Richard Dawkins

[zanahoria]

He is similarly despairing about the tenor of the debate around trans rights. “The idea seems to be that it doesn’t matter what’s objectively true, what matters is the way you feel. That’s ridiculous. Just because you feel you’re a woman – I guess you can have your delusion if you like, but if you’re 6ft 4in and you go to swimming competitions and walk away with all the medals, that’s just dishonest. That’s cheating.”
What he particularly hates is the way the trans debate is sometimes framed as something unworthy of debate at all. “I really despise the tactics of the trans people, the way they won’t actually argue the case but just cancel people. That’s contemptible,” he says. “It’s horrible that they can’t actually just have a civilised conversation… You can’t discuss it. You just get people cancelled, get publishers bullied into cancelling books, and women forced to change in front of fully intact males. They’re put in female prisons… It’s a scandal.”
What does he make of the claim that vulnerable trans people might be nudged towards taking their own lives if their rights are not extended or defended? “Nonsense. That’s a great myth. These so-called suicidal people – they’re mentally screwed-up anyway.”

https://archive.ph/BXlJr

If those claiming to be trans had been told the truth in the first place, we might not be in this mess.

I don't see the strawman. Which argument is the strawman?

'Sexed behaviors and reproductive traits'? What does this mean?
Reproductive organs are a biological reality that is part of our identity, our behaviors are of course part of our identity to but are not immutable unlike our reproductive organs... I'm sorry I literally can't follow your post at all.

Didn't struggle with Dawkins though.

Even if he is a misogynist that doesn't mean he isn't right about this...

Can you make your points more clearly?

What silly women we are. Fancy falling for his views on reality when we could all be insisting men are women.

I think he can be both! He has expressed himself very unpleasantly in the past, and I find it interesting that he’s less scathing on this than other subjects.

...and @Baileyonice add some commas to try and order your thoughts if you want people to engage, rather than throw a load of words at the page and hope some of them stick

RD as usual makes good points, with his high level of expertise in biology only a dumb arse would say he's wrong.

“I really despise the tactics of the trans people, the way they won’t actually argue the case but just cancel people. That’s contemptible,”

So very true, No Debate is all they've got because they know it won't stand up to a debate. Luckily those days are over, and debating it is now the norm, and just as they feared it doesn't stand up to scrutiny.

Oh dear sad times for them.

I am a bit Mixed about Dawkins, although reading the God Delusion turned me into a lapses atheist. I still don't believe in God but cannot match his sort of energy in doing so.

Wow, always the simple takes from TRAs and TRA adjacents.
In the grand scheme of misogyny, there's way worse on the TRA side than Dawkins.
He's an arrogant so and so, as so many scientists and top minds are.
I'd say Dawkins bigger sin is to subscribe to the Peter Singer argument that physical and mental disability doesn't benefit the greater society, so those poor individuals should be aborted or euthanised purely for that.
But kudos to him at least for holding the same line that TRA and ideology is a stain on Western liberal thought, that The Age Of Stupid has well and truly been reached.

On religion, I prefer the very much missed Christopher Hitchins. And Ricky Gervais.

You should read his The Greatest Show On Earth, a wonderfully read. I no longer have my copy so I might have to get it again on my e reader.

It's about evolution, and how humans are an animal who evolved on planet earth, and how they come in 2 sexes only, so not for the fragile minded, it might give them brain damage.

average sexed human behaviours are as real reproductive traits that people may associate with being a defining part of their identity.

I guess that made sense to you when you wrote it, but it's just word salad. 🙄

Looks like Gnosticism never died out, no wonder Dawkins has an issue with organised religion. Whether the big ones like Christianity and Islam, or the early Millennial cults like Gnosticism that trans is the modern day version of.

”Average sexed human behaviours”- I assume this is the fancy way of saying people conforming to gender stereotypes?

I’m really not sure how we’ve ended up in a situation whereby so called progressive people are now defending gender stereotypes, arguing there are male and female brains which cause these and using them to justify why a man is actually a woman. It’s the complete opposite of feminism.

It's like Star Signs controlling categories, and science/medicine/civic society meekly abdicating to the Mystic Megs of that world.

Christianity isn't simply “believing something strongly.” Christianity makes historical and theological claims about God, creation, Jesus Christ, His death and resurrection, and humanity. Those claims can be examined, challenged and argued about.

Christianity also doesn't teach that we create our identity entirely from our inner feelings. It teaches that our identity ultimately comes from God, who created us. Genesis presents human beings as created male and female, and Jesus Himself refers back to this understanding of creation in Matthew 19:4.
There is also an important difference between saying “I experience myself in a particular way” and saying “therefore reality itself must conform to that experience.” Christianity recognises that our feelings and perceptions can be powerful without making them the final authority over reality.

Most importantly, Christianity isn't built around an individual's subjective sense of self. Jesus says, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me” (Matthew 16:24). Christianity therefore actually challenges the modern idea that authenticity means discovering whatever identity feels most true and then asking the world to affirm it.

You can disagree with Christian teaching about sex, gender and the body, but calling trans ideology “the modern version of Christianity” doesn't really work. Christianity is centred on worshipping God and following Christ; it isn't centred on affirming a person's preferred identity.

That comment reminded me of The Age of Scorpius book drama. What a shit show that was (and sadly nothing to do with Farscape).

Didn't he make a similar comment about rape as a "spectrum", though he didn't use the same wording, but said some types are worse? About a decade ago? Apologies if pp have said this, didn't read FT.

Wow bailey, it's one thing having your own personal theory of how gender works, quite another to claim that a world acclaimed biologist must understand and agree with it.

For those that haven't seen it before, bailey's take is that gender is a matter of what the differences between average behaviours for males and average behaviours for females are. Quite how bailey gets from that to individuals having a gender has never been made clear, there does seem to be some degree of personal choice involved.

And bailey, the normal biologist's take is that male/female, cow/bull, ewe/ram, woman/man is decided on the basis of body types, then if you see an animal behaving in a way more typical of the other sex you say 'ooh how interesting, that is unusually aggressive behaviour from a ewe, I wonder what's going on there'. With the answer, just to be clear, not being 'it's a ram born in a ewe's body' but maybe 'sometimes ewes are more aggressive when they feel their lambs are being threatened' or something like that.

can you try to make some points without just saying everyone who might disagree with you is stupid (or ‘washed up’).

I said no such thing.

What does ‘average sexed human behaviours are as real reproductive traits’ mean?

"The first notion Stewart-Williams dispels is the blank-slatist claim that there are no average differences between the sexes. In a useful appendix, he summarises research on the behaviours and personality traits that have shown large and repeated differences between males and females. Some of these are obvious but not often recognised as innate sex differences. One is the strong difference in sexual attraction: most—but not all—men seek women as sexual partners, and most women seek men.

Psychological research indicates that men and women also differ strongly in how they seek mates. On average, women prefer older partners with high status, while men are more drawn to youth and physical attractiveness. Men have a higher sex drive and are more willing to seek casual sex. And once in a relationship, men show far more sexual jealousy than women, being preoccupied with a partner’s sexual infidelity, while women’s jealousy is more emotional than sexual, focusing on a partner’s commitment to the relationship.
Another difference we know well: in every country surveyed, men commit vastly more crimes of violence than women, including roughly 90 percent of all homicides in America.

One of <a class="break-all" href="https://archive.md/o/cbCEc/link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-019-01624-7?ref=quillette.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">the largest and most repeatable differences between the sexes is <a class="break-all" href="https://archive.md/o/cbCEc/onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/icd.2064?ref=quillette.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">the toy preferences of children. On average, young boys prefer male-typical toys like trucks, blocks, and toy soldiers, while young girls prefer dolls and kitchen equipment. This difference shows up very early in childhood and holds across societies worldwide.

The list goes on, but I’ll end by mentioning differences in preference that seem to translate into professional inequities. On average, women have more interest in people than things, which partly explains why occupations like computer science and engineering are dominated by men while the health and social sciences harbour far more women. Related to this are observations that men are better than women at “systematising”, defined as “understanding and reasoning about systems, including natural systems like atoms and galaxies, abstract systems like logic and maths, and human-made system like machines and computer programs”. Women, in contrast, are better at “empathising”: putting themselves in other people’s shoes and understanding their feelings and motivations.

You can see this last difference in <a class="break-all" href="https://archive.md/o/cbCEc/jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2839314?ref=quillette.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">a compilation of sex differences among young American doctors in different branches of medicine. Fields involving less contact with patients regularly show higher proportions of men: anaesthesiology (62 percent), radiology (71 percent), neurological surgery (73 percent), and orthopaedic surgery (76 percent). Fields demanding more contact with patients, and presumably requiring more empathy, show a preponderance of women: hospice and palliative care (63 percent), dermatology (66 percent), and paediatrics (75 percent). Yet across all fields of medicine, the proportion of women among young doctors is precisely 50 percent, suggesting little bias against women entering medicine.
Stewart-Williams notes that such differences could reflect sociocultural pressures like socialisation or bias rather than innate preferences, but we have some data against purely social explanations. <a class="break-all" href="https://archive.md/o/cbCEc/psycnet.apa.org/record/1991-15054-001?ref=quillette.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Two big <a class="break-all" href="https://archive.md/o/cbCEc/pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4945059/?ref=quillette.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">meta-analyses, for instance, show little evidence for the differential socialisation of boys and girls—and, anecdotally, we all know of despairing parents who tried to give their children gender-neutral upbringings, only to see them revert to behaviours characteristic of their sex.

In some areas there is also evidence against systemic bigotry. <a class="break-all" href="https://archive.md/o/cbCEc/journals.sagepub.com/doi/epub/10.1177/15291006231163179?ref=quillette.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">A recent study of sex bias in STEM fields—science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—examined six metrics of professional success: grant funding, papers accepted, strength of letters of recommendation, hiring, teaching ratings, and salaries. The data showed parity between the sexes in the first three areas, a preference for hiring women, and an advantage for men in teaching ratings and salaries."

https://quillette.com/2026/07/30/sex-differences-above-the-neck-steve-stewart-williams/

What has he said or done that is misogynistic for a start?

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/18/richard-dawkins-sexist-atheists-bad-name

Strawman.

RD is claiming trans identity is based on fantasy in other words beliefs about the non material don't count as a legitimate basis for identity. Someone might need to tell him about religion & politics ….particularly since his own identity leans so heavily them.

We can have any number of beliefs that form our identity, but the rubber hits the tarmac when TRAs want that identity to trump biological reality and the inherent risks associated.
Eg it doesn't matter how much an adult may ID as a child, we don't indulge them and don't allow them to occupy groups of children. Risk of physical injury to the child, let alone sexual domination.
We don't allow able bodied people to ID as disabled, again the power difference would be overwhelming.
And in any sane world, we wouldn't allow men to identify as women, where the innate biological imbalances in terms of men being more powerful and sexually aggressive would totally collapse the life chances of females, from physical overpowerment re rape and physical overachievement in sport, let alone the desire for the vast majority of women to have guaranteed same sex social interaction spaces.
Just because some men feel temperamentally suited to what they think is an innate female ID gives them no right to try and fulfill their desires and fantasies.
The world cannot be run on the whims, urges and subsequent demands of a clique.

I'll look out for that.
I recall training in complementary medicine in the 80s/90s, and the number of Ben Goldacre types, along with Dawkins etc, who took no prisoners taking down pseudo medical woo woo and flim flam.
Goldacre was on a roll pushing aside the homeopaths and allergy testers etc.
And what does he have to say today about woo on another quantum level, innate gender identity leading to medicalization of youth and the corrupting of the female sex based category? Yep, nothing.
As I say, he's now in synch with the Mystic Megs of the gender industry.
Dawkins to his credit is one of the few scientists to speak up.

Where are all the suicides by trans people before 2010 when this ideology first began to be adopted?

We would have expected to see a high rate of people taking their own lives because of their dysphoria.

We would have expected to see a small decline between 2010 (when the Equality Act came in) and 2018 when Stonewall Law became prevalent.

We would have expected to see a much steeper decline since 2018 and potentially a small rise since the Cass report came out.

None of it stands up to scrutiny.

Biological sex isn't the silver bullet you think it is. Ultimately, proportionality/ rights balancing applies to the individual circumstances involved that are largely determined by the prevailing culture of the country involved.

biological sex isn’t a silver bullet? Seriously, is that the best you’ve got? Jesus wept.