Thinking critically is a goal you’re perpetually striving towards, not a destination you ever arrive at. Perhaps more importantly critical thinking is something you do (or try to), a Movement Skeptic™ is something you are, i.e. an “identity”, a tribal affiliation, a brand name etc. Whenever I come across an online source that has “skeptic”, “reason”, “rationality” etc. in its name these days, if anything it makes me trust it less rather than more. Like claiming to have wisdom, claiming “reason” for yourself, is a red flag and a warning sign that this person is even more heavily invested in their ideologically motivated conclusions than the average person, and hence more motivated to defend them to the death.
As I have stated many times, my main problem with religious belief, was always the part about leaving the most important questions in life up to blind faith in the first place. E.g. in a classical episode of Donald Duck & Co our feathered friend is converted to “Flipism”, i.e. the philosophy of settling every question by flipping a coin. This doesn’t turn out to be the winning formula that Mr. Duck had imagined, and in the end he has to appear in court to answer for the havoc caused by his random, uninformed decisions. Duck tries to defend himself by pointing out that he was only doing what was required of him by his “religion” of Flipism, whereupon the judge increases his penalty for relying on a stupid coin rather than his brain.
Like Ophelia, I also have issues with Sam Harris, but I think he hit the nail on the head when he said (from memory): “Faith, if it’s ever right about anything, is right by accident”, very much like flipping a coin in this regard. Even if blind faith leads you to embrace the most harmless or (in terms of consequences) “benign” belief system imaginable, it will be absolutely no thanks to you as long as the only thing that prevents you from burning heretics alive, stoning women to death, or crashing planes into skyscrapers is that the coin-toss of faith happened (by accident) to come up heads rather than tails.
Even if you don’t value factual accuracy for its own sake (and I fully agree with Nullius that you should!), it’s a necessary precondition for every other goal, e.g. you can’t improve the lives of women, homosexuals or blacks unless you have a somewhat descriptively accurate idea of what their actual issues are and what remedies are most likely to work.
[…] a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on […]
Thanks Bjarte, well said and very agreeable.