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No so gentle reminder of the reality of the situation.
We are moving toward this sort of frank discussion when it comes to the religion of gender identity. The days when we have a gender atheist the caliber of Richard Dawkins will not be here too soon.
Catch up with the full article found here on The Critic.
This is the situation we are up against. Speaking out against or even wanting to discuss the gender religion can be hazardous to you and your livelihood. Isn’t it darkly fascinating that defining women as adult human females is considered, in some ‘progressive circles’ the pinnacle of heresy?
“You tweeted in May 2015:
- Words are our servants not masters. But reality masterfully demands words to respect objective distinctions. “Social constructs” have limits
- Thus, it is polite & praiseworthy to refer to trans people by pronoun of choice. But not when talking of, say, chromosomes or anatomy
- No matter how neutral, objective, disinterested, or just plain true your statement, someone will be deeply (& offensively) offended.
- Anthropologists respect a culture by, say, synonymising “brother” & “cousin”. But we must acknowledge scientific distinction as more real.
This is pretty much the position for which I lost my job at an international development think tank, and which was deemed by a judge to be “not worthy of respect in a democratic society”. It is the position for which JK Rowling has been deemed a terrible transphobe, and disavowed by the Robert F Kennedy Foundation, who also revoked an award.
Meaning matters when words are used to make, or break, the rules by which society operates
I imagine you got some pushback at the time, but not of the ferociousness that women face when they say this. And maybe not enough to spark a recognition that this is an authoritarian faith that has taken hold of our enlightenment institutions; complete with a catechism (“trans women are women, trans men are men, non-binary people are non-binary”), heresy laws and an inquisition. It has corrupted and corroded the systems for data collection, sense making and rule formation, for safety, cooperation, and collective endeavour.
In October 2015 you tweeted: “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.”
Courtesy is nice, but meaning matters when words are used to make, or break, the rules by which society operates. Is a “trans woman” a woman when it comes to women’s prisons, women’s refuges, women’s rugby, women’s athletics, the request by a woman to be seen by a female doctor, the rules around being searched by a police officer or a prison guard of a particular sex? Should statistics and medical risk assessment defer to courtesy or stick to facts?
I think you see it now. What is being asked is not just day-to-day courtesy, but replacing sex with self-identified gender in every situation and punishing those who refuse to comply (or who even ask to discuss).
Thank you for speaking up. Please keep doing it.”
Do speak up everyone and push back against this profoundly misogynistic anti-reality ideology, but stay safe while doing so. Every voice, even anonymous voices on social media are important in spreading the word about this deeply regressive tide we are facing.
The good cardinal is out gunned, out classed and out argued on this episode of Q&A. He ends up calling Jesus and ignorant sheep-herder. A great debate, well worth your time.
Richard Dawkins has a new new book out called the Magic of Reality. Doing the promotional rounds in the UK and the US must promote a certain amount of cognitive dissonance for Dawkins as the calibre of the questions he faces varies a great deal depending on which side of the Atlantic he’s on. Compare and contrast, my faithful readership, the two interviews conducted with Dawkins, one by the BBC and the other by Fox News.
As a North American, the second interview makes me ashamed to share the same continent with ‘commentators’ that espouse the merits of bronze age wisdom in the 21st century.
Two talk shows, two very different levels of discourse.
The Late Late Show from Ireland.
Bill Mahr on HBO.
Draw your own conclusions, but one can see why one should be worried about the state of affairs on this side of the pond.
When the religious compare their dogma of choice to science it is almost always a grand misrepresentation of what science actually is. One can break it down for them categorically for instance:
religion – requires a belief in magic and the supernatural
science – requires a dedication to finding the evidence and testable facts about our existence.
As a person who is solidly in the second camp let me assure you, I have no need to “believe” in science. One cannot believe in science as one does religion, it is a false equivocation from the outset. My belief in gravity has no effect on whether gravity applies to me or not, and as hard as I might pray to the gravity gods, I will still be attracted toward the center of the Earth(this works for religious prayer to as well in terms of efficacy).
But what would happen if science was actually a religion. Dr.Dawkins investigates this premise in this video
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