"What Is A Woman" by Richard Dawkins - in the the New Statesman!!

Yes, but it's a conscious and deliberate lie. All of the pro-trans crowd seem to delight in lying, distracting and obfuscation.

How can you have a meaningful dialogue with liars?

@SinnerBoy

It's not an inaccuracy, it's a deliberate, steaming pile of horseshit.

Horseshit is real, very material, and has its uses. I prefer the term "inaccuracy" which is much more damning.

Apart from the straw manning, the outrageous inaccuracies ("female" emerging as a concept in 19C racism? Really?)

It's not an inaccuracy, it's a deliberate, steaming pile of horseshit.

Dawks has hit the nail on the head with this, of course:

A “woman” is defined as anyone who chooses to call herself a woman, and never mind if she has a penis and a hairy chest. And of course this entitles her to enter women’s changing rooms and athletic competitions. Why should she not? She is, after all, a woman, is she not? Deny it and you are a transphobic bigot.

I've read both the articles. I enjoyed the Dawkins (I always do - he's a first rate writer, except when he gets overtaken by grumpy-old-mannishness). I found the other weirdly - weird. Again, I always do. There's something intoxicatingly sublime about the sheer chutzpah behind this kind of writing. You're reading it, and thinking "how do they get away with this?" all the way through. Apart from the straw manning, the outrageous inaccuracies ("female" emerging as a concept in 19C racism? Really?), the refusal to define or even characterise concepts, and the complete failure to reference any of the claims, there is an argument and evidence vacuum. Nothing outside the story.

And this is the aim. Destroy reason and argument construction by claiming that everything is stories, and everyone had a story, and all are equal. Except, of course, for the stories of the oppressor class, which are only there to disempower marginalised identities. They cannot therefore be a legitimate expression of identity. They are not "valid". "Valid" is another term which has lost any meaning.

I remember reading a pamphlet written by the Chinese American Peoples Friendship Organisation (or some such title) which was a far left Maoist organisation in the 60s or 70s. It argued that fallout from China's nuclear bomb could not harm the workers because it was not produced for profit, but for people. The US bomb, though, was produced by the capitalist west, and was lethal to the working class because capitalism is all about production for profit, not people. The Pomo attitude is the same thing. Same aims. Same utter lunacy. Same rejection of reason.

However, they have learned from the Maoists. The Maoists attempts to argue exposed them to ridicule. The current bunch realise that the best way to counter rational argument is to refuse to engage. Actually, it's the only way. So "no debate". As long as you shout your matras long and often enough, they will somehow transmogrify into reality.

There's a wonderful bit at the end of Vladimir Voinovich's "Private Ivan Chonkin" where the peasant's horse finally, though the enobling, developing power of Labour, turns into a human. Beautiful parody.

Is this even true?

Research published this June found that roughly 7 per cent of people changed sexual identity and/or orientation in the course of a six-year period in the UK.

I thought that the census showed that it was about 1% ?

One more time 😁😁

Dawkins, you are a gem.

I would like them to have two opposing-sides articles on the vexing question of what is a man.

We had a brilliant display on national telly (Scandinavia)where two men who were all TWAW invited a transman on their show.
Their faces when it dawned on them that this little woman with a beard really thought she was a man were priceless.
It was VERY clear that they did not think TMAM and the cogs started to turn regarding TWAW as well.

It would be good to accept that twatw and tmatm, and that they can have their own categories and Third spaces.

Women, Men and Other or some such.

This exact point is actually debated by early modern historians. Aristotle isn't regarded as clear about it at all.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-sex_and_two-sex_theories

As a student I accepted that the one-sex model was the dominant way of thinking in the early modern period. The critiques I read of it were very weak - more tinkering at the edges than demolishing the theory. I think I need to read it again now with a gender critical adult eye!

It's interesting to consider 'sex as a spectrum' as being a fundamentally medieval idea!

“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.”

From the Bible commissioned by King James VI
1604

I mean this is pretty basic, how can an academic not have heard of this text?

Also how can she have so seriously misunderstood Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex?

Do you think it makes any of them pause for thought when they sit down, sharpen their pencil and find that they can’t actually sensibly explain why they believe what they believe?

Loving this! 😄And, as a long-time subscriber, looking forward to the letters page next week.

Moreover, I don’t think Jacqueline Rose can be blamed for not replying to my article, because I doubt that she was shown it. Whether she should be blamed for something else – such as writing an article that doesn’t make any coherent sense – is another matter. Perhaps “doesn’t make any coherent sense” is a badge of honour among postmodernists. I wouldn’t know, as I’ve never met anyone who could even begin to tell me what postmodernism is.

This is glorious.

If you take ‘female’ as a synonym for the idea that there are a distinct type of bodies that can gestate babies and breast feed them, then I suspect the human race had that figured out some time before the 17th c. Or even the Middle Ages

Aristotle was pretty clear about it.

Latest - From a Dawkins comment it Turns out there was a very long delay in publishing the piece possibly because New Statesman couldn't find people willing to go up against Dawkins. I doubt it was purely because of staff pressure as NS has long published articles on both sides .

Dawkins - New Statesman commissioned my piece out of the blue (rather to my surprise) on 29th March. I sent it in on 4th April, having been told it would be published the following week. In the event it wasn’t published for more than three months. I was eventually told the reason for the long delay. Perhaps under pressure from junior members of staff (that’s a pure guess, but it’s a common pattern in publishing today) they had decided they needed to publish an opposing view. They were having trouble finding one, and I think it shows.
I should make it clear that I’m not complaining about the delay. I was treated with the utmost consideration and courtesy throughout. And I think it may be the only piece of journalism I have ever written where my prose was not messed about by the editors but printed exactly as I wrote it. For that I am extremely grateful.
Moreover, I don’t think Jacqueline Rose can be blamed for not replying to my article, because I doubt that she was shown it. Whether she should be blamed for something else – such as writing an article that doesn’t make any coherent sense – is another matter. Perhaps “doesn’t make any coherent sense” is a badge of honour among postmodernists. I wouldn’t know, as I’ve never met anyone who could even begin to tell me what postmodernism is.

https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2023/07/27/sex-2-dawkins-vs-rose-on-whether-theres-a-sex-binary/#comment-2055284

This article shows once again why no debate was so important. The Gender side have nothing. It is just a belief system and a very silly one.

It's refreshing to read Dawkins on form (on the topic of biology). I particularly enjoyed these phrases and aim to steal them:

people who choose to identify with the sex opposite to their biological reality

a tiny testicular excrescence

Thanks to those who've summarised the Rose article so I don't have to read it. Are New Statesman readers able to see the difference in coherent writing do you think?

It is dishonest. It is a tactic. Just like the assertion that second wave feminists never believed that male and female bodies were very different in physical strength.

These are just misrepresentations to fulfill other people’s political agendas. (Not sure why anyone gives air time to Long Chu though). It is done by oversimplification or by out and out dishonesty, including lack of adequate research and being bereft of intellectual curiosity.

I hated this bit in Rose's part "women the mark of oppression, prejudice, low pay, the burden of domestic labour, violence in the home and on the street. For many trans women, it is a claim that arises out of the feeling that biology and a core, lived, sexual identity have been woefully misaligned. These women surely deserve respect as women, not least for discarding the straitjacket of masculinity."

Exactly - women have those experiences of oppression. Men don't. So men have neither the biology nor the oppression. Furthermore, they do not discard the straightjacket of masculinity because they are still treating themselves as much more important than anyone else when they ignore women's boundaries and force a change in language which will kill women and make it such that women have no rape crisis groups, safe refuges or ability to feel safe in hospital. Men who discard the straightjacket of masculinity deserve respect. Eddie Izzard, Lia Thomas, Robin Moira White and the likes have not done that. They've put on a frock and shown their narcissism. They're archetypal men. Men need to own their own privilege. Any man who does that would never call themselves a woman.

The bit about the word female and slaves was presumably a deliberate repurposing of the idea that prior to that it wasn't applied to humans only other species and was applied to slaves as part of their dehumanisation. She is trying to make it seem as though the actual word wasn't used before.

I properly hope the New Statesman goes on to publish the inevitable take-down of Rose’s ill-conceived and inaccurate piece. It relies on very poor sources to (incorrectly) define ‘woman’ and ‘female’, the tired old ‘what about women who don’t have wombs’ argument [all biological individuals are different, but they all follow pathways which are only available to other individuals who share some specific characteristics. Humans are sexually dimorphic, so for humans, that includes sex. I realise that’s more of a mouthful, but I guess that’s the level of detail some people need 🙄]

I am soooo fed up with the trans lobby implying that GC won’t allow self-expression. GC is all about self-expression NOT being related to sex; while recognising that men and women are different, so the social contract inevitability has sex-base elements, out of respect for other people

Wow the opposing article is a load of garbled, confused nonsense. Freud? Sexuality? Dfod!

The progessive Wokesters are so facile that they can't even make a novel argument for their POV. No, they have to rewrite definitions and reinterpret language to shoehorn their cause.

This ton of crap that woman/female wasn't in use before recent history, and the definition is race-class based rather than sex-class based is so ludicrous, I wonder how she kept a straight face typing it.

Men certainly have always known who women have been. And so have women. Since time immemorial.

Thank you to previous posters for some very insightful comments. I hope some of you consider writing letters to the magazine to put forward your well-reasoned views.

Yes, that's what I thought. But as @Zeugma said, that word has been in use since the 14th century or earlier. It took me a minute or less to find that on the internet. I'm surprised that a professor was unable to do such a simple bit of fact checking.

As for quoting Andrea Long Chu as the source - a man who thinks that a woman is a sex toy for men - I have no words.

If you take ‘female’ as a synonym for the idea that there are a distinct type of bodies that can gestate babies and breast feed them, then I suspect the human race had that figured out some time before the 17th c. Or even the Middle Ages