Old guard thinker
Kat Grant – FFR’s women-explainer – has a long post responding to Jerry Coyne’s. It’s quite remarkably sloppy and badly written/reasoned.
Originally, I had planned on launching this blog in the New Year. It seemed like a good, solid time to launch a new project, allowing everyone to get through the holidays with minimal issue.
Wat? Everyone? Because the whole world is agog waiting for this blog?
If you are in the state-church space you may have seen that the Freedom From Religion Foundation recently posted a column by biologist and old guard atheist thinker Jerry Coyne, “rebutting” my “What is a Woman” blog, also written for Freethought Now.
Oof. Terrible writing. Only the third sentence and we’re hit with all this. Sneery ageism plus scare quotes on “rebutting” – as if he were too dimwitted to take on a genius like her. And the whole structure of the sentence is messy and awkward. Those who cannot write should not try to tangle with those who can.
Now deleted, Coyne’s blog argued that we should not ignore “biology,” as well as cited a debunked British study as “proof” that transgender women are more likely to commit acts of sexual violence.
Even worse! Awkward wording again, stupid scare quotes, clumsy mistakes – this person cannot write her way out of a paper bag. “Now deleted” meaning what? Now deleted why? If now deleted why discuss at all? What mean? Please clear be.
Scare quotes on biology.
“as well as cited” – you mean as well as citing, you illiterate child.
“cited a debunked British study as “proof” that transgender women are more likely to commit acts of sexual violence” – one, he doesn’t use the word “proof” at all, and two, he of course doesn’t word what the study suggests that way. Kat Grant’s clueless translation shows that she’s in way over her head. What he does say is this:
But even here Grant misleads the reader. They argue, for example, that “Transgender people are no more likely to be sexual predators than other individuals.” Yet the facts support the opposite of this claim, at least for transgender women. A cross-comparison of statistics from the U.K. Ministry of Justice and the U.K. Census shows that while almost 20 percent of male prisoners and a maximum of 3 percent of female prisoners have committed sex offenses, at least 41 percent of trans-identifying prisoners were convicted of these crimes. Transgender, then, appear to be twice as likely as natal males and at least 14 times as likely as natal females to be sex offenders. While these data are imperfect because they’re based only on those who are caught, or on some who declare their female gender only after conviction, they suggest that transgender women are far more sexually predatory than biological women and somewhat more predatory than biological men.
He says “suggest” and she shouts “prove.” What a bonehead.
To put a long story short, the blog was bad. Coyne combined straw man arguments and stochastic terrorism to create an essay that was almost comically bad, if it weren’t for the sheer danger it presented.
It’s to “make a long story short,” not “put.” As for “the blog was bad” – kid, you need to work hard on your own reasoning and writing before you accuse other people of being comically bad.
That’s just the first three paragraphs, and it’s more than enough. The mystery is why FFRF prefers this nitwit to Jerry Coyne.
“And you’ll just have to take my word for it because we’ve deleted Coyne’s article.”
But it’s so difficult to take they’s word for it when they is so dim.
Fruitcakes to the right. Fruitcakes to the left. We’re screwed. Maybe we’ll all get bird flu or die in a raging wildfire.
And Jerry Coyne can…and he can reason, which apparently Kat Grant cannot.
And stochastic terrorism? Seriously? I can think of many people who would commit acts of stochastic terrorism long before Jerry Coyne. Being disagreed with is not terrorism, stochastic or otherwise. Being recognized as your correct sex is not terrorism. Having your assumptions questioned is not terrorism. In fact, if no one questions your assumptions, you can believe anything.
When you shut down your opponent, and erase their words, you get to characterize their arguments any way you like. Don’t quote them, just paint them as unspeakably evil. When you can accuse them of “terrorism” and putting people in “danger”, you can portray your silencing of their words as a sacred duty. Put them beyond the pale and you no longer have to answer their arguments. Ever. “NO DEBATE!” Convenient or what? What other organizations use this kind of move? Religions.
No, but these are all “violent”. Anything less than unquestioning acceptance of their claims is violence. Pointing out the inconsistencies, contradictions, and illogic is “denying trans people’s right to exist.” Critics aren’t supposed to question or criticize; we’re all supposed to shut up and obey. Resistance is violence.
And they do. If what you believe is impossible, being told it’s impossible must be a bit of a downer We are Always Killing Tinkerbell.
I’m inclined to be forgiving towards Kat Grant’s grammatical mistakes, as they don’t have too much of an impact on the clarity or substance of the article. (I will however concede that, since Grant is probably a native English speaker who received a decent education, they’re not the most excusable.) The main issue is that said substance is completely ridiculous; no spell-check can fix that.
Grant’s original “What is a woman?” piece makes a bunch of blatant errors in its argumentation. It explores potential definitions of the word woman while simultaneously using it according to some unclear pre-established definition. It also repeatedly argues that the existence of “intersex people” makes biology-based definitions of the word woman impossible, without ever explaining why that would be the case. And of course, like Coyne pointed out, it keeps sloppily conflating sex and gender.
It’s unclear what the various exotic gender systems cited are supposed to demonstrate. For one thing, they don’t really match what Grant’s conception of sex and gender identity seems to be. For another, you might as well construct arguments against a fluid gender system by basing yourself on traditions that are not “outside of the strict sexual binary.” Such arguments would also be very poor – it all falls under the appeal-to-nature fallacy. (It reminds me of some Evangelicals who justify their faith by pointing out that there’s so much religiosity in the world. Belief in gods does not prove their existence, and the majority of believers aren’t even Christians anyways.)
And of course, let’s not forget the completely useless definition of the word “woman” that it comes up with in the end, with only very lacking justification. Other definitions are shot down as problematic, but nothing is done to show that this one is not problematic. I could get my next-door neighbour to say she’s Count Basie, bring her to Grant’s audience, lift her for them to see, and shout “Behold! Count Basie!”
Of course, the article is flawed in many ways – it’s not exactly a marvel of rethoric or good writing. It ticks me off that it starts off by calling Diogenes a “gremlin” and misusing the word “objectively.” It’s naive, simplistic and the conclusion sounds like it comes from a middle-school essay. But the really striking thing is just how terrible the argumentation is. It doesn’t even try to make sense. I’m quite far from being a great writer, but I do believe I could write a much better article to defend Grant’s position – this despite the fact that I’m completely opposed to it.
The worst part about the FFRF having published this article is not its absurd ideological stance, it’s its utter hollowness. It’s odd that such an organization would not uphold a higher standard of thought. One could take it as a sign that, beyond cursory virtue-signalling, the FFRF doesn’t really care about the issue it’s supposedly committing to.
Some more nitpicks.
I suspect they put rebutting in quotes because they thinks it means the same thing as refuting. They appears to be unaware that a rebuttal might not succeed as a refutation, as that fact renders the scare quotes unnecessary in expressing disagreement with Coyne’s post.
They says “I do not believe that [Coyne] is engaging in this topic with any degree of intellectual honesty or integrity. If he was he would have at least engaged with my argument directly…”, which is a particularly dumb thing to say given the same paragraph also contains “I’m not going to give an in-depth response to Coyne’s blog.” If Coyne’s post was bad, it would be easy to point out the bad reasoning, much as we are doing with this silly post.
“Coyne has been going after my work for the past two and a half years…” and rightfully so, judging by this sample.
In the current environment it doesn’t have to. She’s expressing the viewpoint of the organization; her piece wasn’t prefaced with a warning or disclaimer. They were holding Coyne to a standard higher than that to which they were willing to hold themselves. I’m guessing FFRF weren’t expecting any response or rebuttal at all. It was a puff piece to which all were to give assent: certainly decent people wouldn’t argue with it. Their official position is that there is only one correct (dare I say orthodox?) opinion permitted in this discussion, any other is not just incorrect, but evil. In their view, Coyne outed himself as a hateful, transphobic bigot. With Coyne’s response stricken from the record, she’s got the field to herself in branding Coyne as being exactly that.
I’m not really surprised. I’ve often thought that genderists are unable to articulate the arguments of their opponents, i.e. us. Normally, an understanding of your opponents’s views sharpens your ability to respond to them effectively. But if you insist on “NO DEBATE”, you forfeit your chance to hone your arguments, which is bad news if and when the refusal to engage in debate fails as a political strategy. Once you’re forced to go beyond the out-of-context quoting of that single line of de Beauvoir, you’ve got nowhere to go. If you lose control of the narrative and the discussion, an unwillingness to debate leads to an inability to debate. (Of course I’m cynical enough to believe that the causality is reversed; that the fact that their critics’s arguments were unanswerable is what led trans activists to the “NO DEBATE!” strategy.)
I don’t think this “hollowness” is because they don’t care; it’s because there’s so little logic, thought, consistency or coherence in the “cause” itself. A higher standard of thought kills the cause. It’s an emotional, ideological commitment, not a rational, arguable one. They can’t even define their terms. Can Judith Butler explain it to us without lapsing into tortuous, incomprehensible word salad (which is a feature, not a bug)? Does Sally Hines have a straightforward definition of “gender”? We’re supposed to write blank cheques with our consent, letting them fill in the details of what we’re supposed to believe in as they see fit.
Any one of us here could ratlle off all sorts of arguments about why sexism, racism or antisemitism, is wrong, what the rights are being trampled in each case. When has a trans activist ever explained exactly what trans “rights” are, and how they differ from the rights against discrimination that trans identifying people already have, that they already share with all of us? Never. They care passionately, they just can’t tell us why we should as well, because we’re not even allowed to ask what these “rights” are , but if we don’t, we’re evil. It’s a different take on “Don’t ask, don’t tell.”
Kat Grant sez “I am a strong believer of “killing the cop in your mind.””
Well, some cops are happy to stop people saying unpopular but legal opinions, like Jerry Coyne’s. Why do the “abolish the police” crowd usually act like members of the Khmer Rouge towards people with unpopular opinions?
On Reddit, the “atheist” and “skeptic” subreddits are falling over themselves to condemn the wicked Mr. Coyne and fawn over Kat Grant.
Well, if she believes it, it must be true. That’s the core (actually, the only part) of their argument that TWAW. Never mind that he did engage with her argument, that he wrote well, and used science, logic, and reason to refute her childish meanderings. She believes he is not engaging with intellectual honesty or integrity; therefore, it must be true.
^ With this and most accusations of bad faith, I get the feeling it is made mostly because the accuser cannot answer the arguments of the other interlocutor.
The “bad faith” part is Coyne’s failure to accept her “argument,” and his nerve to respond to it in any way other than, “Why yes, you’re right!” With Coyne’s response erased (or nearly so), she gets the last word. Having been declared evil and transphobic, his arguments no longer need a response at all, but are best left buried and hidden, like some kind of radioactive waste that must be kept out of reach and exposure for centuries, for the common good.