Diversion from the horror revealed by Jersh, of what minuscule and fragile protections there are for free speech on the internet . . .
It's a Platypus! We can't talk about the Elephant in The Room - or the Platypus in The Museum, or should it be the Chapel? "Chapel" works for Religion and Unions.
Richard Dawkins + Helen Joyce
"Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality" - My conversation with Helen Joyce
29 July 2023
Transcript from 38:06
RD: I'm baffled by why this is also one-sided. I realise there are two different points of view here but how has one side managed to kind of capture the dominant um dialogue really the dominant half of the dialogue and and constantly it comes up that you've if you dissent from that you're called a
bigot and so people don't want to dissent because dissent um so I don't want to call it cowardice but but um it's it's pardonable cowardice because nobody wants to be called a bigot but why does all the abuse go one way why does it why is it such a, why did all the bullying go one way?
HJ: I mean there are so many different answers to that and like you know like I think they all reinforce each other and one of them is because this is a linguistic movement and there is no sense in which Lia Thomas is a Woman except that you say he is. You must silence people it's the only way in which you can keep the fiction going. If people can say what they see in front of them . . .
RD: In which HE can keep the fiction going. But why does he have these abetters and accomplices?
HJ: I mean you can't ignore the fact that this is for the benefit of men. You know like female sports has always been fifth rate, like it gets much less funding. You know these girls are told, they're told things that nobody would tell a male athlete. Like, that you know, "It's for the joy of taking part", "Why do you care about winning?".
I think in America it's become so associated with the very, very polarized political system. So you know the, and everyone, everyone tends to take their political opinions as a package, that's not an American force solely, but in America it's so polarised, that they're really very specific packages.
And if you want not to take the opinion the gender identity trumps sex then you're a republican you have to be a Conservative Christian, you have to be anti-abortion, you have to think that women belong in the kitchen, you know. And so if you don't want those things, well you've got to come over here and give up women's sports and say that men can be women and say that, you know, there can be a female penis and so on.
And then, I mean there's a sort of an evolutionary point to make here. Like sometimes when you look at a giraffe or a platypus or
something and you say, "How did this come to be?", you could answer that by sort of going back. And I think you did this in your beautiful book and, which one was it, the the one where you go back in the the Tree of Life backwards, quite thick one
RD: oh The Ancestor's Tale.
JD: That's lovely, yes, that book. So you can go back and you can you can actually answer that question or you can just say, "Look, that's how Evolution works, you know".
So we have we have, this is an emerging ideology, some would say neo-religion, and out of the many many bizarre things that people could believe, this is the one that made it. And you could then point at, you know the internet, the arrival of sex change surgery, the fact that we're all online too much, social media places - where kids congregate without adults and talk to each other without adult oversight.
The cowardice of the IOC, the international Olympic Committee, which is a dreadfully corrupt organization. I mean you know it allowed the cheating by the East German women dopers to go on in full sight for 20 years and has never sorted that out, and never taken the medals away from them, you know they just don't care, the show keeps on the road as far as they're concerned.
So there's just all these different things that happened and, you know, the result is what we see. As opposed to me being able to say I would have been able to predict this in advance. I'd never predicted the Platypus either.
RD: Yes, the Platypus wasn't the lead when it was first sent to the museum.
HJ: Well exactly! So this is a platypus in a way.