Is it 2015 again?
Ructions.
Freethought Now, the blog or online magazine of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, posted an article last month by someone named Kat Grant titled “What is a woman?”
The content, I’m sorry to say, is tediously predictable and indeed already familiar, not to say stale. Usual stuff. Vagina can’t be the answer because trans women can have them, missionaries and colonizers, blah blah. Mind you there is one quite startling lie:
Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists, also known as TERFs, claim that transgender women are rapists who are attempting to take away opportunities from “real” women.
The hell we do. Claim that all “transgender women” are rapists? I don’t know of any gender critic who has ever said that, let alone all of us. We do point out that being a trans woman doesn’t rule out being also a rapist, but that’s not even close to saying what Grant claims we say. (Grant is a they. It’s not clear what sex “they” is.)
What’s the point of having freedom from religion if you’re still imprisoned by this kind of bullshit?
So here’s the story. I’m not only a member and supporter of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, but am also on its Honorary Board. Thus I was doubly distressed when I saw the post below on their website Freethought Now!, a post that completely ignores the widely-accepted biological definition of a woman—one based on the possession of a reproductive apparatus evolved to produce large immobile gametes—in favor of a definition based on self-identification. (Kat Grant identifies as non-binary.)
He quotes from it and points out what’s wrong with it. Then:
Perhaps you won’t be as distressed as I was when you read it, but as someone who, as an Honorary Director, supposedly gets to weigh in on the direction of the FFRF, I felt I had to say something. Recently-confected and ideological definitions of “woman” not only offend me as a biologist, but they have nothing to do with the mission of the FFRF. So I asked if I could make these points in a response at the same site. Mirabile dictu, the FFRF let me, for which I’m grateful. You can read what I said by clicking below or going here:
NOTE: My article seems to have disappeared but one copy has been archived in two places,
here: https://web.archive.org/web/20241227095242/https://freethoughtnow.org/biology-is-not-bigotry/
In other words they told him he could reply and then they removed his reply – apparently without telling him so or saying why, let alone apologizing. How very Freethought Blogs.
Read his post: it’s full and detailed and very worth studying.
He concludes with:
Mission creep has begun to erode other once-respected organizations like the ACLU and SPLC, and I would be distressed if this happened to the FFRF.
After a bit of back and forth with the bosses of the FFRF, they accepted this version, which of course will get me in deep trouble with many who favor “progressive” ideology over the biological truth (see below).
But when they published my piece, the FFRF told me this:
We have decided to publish every blog with a disclaimer going forward so don’t feel picked on.
And so they put their very first disclaimer atop my article:
Disclaimer: FFRF Honorary Board Member Jerry A. Coyne requested that this column be written as a guest blog. The views in this column are of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Freedom From Religion Foundation.
Make of this disclaimer what you will, but I find it a remarkable coincidence that the appearance of disclaimers just happens to accompany the publication of an article discussing the definition of “woman”.
Right. Don’t feel picked on, but here for the first time ever is a disclaimer at the top of your article.
It’s so very Freethought Blogs.
Massive h/t to Peter N
I am a State Representative for FFRF, and I’ve been equally disturbed by their venture into gender ideology. I think a couple of things explain it. First, their staff is young…very young…and woke. I suspect that was their entry drug. Then you get into the fact that there is a religious aspect to many of the bathroom bills, etc, and they are automatically against anything religious. That’s probably why gender ideology has captured so many of the atheist and freethought groups – the legislatures stand up there and spout religious rationales for their bills, the knee jerk reaction starts, and they also believe this is part of the LGB issue…they don’t see the conflict in their support of LGB and women’s rights. They drank the Kool-Aid.
Richard Dawkins is also an honorary board member. I wonder how many of these respected honorary board would need to ring in and protest before someone’s head exploded?
“If only there was some kind of pattern discernable in this wacky, random, chaotic system we call sex! Something that involves a majority of the population, perhaps even above 99% would really allow us to classify and make sense of it all!” – paraphrased.
So many words spilled, and all with the goal of pointedly ignoring the pattern that exists. A pity the post is old and the site does not permit non-member comments.