Richard Dawkins says trans activists 'bullied' JK Rowling for standing up for women's rights

[PorcelinaV]

Richard Dawkins says trans activists 'bullied' JK Rowling for standing up for women's rights

https://www.scottishdailyexpress.co.uk/news/scottish-news/richard-dawkins-says-trans-activists-29511706

Richard Dawkins claims trans activists 'bullied' Harry Potter author JK Rowling and Kathleen Stock for standing up for women's rights....

He claimed that it was very upsetting that a "tiny minority" of people managed to capture the discourse to "talk errant nonsense".

Their inability to explain this annoys me, but all least they're staying in their lane. So a bit different from Dawkins. Perhaps I'm easily annoyed.

That hurts my head so much that I need a sit down.

I’m trying my best not to be triggered here, but that infamous Nature article you linked (one that cited a PhD student and a TRA gender clinic activist as its primary scientific sources) was SOUNDLY criticised, discredited and rightfully viewed as nonsense by every scientist I know, with its incorrect descriptions of DSDs as a spectrum. People with DSDs (formerly called intersex) are always either male or female due to being mammals. Even the chimerism described in that article refers to the rare chimerism of individual humans in uterine environments, which again is no evidence of a spectrum.

The equally unscientific (and grad-student-penned) Scientific American article also bandied about as “proof” of sex-as-spectrum conflates gonochoric mammalian species (which is every single one of them) with teleost fish and lizards and plants: not a biologically sound approach. No biologist is arguing that there cannot exist more variability in other non-mammalian animals or plants. Your assertion that “there is some proof that sex is a spectrum” does not, and never will be, applied to mammals.

Nearly all non-mammal animals, eg. reptiles, birds, amphibians, insects, invertebrates, are also gonochoric with two sexes only. A fair few plants are, too. Even in non-mammal animals where sex-change mechanisms exist, there is compartmentalisation of structures to avoid self-fertilisation, and plants that do this also have specialised adaptations.

Moreover, self-fertilising plants and clownfish have sweet eff-all to do with transgender and DSD issues. Humans are a mammalian animal.

In mammals, THERE IS NO SEX SPECTRUM.

Is this really true though?

When it comes to gender we have stale pale males like Keir Starmer, Ed Davey, Crispin Blunt and Owen Jones telling women that trans women are women so we need to shut up and make room for them in our spaces.

People like Allison Bailey (a black lesbian), and Sarah Summers (a female rape survivor) are not pale stale males by any stretch of the imagination, but they are being cast in the role of the oppressor and told their opinions don't count because they're not part of the minority being oppressed.

If it were really the case that only the group being oppressed were qualified to comment on the subject, men would listen to women about womanhood, misogyny and sexism. But they don't.

I think it's more just a case of "heads I win, tails you lose" with these people. JK Rowling is dismissed as a white cishet billionaire and a right wing extremist, despite being an entirely self-made, former single mother on benefits and survivor of sexual abuse who has been a famous supporter of the Labour Party.

@Sunnava
I guess it's that article. In my defence, I was sent it by a friend who knows I have (in her opinion) unsound views on gender.

I shall google the panning.

What is “errant” nonsense? Is it worse than arrant nonsense?!

What are you talking about? The word is 'errant', not 'arrant'. Google it or look it up in a dictionary if you don't believe me.

I'm glad, because my stale male pale husband values the opinion of atheist scientists like Dawkins more than his own wife. This will influence a lot of "rationalists" who would rather poke their own eyes out than agree with anything the Daily Mail would agree with.

RosaBonheur,

I'm not defending the new approach, ie progressivism. I see myself as a classic liberal, more or less, and I don't like what's happened at all, because it takes away the role of reasoning, and implies that people who aren't in group x can't truly empathise or understand those who are in group x. That leaves nothing but a power struggle which ultimately ends badly for everyone.

You are allowed to speak if you're speaking on behalf of a recognised oppressed group. So stale pale males like Starmer, Davey, Blunt, Jones and Billy Bragg et al get heard anyway. Bailey and Summers don't get heard because, regardless of their own backgrounds and traumas, they aren't of the correct minority group, ie, trans.

If it were really the case that only the group being oppressed were qualified to comment on the subject, men would listen to women about womanhood, misogyny and sexism. But they don't.

I can only agree with this.

But I think it highlights another thing: there is a hierarchy of victimhood, and the logic goes that trans people outrank women, so when there is an overlap of groups, trans women trump biological women. I am not defending this - just trying to explain what I see as the theory's own logic.

It's not a given that Dawkins' former fan club will be swayed by his views on this.

When he was trending on Twitter fir his exchange with Monty and subsequent signature of that declaration of women's rights, an awful lot of toys were thrown by left wing woke bros who idolised Dawkins in his God delusion days and couldn't believe he had betrayed them like this.

Who knew? A man whose academic background is in evolutionary biology and who doesn't believe in God or other deities also doesn't believe in the magic gender fairy who gives us all sexed souls which usually but don't always match our sexed bodies.

Almost as surprising as a survivor of male violence against women who wrote a series of books about bravery and selflessness and personal sacrifice for the good of the rest of society not agreeing that men should be allowed into women's prisons and rape crisis centres just because it's what they want.

OK - I have tried to find a rebuttal / critique of that Nature article but all I can find is blogposts and similar things... can anyone recommend me anything from a scientific journal - ie, like Nature?

I think it's "arrant" and that's actually what Dawkins said.

The source I was using didn't do a good job with the transcript.

@SinnerBoy I suspect, given the circular and restricted definitions of "acceptable" rebuttals as posted above, that a mere middle-aged-partially-sentient-support-biped with self-declared qualifications, writing a post on a talk forum, will also not be considered "acceptable".

It's a Very Neat Trick: get mainstream "acceptable" Good Media (including formerly robust scientific journals) captured, get unqualified TRSOH activists to write obfuscatory pseudoscientific shite in them, ensure that nobody on TWSOH is allowed to write in the same journals/media and then crow that only Bad Media and silly unreliable blogs are reporting on this.

Was that directed at my last post?

Emma Hilton is your best bet…

https://www.womentalkback.org/amp/emma-hilton-sex-denialists-have-captured-existing-journals-we-are-dealing-with-a-new-religion

https://www.peaktrans.org/sex/

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11845-020-02464-4

Note from an easily distracted pedant: the arrant vs errant thing is fascinating, actually - google it, and then verify in the OED. Arrant was originally a variant spelling of errant, but their meanings in practice have now diverged somewhat, so that arrant is worse than errant. Can't really blame the speech to text for getting the wrong one, if it did, and it probably doesn't matter much, I expect either would work in context!

I'm interested in @EdgeOfACoin 's answer to this one, too.

The starting assumption of a "real historical Jesus" appears to take the Bible as a credible source, which is hotly debatable.

The other main primary sources (Josephus and Tacitus) are both written more than a century after Jesus died, and only discuss the fact that other people from generations before were talking about a wandering preacher (of which there were many). Also, there seems to be good evidence that those sources were altered after the fact, and may not be at all reliable.

The person in the article was a chimera. It's not unknown and there are probably more about than we think. Two embryos, or is it blastocysts(?) joining together early in pregnancy. Articles like this don't actually help the cause of sex being a spectrum, as there is clearly a medical reason for a person having a body containing both XY and XX chromosomes. But functioning ovaries, womb etc will clearly indicate female.

I bloody love RD. Wonderful fellow.

And people buy these books and read these books despite apparently knowing pre purchase that he has no idea? Who is the dumb one?

I bought one of his books once, I found it impenetrable. I never bought another, not even from the charity shop.

FWIW I wouldnt buy your book either.

Still glad he has said what he has about jkr

Does speak a little about the trans issue:

https://unherd.com/2021/04/why-the-atheists-turned-on-richard-dawkins/

Thank you for making this argument far better than I could.

The phrase is “arrant nonsense”. Google it, why don’t you?

But the problem with this is that conversations about women's rights are reframed as conversations about trans rights.

We see it all the time with JKR.

She makes a statement about women's rights. Something that shouldn't be controversial, such as, "it's dehumanising to refer to us as menstruators", or "male rapists shouldn't be housed with vulnerable female prisoners", or "female rape survivors deserve single sex support", and what she has said is twisted and reported as a statement about trans rights, specifically that trans people should not have certain rights.

Can we shut up about trans rights for a nanosecond and focus on women's rights? Because JK Rowling is talking about women's rights, and as a woman, she is absolutely qualified to talk about that, because she is a member of the group in question.

Same with Sarah Summers and Allison Bailey.

The only way you can get away with saying that a woman isn't qualified to talk about women's rights is by pretending that the topic of discussion is trans rights. But it isn't, not really. And to the extent that it is, we're talking about a conflict of interests between two groups, which means that both groups should have the right to express themselves.

I believe that trans rape survivors should have access to support. Of course I do. And I believe that trans women should be safe in prison, and when using public toilets and changing rooms.

But trans activists aren't campaigning for trans people to have those things for themselves. If they were, I would support them. They are saying that women should not have these things if they exclude people who are male but believe they identify as women. They are expressly placing trans people's identities, rights, safety and dignity above women's. And then saying that any woman who isn't OK with that is a bigot.

They're not staying in their lane. They're telling actual biologists that biological sex isn't real/binary/immutable, and actual women that we don't understand what a woman is.

They believe every lane is their lane, despite not even having a coherent grasp of their own lane.

I feel the same about gender ideology.

No, I haven't read the entire back catalogue of Judith Butler. I've read enough to conclude that it's all a crock of shit.

I've read enough of Wikipedia and the NHS and the WHO websites which talk about gender and gender identity, completely fail to explain in even basic terms what either of these things are, say that they are different to biological sex and then immediately conflate them with biological sex, and talk about things being assigned at birth.

Sorry but if you talk about things being assigned at birth, why should I take you seriously? We all know sex isn't assigned at birth, that's why nearly all parents these days know the sex of their children before they are born. And since gender is vaguely defined as socially constructed norms and behaviour and expectations, if you are "assigning" any of those to a newborn baby who doesn't even know what a girl or a boy is or which one it is, you are the problem here.

So until someone can explain, in simple terms that a child could understand (because apparently children have innate gender identities and are capable of understanding these things which is why trans activists want this stuff to be taught in primary schools) WHAT gender is, and WHAT gender identity is, and WHY anyone should actually care, without resorting to stereotypes which just make you look like an actual old fashioned sexist who has time travelled from the 1950s, I don't actually need to give your ideology any additional time and attention to dismiss it as complete rubbish.

As an atheist, and also someone who does not have a gender identity, I consider that there is far more likelihood that God actually exists than it is that gender identity is real and innate and everyone has one.