The rejection of science and common sense

[AntsInPenzance]

I'm currently engaged in a debate on trans issues and concepts around sex/gender on another forum (US based). I've been dealing with two main protaganists, one male, one female (neither of them trans people as faras I know), and so far I've had the following statements put to me by one or both of them which just boggle the mind:

^A transwomen is female and has always been female even before they identified as such.

DNA and chromosomes are not the deciding determinate of what differentiates male from female.

If the boxing heavyweight champion, Anthony Joshua, were to identify as a transwoman, he should be allowed to fight against a female heavyweight boxer and such a fight would be fair and evenly matched.

75% of all rapes occur by someone known to the victim, so a strange male in a woman's changing room is less of a threat.^

I'm not even angry, just dumbfounded.

The rejection of science and common sense and this is what worries me about the world today, that there are people who believe that their will is stronger than objective reality and they are building castles in the air that they are using to throw rocks at the people below.

The last person to try this was King Canute in 1027 (to be fair to guy he was trying to prove he wasn’t stronger than the tide, and succeeded perfectly) and I don’t see this modern trend ending well. The structures people are building are becoming more elaborate and removed from reality every day, and I think one day nature will remind us why she is a mother and the whole edifice will come crashing to the ground. Then there will be people sat in the ruins looking all doe eyed and asking why no one told them

But until then it’s going to be a wild ride, with no seatbelts

The last couple of years, mainly since a visit to Lichfield and the house of Erasmus Darwin, I became really interested in the history of science during 18th century... (With a bit of Newton prior to that for good measure lol)

Obviously science stretches back to the Greeks, there's Galileo, Copernicus, & Da Vinci and less well known discoverers & recorders too, but until the microscope & telescope were invented, quite a bit of science was observation, logic and reason without clear evidence of the tiny building blocks of life or being able to see further than the naked eye in the night sky.

The Age of Wonder* had Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, the inventive Lunar Society in the Midlands, national museums & Royal Societies popping up all over the place & plenty of European thinkers all racing to experiment with, explore & catalogue the world. A fascinating period & the book 'The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic generation discovered the beauty & terror of science' - by Richard Holmes is fantastic for an overview of this period.

Holmes quotes French chemist Lavoisier, who was guillotined (for embezzling tax funds), who wrote this beautiful phrase "we should proceed from the known facts to the unknown" in 1789... That is not make up stuff to our own advantage based on strongly held feelings rather than using empirical evidence we can see with our own eyes.

It's fascinating how science broke through to establish itself in Western Europe despite the stranglehold religion had on ways of thinking & what you were allowed to think, often punishable by death.

Erasmus Darwin who was Charles Darwin's grandad had the family motto 'everything from shells', emblazoned on his Stagecoach but was forced to remove it, especially as his house was in the shadow of Lichfield cathedral... This heresy against God's creation of the world was too much for the church to bear on a daily basis!

That Royal Societies currently seem keen to jump on the gender bandwagon is beyond ridiculous. What I love about Abigail Shrier's 'Irreversible Damage' is it's foundation in the best science available & the disbelief that this unscientific, unevidenced, psychiatric ailment is taken so seriously by people who should know better.

Don't know if arguing with people who won't or can't think critically is that productive but sometimes you just find yourself doing it...good to deliberate but stick with the known facts is my motto...just wish others would too lol...

@EndoplasmicReticulum

In agreement here. Many skeptics, atheists, scientists are happy to criticise organised religion, homeopathy, anti vaxxers or whatever but are silent on this, or have been captured. Like the humanists.

Andy Lewis is a notable exception.

This is a fascinating thread. I'd never heard of the atheist infighting detailed by ByGrabthatshammer and NecessaryScene1.

I was disappointed, after joining the National Secular Society, that they bigged up the teacher who baffled children with a multi-gender RSE programme 'No Outsiders'.
www.transgendertrend.com/no-outsiders-queering-primary-classroom/

Wouldn't go near Humanists UK (the British Humanist Association as was) since I read how they treated the heroic Maria Maclachlan:
www.peaktrans.org/why-i-resigned-from-humanists-uk/

But it seems the whole humanist establishment is drenched in trans ideology, and I can't understand why. I mean, really. I can understand very young woke people, and kind folk who don't know anything about the issues, thinking this is about protecting a persecuted minority.

But how can people who oppose religion support an anti-scientific movement that behaves exactly like a fundamentalist religion? How do they justify this to themselves?

But how can people who oppose religion support an anti-scientific movement that behaves exactly like a fundamentalist religion? How do they justify this to themselves?

My feeling is that there are a lot of people who grew up in religious households who then move away to university or to a different town and find friends who are not religious.

They realise they agree with the atheist point of view and so they pride themselves on being 'freethinkers', never stopping to consider the influence that their friends have had on them.

An atheist in a town full of fundamentalists is probably a freethinker. An atheist in a town full of atheists is probably no more a freethinker than a fundamentalist is in a town full of fundamentalists.

I can't get past that they would let Anthony Joshua fight a women.

I'm prob the same weight!

He would kill me.

I recently had a disagreement with someone in the Guardian comments section (totally unrelated to anything trans) where they used the argument that most sexual abuse is committed by perpetrators known to the victim to downplay risk from strangers.

It's a terrible argument for a couple of reasons. Statistically less likely does not equal impossible. It also just emphasises the opportunism in these crimes, making the very opposite point to the one claimed: the easier you make attacking someone, the more likely it is to happen so where we can put measures in place to protect people, we should!

very true regarding opportunity, but I also think it's a narrow understanding of the problem. It's as much about the feelings of a woman who fears or has suffered abuse as it is about preventing abuse. It's about enabling women to feel confident enough to take part

Wow, I remember Atheism+. I never thought they were big enough to make much difference to anything, or for their peculiar angle on things to be called a "schism" though. Most people seemed to just laugh at them and then eventually they faded away.

As for Dawkins, he's an evolutionary biologist, not the Guardian of Rational Thought in All Fields of Human Endeavour Everywhere. He got into the science vs religion thing because of the conflict between creationism and the evidence of his own field.

I have no idea where he stands on trans issues, and I wouldn't want to make assumptions about it just because he hasn't made some strong public statement about it yet. There could be all kinds of reasons for that.

Maybe someone should ask him? Can he be contacted via his website or something with a question about it?

No, I think someone did ask Dawkins about the trans issue and his reply was really disheartening. I can't remember exactly what he said but someone else on here will.

I used to not be a fan of his as such, but I read a lot of the debate between atheists and creationists. I was a huge Pharyngula fan. I read it avidly. It's been so disappointing to see how the community has responded to this debate. I thought it would be so clear cut and they would see transactivism as the religion it is.

Dawkins definitely has commented and, as Adventures said, it wasn't a GC response but I can't remember the details.

Alice Roberts is a good example of a scientist and humanist who doesn't believe in biological sex

Googling "Richard Dawkins transgender" brings up various iterations of this:

planettransgender.com/richard-dawkins-insults-transgender-community/

basically speaking out in defence of Germaine Greer against TRA attempts to silence her.

But I also found this interesting:

www.richarddawkins.net/2017/12/views-of-transgender-issues-divide-along-religious-lines/

suggesting a strong link between religion and gender essentialism. Maybe a lot of atheists' first reaction is then to support the whole TRA thing as a reaction against religious gender essentialism. And if they haven't though about it long enough (and the public debate about it hasn't been presented as such), they haven't gotten as far as the third option of rejecting gender while acknowledging biological essentialism.

Ah... maybe they need to see that Venn diagram.

The only quote I can find from Dawkins is a few years old:
Is trans woman a woman? Purely semantic. If you define by chromosomes, no. If by self-identification, yes. I call her "she" out of courtesy.
www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2015/10/27/richard-dawkins-taught-a-lesson-by-trans-women-_n_8397344.html

And that's why it's irrelevant what Dawkins says. Only to a man can this question be 'purely semantic'.

He's had his fingers burned a few times through ill-considered tweets re issues pertaining to women which he had to then explain at greater length so maybe he's somewhat learned to stay out of it.

What is the Venn diagram?

This one.

Yes, that. Public and media discourse about gender is mostly framed as a battle between red and yellow, which both assume the innate reality of gender but disagree with each other over what to do about it. Many atheists who haven't been deeply involved in the issue probably embrace yellow out of instinctive antipathy towards yellow.

Green, which is actually correct, has been largely squeezed out of the debate, and - in my experience - the key point that "gender is constructed" is not very well understood by a lot of people. I remember having a debate on an atheist forum on this very subject, basically trying to explain that the reason I didn't fully embrace yellow was not that I'm a red bigot, it's that I'm yellow. I found it surprisingly difficult. When I asked people what exactly they meant by gender identity, whether they personally have one and what it means about how they experience things, they just sort of . . . went quiet.

"embrace yellow out of instinctive antipathy towards red", I meant.

Arghh: "I remember having a debate on an atheist forum on this very subject, basically trying to explain that the reason I didn't fully embrace yellow was not that I'm a red bigot, it's that I'm GREEN."

This forum really needs an edit function!

@ErrolTheDragon

This one.

Ah thank you! I've not seen it before and that visualises the different views really well :-)

We might be the last bastion of truth. People will write about this small group of women that were eventually silenced. One day this place will be shut down. One day we will pick up our phones and the feminism board will be gone.

There was a great answer to Dawkins on twitter (I paraphrase because I can't remember the precise wording): "does God exist? Purely semantic. If you mean a creater fella in the sky, no. If you mean something metaphorical about the good in all of us, yes. And then when there's a switcheroo back to the first meaning, I'm fine with that".

One day we will pick up our phones and the feminism board will be gone.

Why would you say that?! You are taking me back to the day I clicked on Guardian Talk only to see a message saying the site was closed. I can still remember the panic.