Very interesting. I don't know how I hadn't ever thought about gender roles being socially defined and how being trans fits into that. Thank you for your comment.
Gender dysphoria IS VERYY REAL. I think Dawkin’s issue deals with phrases like ‘Trans women are real women’’ He very much interprets this phrase as people saying ‘Trans women are biological women’ and as a biologist he takes issue. I don’t think he would deny that gender dysphoria affects a certain percentage of the population, afterall, Mutation (variation) is the engine that drives evolution.
I am trans and I also have an issue which such phrases, yes, trans women should be socially accepted as women, but saying trans women are real women is wrong, even the phrase trans women are women is a bit off.
>I am trans and I also have an issue which such phrases, yes, trans women should be socially accepted as women, but saying trans women are real women is wrong, even the phrase trans women are women is a bit off.
Do you think new words would be useful? Like fresh new words or uses of existing words or are trans women/men sufficient and accepted enough? Anything would obviously come from inside the community and only work if it happened organically so pure spec.
If you haven't seen this, it's worth a watch. It's Prof. Robert Sapolsky talking about the actual neurobiology of being trans. There's not a lot of actual studies out there about this topic, but he lays out a lot of \*really\* solid evidence that the sex of the body and the gender of the brain do not always match up.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QScpDGqwsQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QScpDGqwsQ)
I went down a very long Sapolsky YouTube course rabbit hole like 12+ years ago and this is giving me all sorts of memory unlocks - really made biology actually interesting and highlighted the complexity of it all.
Being a biologist has nothing to do with being an expert in psychological and social constructs. Just because he is right about some things doesn't mean he's right about everything.
I’m a molecular biologist and I have no issue with it because as you study genetics you realize that there are so many factors. People treat genes like a dictionary…immutable but it’s really like poetry…subject to a change in meaning. The environment, society, stress, even if your grandmother had a difficult pregnancy with your mother can all affects how genes are expressed. Put it this way. You may have the genes to grow to be 6’4 but if your child hood was marked by food insecurity and stress you might not get to that height. Plus that’s ignoring the social science around gender.
Word
We need to accept that two things can be true. We don't have to share all opinions with people when we agree on one thing
Honestly that's what makes the Q movement so prolific; people agree with one stance and then feel like whatever else is said must be 'gospel' too
There are way too many people that try to make topics and people they agree with right on absolutely everything all the time for all time and people they don't are always wrong and always were. Reality is more messy.
Right, I want to say something like “ A timer can tell time after a fashion, but it doesn’t cook your food for you.”
I’m bad at wordplay this early, but you can’t rely on one thing/person/ideology to have all the answers.
My neighbor might be a great carpenter and offer some help and good advice while I'm building a toolshed, but if I have a health issue, I'm going to talk to my doctor about it, not my neighbor who's a carpenter. Just because he's experienced and knowledgeable in one area doesn't mean he's experienced and knowledgeable in EVERY area.
Being a biologist also doesn't make him an expert in all topics of biology. He has a more narrow field in which he's an expert (evolutionary biology), and he understands the rest of biology better than the layperson, but he's not an actual expert in endocrinology or neurology or psychiatry. Most people in those fields support trans people, and their expertise is more relevant to the discussion.
Exactly this. Lots of people who are experts in one field have said some outlandish things when applied to another field. A Nobel prize winning theoretical chemist came out around the time of Covid saying N95s will do nothing to prevent infection because the viron size is smaller than the pore size on the masks. He forgot about electronegativity gradients,
infecting doses, and other fundamental reasons why the N95s work.
Don't get your thoughts and opinions from a single person. Use them to gain your own opinions. If you want a different perspective from another biologist, look up what Forrest Valkai on YouTube has to say on the subject.
The answer to this is to not have gurus. Don't believe what anyone says about everything. No one is right about everything.
He can be right about atheism and wrong about trans people.
It literally doesn't matter if the source of the problem is the brain or something else, unless it informs treatment. Your experience is valid, and you deserve the care to live your life being true to yourself. Only you are an expert at being you.
I think there is a parallel here to Taylor Tomlinson talking about being bipolar in one of her Netflix specials.
If you haven't seen it, watch the first minute and a half of this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuue-s8qM8w
But the truth she shares there is that the people that judge you for getting the treatment you *need* literally don't care if you live or die. So fuck those people.
Just use the terms sex and gender to avoid confusion.
Sex is a fact of your birth and is defined by which role in reproduction your body is adapted to, gender is a social construct based on things like how you present yourself, behavior, roles in relationships and families etc. for most of human history, and in many parts of the world still, your gender was defined by your sex. That’s no longer true in most of the west although it’s still a social norm. There are two issues though:
1) we haven’t agreed whether the term woman refers to a persons sex or gender because it didn’t make any difference for most of history.
2) people don’t seem to realise that just because your sex no longer has to define your gender that doesn’t mean that your gender defines your sex.
That’s not right, there’s no biological gender. There is biological sex, and gender expression. There’s a reason the accepted term changed from transsexual to transgender. Gender is the socially constructed characteristics of men and women. Sex is the biological characteristics of men and women.
Trans women are real women when considering gender.
The use of the word woman comes across as a trespass of language really. Saying transgender women ARE women really requires a redefinition of the word woman to be factual. To say they ARE feminine would still have the same intended meaning but without the impact or affect that people are looking for, no?
There's also gender identity, which is influenced biologically in terms of the brain. Expression and identity are _not_ the same thing and conflating them is harmful.
Correct, the problem is that there's way too many people out there who don't understand when it's more appropriate to use the facts or the social construct.
Being right about one thing doesn't mean you're right about all things. Avoid heroification. This is like the MAGA mentality of "because Trump said it it must be right". Dawkins is right that trans people are not biologically the sex they feel their gender aligns with but he's not right about the social, psychological, and neurological aspects of gender versus biological sex.
Correct. Just like Ben Carson. Brilliant neurosurgeon, absolute moron with anything else. Ran for President. Dude needs to stick to neurosurgery and not speak on anything else.
Also like Dr. Oz, weirdly enough.
He was arguably the greatest living cardiac specialist on the planet. Then he dived into the Alternative Medicine pool… and never really came back up for air.
Which, honestly, is often a solid part of atheist outlook: that there are no "revealed truths" or "divine prophets" who know everything. People are fallible, including spokespeople of atheism and secularism.
Don't put people on a pedestal. He's a man, nothing more. His arguments against religion make logical sense from an evolutionary biological view, because that's his field of expertise. His views on transgenderism may be valid from a biological point of view, too.
His public profile doesn't mention anything about qualifications that may be relevant to gender identity, so I would not consider him an authority on the subject.
Do you know Albert Einstein, one of the greatest physicist of the 20th century, the man who created the theories of general and special relativity, as well as explainedBrownian motion, and won two Nobel prizes?
He was unable to accept the reality of quantum mechanics. He accused Heisenberg, the author of the uncertainty principle, of saying that God was playing dice with the universe. He spent most of the rest of his professional life trying to disprove quantum mechanics
He was wrong.
Have you ever heard of Linus polling? He is the only person to have one to unshared Nobel prizes. His first was in chemistry, for researching into the chemical nature of bonding between atoms and molecules. His second was in peace. He invented an artificial blood serum used during World War II and an oxygen detector used in submarines and airplanes, for which he was awarded a presidential medal for merit. He worked on a team that identified the defect in hemoglobin structure that is responsible for sickle cell disease. It was the first time a molecular cause of a disease was found.
He spent the ladder years of his life researching the effects of megadoses of vitamins on disease. He came to believe that megadoses of vitamin C would cure not just the common cold but also cancer.
He was wrong.
History is full of people who were geniuses at one thing or another but absolutely incorrect on another topic.
Have you read any of the new research on the trans brain? Imaging studies of people's brains have shown that there are differences between the brains of cis males and cis females. We shouldn't be at all surprised by this. Imaging studies of left-handed people show that their brains are organized differently from right handed people.
When they do imaging studies of trans people's brains, it shows that they are more similar to the brains of cis people in the gender they identify as.
We know that structurally every human body starts out female. During the process of fetal development, hormones are released at certain stages that, if the body has XY chromosomes (and everything is functioning normally) change the body to male. The proto-clitoris turns into a penis. The proto-ovaries develop into testicles instead. And certain structures of the brain are reorganized.
But this process is imperfect. A girl fetus his brain gets a dose of masculinize hormones. A male fetus his brain doesn't get the hormones it is supposed to have. And the result is a baby born with the wrong sex sprain. That baby, with a certain sex chromosome and a body that matches that has a brain that doesn't. They can't think that their gender aligns with their sex, because their brain literally is shaped to think the other way.
People used to think that left-handed people were that way because they were possessed by the devil. We now know it's brain structure. It's just one of the variations that humans have. It's like being incredibly gifted at math or music, which also comes from a nonstandard brain wiring.
None of this should be a problem other than the cost of replacing someone's wardrobe when they finally realize who they actually are. It's just stupidity and prejudice that we don't accept that this is something that people are sometimes. When we finally admitted that people could naturally be left-handed, we just invested in some of those desks that have The writing surface on the other side. we also recognized that left-handed people seem to have the ability to tap into a creative and artistic side that right handed people didn't always have as good access to. Because their writing and communication centers are on the opposite side of their brains. When we stop expecting everyone to be identical, we can appreciate the beauty and depth that all of our differences bring to our common human experience.
I take your general point here but I want to point out that your interpretation of Einstein here is a common misconception. Einstein helped create quantum mechanics - so not only did he accept the science, he helped create it! but he wasn’t convinced by the Copenhagen Interpretation of the measurement problem that was put forward by Neils Bohr and became widely accepted (although this interpretation is likely wring in itself). The questions Einstein asked to challenge Quantum physics and the measurement problem were relevant, insightful, and are still being asked today. I’ll add that continuing to challenging one’s own findings, and the findings of your peers, with piercing questions is a core part of good science, and is quite different from “being wrong.”
The topic of Einstein’s stance on the Fundamentals of Quantum Physics is nuanced: For more you can read “What is Real” by Adam Becker or check out books and podcasts etc from Sean Carrol.
He's a biologist. He looks at it from a biological standpoint. The psychology behind how we see ourselves is not his field.
He basically deals with applied chemistry.
To him a sperm is made by a male. Not a he/him.
Egg are produced by a female. Not a she/her.
He's one layer departed from how we express ourselves.
You can still listen to him regarding biology. He's a very well educated man in that field. Evolution and all that.
This is the root of the argument. We are animals, that's how Dawkins sees us. Yes there is nuance in human culture, but from the 10,000 ft. view, there are two sexes in humans.
IMHO we've been roped into this divisive bullshit on purpose in order to make us fight each other. I'm a passionate supporter of trans rights too.
Are people wrong when they say trans women aren't women? Yes.
Is it worth arguing about among ourselves when they already support trans rights ( I'm not talking about bathroom banners here)? Probably not.
Scientifically, yes, if you were born as a male, you will have male chromosomes, you will be more prone to male-specific illness or disease, you will have male specific trait unless you medically tried to alter or suppress it.
Is Gender dysphoria real? Absolutely, but in a pure scientific field it would be considered as abnormality(Do note that being abnormal doesn't make your suffering not real), and being abnormal doesn't translate into you being a crazy person, people being left-handed or have different eye colors can be considered abnormal too, but they can still function properly as everyone else.
I think us non trans people would just like you to get on with your best life. Be a good, moral, ethical person. Take responsibility for yourself. Incorporate some stoicism so you’re not emotionally fragile. Don’t compact the entirety of your self and identity into your sex and gender. People love awesome people presented in any package because awesome is universal. Just go out and be your awesome self trans or not.
Try not to worry too much about it. Not everyone is right about everything. You can believe what he says about organized religion without accepting what he says about transgenderism. It doesn't have to be all or nothing.
Very simply… being an informed atheist does not make you right about everything else. It doesn’t make you an expert on all matters. It certainly doesn’t imply that you’re a good person.
Beyond that, he is an 83 year old evolutionary biologist. He’s no expert on psychology. He’s clearly out of touch with social issues— which this very much is, and not simply a biological one— other than spreading awareness about religion being a cancer. Don’t let some boomer tell you you’re not valid… you know who you are, fuck everyone else.
I agree with him not being an expert on social issues but all he has said is a trans person is not biologically a woman which is his field and he would still call a trans woman “she” out of courtesy.
No one knows what the fuck is going on or have any real answers. Stop following others and just do what feels right to you.
Believe. Don’t believe. Why do you need Richard Dawkins or anyone else tell you what to believe?
Yeah I think OP needs to evaluate their belief system more than worrying about what Dawkins thinks about trans people. One person should not have this kind of sway on your values where if they say something it throws you into disarray
It's all semantics for Dawkins. Most people conflate the terms sex and gender, but Dawkins doesn't. For him, male/female simply refers to biological sex, while gender refers to one's gender identity. The former cannot be changed, while the latter certainly can.
Just like J.K. Rowling, who Dawkins adamantly defends, he only argues that a person cannot change their ***biological sex*** via force of will or surgery. That's it. Both of them absolutely accept gender identity and that a person's ***gender*** can change.
The issue that Rowling and Dawkins have is that some trans individuals conflate sex and gender and wind up making nonsensical claims, e.g., that a trans-woman is a biological woman because "trans-woman are woman". In reality, trans-women --such as myself-- *identify* as the female **gender**. I am ***not*** identifying as being a biological woman because, of course, I am not. Gender is subjective, but biological sex is objective.
Their point is simply that sex and gender are not the same, which ironically is the same belief that trans people have.
If Dawkins or Rowling were to claim, for example, that I wasn't actually a "woman" they would be referring to my *biological sex*, not my *gender identity*. Again, they both accept that a person's gender identity is whatever they say it is. However, you can't change your biological sex in the way that your gender identity can change. They just aren't the same thing.
Understanding their argument, instead of lashing out at them, is key to realizing that they don't disagree with the foundation of trans ideology, but rather the equivocation of words by the trans community that are related to sex and gender.
I don’t want to be cruel to op here, but if you are sincerely saying something Richard Dawkins (or any other public intellectual, celebrity, etc) said “shook you to your core” and you’re now “heart broken and hurting” then that does sound like a mentally unstable response.
If your conviction in your trans identity can be shaken so easily, then maybe that’s a sign of whether you’re trans at all. As a counter example, if anyone (public intellectual or celebrity I look up to, even a parent) said I was gay or my sexuality or gender identity was wrong, or a sign I am disturbed or something, I would not be shaken or emotionally harmed, I’d think “no, I’m confident that person is wrong about me” and move on.
Per his post history, he’s been tripping frequently on mushrooms etc through his forties and decided he was trans because he started wearing panties during these trips. Recently divorced. Doesn’t seem like the most stable sense of self
> He’s a biologist so he knows what he’s talking about.
This is very, very wrong. He’s an *evolutionary* biologist, so he knows what he’s talking about *in the field of evolutionary biology*. He’s not an endocrinologist, he’s not a sexologist, he’s not a neuroscientist, he’s not a psychologist, he’s not a bioanthropologist, he’s not a sociologist, and he’s not an expert in any of the *dozens* of other fields that even a cursory understanding of which would demonstrate how obviously wrong he is.
Although all that aside, I wouldn’t place much stock in anything the man’s said post 2017-2018. During that time he suffered a pretty massive stroke, and he just flat out hasn’t been the same since. Hell, he’s even gotten pretty serious things *within his own field* catastrophically wrong, like his defense of eugenics.
Trans women are women, but trans women aren't cis women, and that's just how it be. I've never seen Dawkins really say more than that. I think as the years go on, language will evolve to catch up with society, and more people will start using "sex" and "gender" in their proper ways, clearing up a lot of this issue. Old men like Dawkins get really hung up on semantics, and the rest of the culture is very sensitive to perceived slights against marginalized people.
Right now I believe there is an effort to get people in the west at each other's throats over ideas of gender.
It's a relatively new concept for a lot of people, especially older people.
This infighting serves to keep loosely assembled voting blocks from working together to stop fascism.
I think lots of the replies in this thread adequately addressed and clarified Dawkins' viewpoints. But on a broader scale, he is a human. Even if he *was* downright transphobic, he's still human, he's still fallible, and he can still have bad opinions or be objectively wrong on certain things. It's your job as a sentient adult to take in information from the world and parse it yourself. That means you can accept that, even if Dawkins was wrong about trans people, he can be right about theism/evolution/whatever. He is not simply another interchangeable deity that must be put on a pedestal and purported to be infallible.
You shouldn't base your entire personal belief system around the teaching of one individual. That's pretty much the same as religion. Richard Dawkins is not a religion. You can accept his statements on Christianity (provided you actually agree with them and they make sense to you) while not accepting his statements on transpeople. I'd advise against making Richard Dawkins, or anyone else, your sole authority on anything. Research multiple perspectives on everything and go with what makes sense to you. If you are trans, then you know that being trans is not a lie because you live it - it doesn't matter that someone you use a resource may disagree. (Also, as other commenters have pointed out, he seems to draw a distinction between the biology of being trans and the social aspect of being trans).
As I'm sure Dawkins would agree, life is about research, multiple sources, skepticism and questioning. Do those things
The validity of Transness is not a question for biology, but for culture. Culture, also, happens to be subjective. Dawkins is not an expert on that.
I say this as a microbiologist who respected Dawkins writing on both The Selfish Gene and The God Delusion but the man has absolutely fallen down a mysoginist rabbit hole since then. Even putting aside his opinions on trans issues, there have been numerous issues pointing to the fact that he doesn’t respect women in the sciences or elsewhere.
Believing that God exists does not mean that a god actually exists. It means that you believe God exists and others who know you believe that, as long as you don’t harass or belittle them, will typically respect what you believe and not belittle or attack you because of what you believe.
A biological male that believes they are a woman does not mean that they are literally a woman. It means that they believe they are a woman, and typically most people will respect them enough to not belittle them or purposely use the wrong pronouns to hurt them.
With that said, a Christian can’t expect others to play along with their beliefs just because they believe it. They can believe it, but if they ask an atheist if they believe it, or ask an atheist to join them in prayer, the atheist should not be expected to do so. The same for a person with gender dysphoria. They cannot expect a person to agree that they are a woman or force them to use their selected pronouns. A person is entitled to believe what they want, whether that hurts someone’s feelings or not. We can expect basic respect and dignity, and protection from harm or harassment due to our beliefs, but we can’t expect others to play along to appease our feelings.
There are some people genuinely claiming that biological sex is a social construct and I think he's responding to that. I can find examples of this if you want or you can, they're very available. The idea that someone can have a "female soul" or "male soul" seems extremely religious and nonsensical to me - I don't believe in an essential human soul/essence of any kind let alone one tied to concepts of gender - but I'm polite about it in the same way I'm polite about any other idea that seems religious to me. My guess is this is what he is taking a strong position about, because biological sex really does seem to be binary.
There are simply two human gametes in my well-researched opinion and that is baseline sexual dimorphism - intersex conditions/DSDs are pretty inherently someone female or male that has an atypical phenotype.
In terms of "am I really just a crazy person and my being transgender is all made up?" I would say the choices you've made are not made up, the experiences you have about gender are not made up, dysphoria is not made up. But to say those experiences and choices mean something fundamental about a concrete, real, "kind" of person seems made up to me. I don't think that's a demeaning thing to say and I certainly don't mean it to be. As in, "figuring out who I really am" meaning "discovering a real extant essence that I have" feels extremely made up to me, whereas "figuring out who I really am" meaning "figuring out how to live my own life" is not at all made up.
When it comes to accepting who you are, I think you can look at this from an atheist point of view in a way - being gender nonconforming, even immensely gender nonconforming, doesn't mean you're not male or female. I really struggle to understand how man or woman could refer to anything but sex specifically from an atheist standpoint. Obviously I understand that both of those words have strong cultural connotations, and that someone female for example could align with male cultural connotations and stereotypes.
OP, this is a difficult thing to go through. i don't know much about dawkins, but you do have good ability to think clearly about things. this new development can make it really difficult emotionally. i hope you self-soothe when it gets hard, and find people who can be your support when the days are really hard
Stephen Woodford ("Rationality Rules") about Richard Dawkins:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x\_MpSyH5uEA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_MpSyH5uEA)
In his interview, he did not criticize Helen Joyce and explicitly agreed with some points.
She called gender-affirming care 'child abuse,' 'unethical medicine,' 'mass experimentation,' and a 'global scandal'.
“And in the meantime, while we’re trying to get through to the decision-makers, we have to try to limit the harm and that means reducing or keeping down the number of people who transition,” Joyce said.“That’s for two reasons – one of them is that every one of those people is a person who’s been damaged. But the second one is every one of those people is basically, you know, a huge problem to a sane world.”
She mentioned Rapid Onset of Gender Dysphoria (ROGD):
>ROGD has not been recognized by any major professional association as a valid mental health diagnosis, and use of the term has been discouraged by professional and academic institutions due to a lack of reputable scientific evidence, major methodological issues in existing research, and likelihood to cause harm by stigmatizing gender-affirming care.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid-onset\_gender\_dysphoria\_controversy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid-onset_gender_dysphoria_controversy)
What does Dawkins say about this? nothing.
>Joyce immerses herself in another debunked theory: ‘Rapid Onset of Gender Dysphoria’ (ROGD)
[https://criticallegalthinking.com/2021/10/08/review-of-helen-joyces-trans-when-ideology-meets-reality-london-oneworld-2021-pp-311-rp-16-99-and-kathleen-stocks-material-girls-why-reality-matters-for-feminism-london-fle/](https://criticallegalthinking.com/2021/10/08/review-of-helen-joyces-trans-when-ideology-meets-reality-london-oneworld-2021-pp-311-rp-16-99-and-kathleen-stocks-material-girls-why-reality-matters-for-feminism-london-fle/)
Listen, transgender research is brand fucking new. If you think different, remember it was only a little over a century ago that we started evidence based practice and medical research. Due in large part to Hopkins.
No doubt there is much more to learn, but the biggest part, that we need no research on, is that kindness and acceptance are paramount to anyone coming out as LGBT. Don’t worry about it. Just be kind.
People, including researchers and academics with PhDs, can be right about some things and wrong about others. That's why authorities don't matter in science, it's the evidence-based arguments that should speak for themselves.
Dawkins can be right about christianity and evolution, and wrong about what it means to be transgender. He has research and evidence for the former, and personal opinions on the latter.
Every aspect of your body and mind has genetic components that control everything. Funny thing about genetics is that it's basically rolling a huge die that can influence how much or how little some particular trait is expressed.
Where this really gets tricky is hormone expression and sensitivity. One of the first transgender I remember hearing about was a Olympic athlete (no not that one) who had every outward sign of being a woman but was a XY chromosome.
If you want to understand more about how someone who is truly Born That Way is I have a perfect example. Blume didn't find out about her condition until puberty. She's smart and beautiful and surprisingly well adjusted. She's very open and honest with her situation and has posted lots of videos on YouTube talking about it.
She does have a lot of other content on her channel but if you search by Popular you'll probably get mostly stuff talking about being intersex.
[Blume Has Testicles in Her Stomach](https://youtube.com/shorts/g_cX5-qzQuc?si=ZtLip19-Fe6KKsGK)
People can be very smart in one area, and very dumb in others. The position that Dawkins has made about trans people is not based on biology, but politics. It's not like he has a real scientific justification for what he is saying. The UK has developed an almost pathological hatred of transgender women.
You can't let a single person/group's opinion about something to haunt you. No matter what decision you have anxiety about, there will always be someone who will think otherwise. You need to find strength in yourself and not rely on these opinions for validation.
NGL listening to Atheist figure heads is just as bad as listening to a religious figure. Your letting some random guy tell you how to live your life and what's important and generally shape your sense of identity and meaning. It's not somehow better because he doesn't justify it with God but instead whatever he justifies it with. Philosophy is dangerous and must be created for yourself individually not learned from one general source
I understand the heartbreak.
Richard Dawkins is a biologist, but he doesn’t actually seem to have any background on gender and sexuality. His statements on Transgenderism seem more informed by his cultural views and pre-conceived biases than on his academic background.
Consider this video by a Biologist with the appropriate expertise.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8QScpDGqwsQ
I won’t affirm every pro-trans statement out there. The fact of the matter is that transsexuality deals with human complexity in a big way, and so things are never clear cut. Nonetheless, we have very strong evidence that transgenderism isn’t a lie or delusion. Richard Dawkins seems willing to just dismiss the evidence to support his view, which is a particular shame for someone who spends so much time combating that very tendency as it pertains to religion
I would very much like to see those videos because each time it’s mentioned it’s always a big nothing burger.
To sum it up it’s basically that he’s reminding the biological definition of gender, as a biologist, as a scientific fact (which it is).
I do not think he’s criticizing or questioning gender dysphoria, I also seriously doubt he’s calling trans “mentally insane” at least not in the sense OP puts it (there a difference between calling a murderer “mentally insane” and someone with an anxiety disorder “mentally insane”).
Never ever base your worldview on someone else. No matter how much you respect someone they’ll inevitably do something disappointing. Dawkins unironically uses the term “wokeism” and calls it a religion, he’s not right about everything. No one is.
Remember the Republican presidential hopeful Ben Carson? He’s a celebrated neurosurgeon. He also once said that the pyramids of Egypt were grain silos.
You can be smart about one thing and really dumb about another thing at the same time. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Being a famous evolutionary biologist doesn't mean he knows anything about trans people, psychology or mental health. Scientists can be just as much bigoted, anti-scientifically-thinking assholes as anyone else.
All evidence points to trans people being real and that transitioning and acceptance is the most- and only-effective method of health care.
Check other comments here. They clearly quote him distinguishing sec and gender and accepting gender as valid and real.
He generally says Trans women are not biologically born women (by body) and women by their definition (mind/identity) and we should respect that. (He does)
Crazy that you took what he said out of context and are now spiraling because of it. You had to have people in the comments pointing out the entire context. Why couldn’t you do that before you started freaking out? Why do you need people here to do the research for you? It’s just incredibly lazy and probably would have taken two minutes to research yourself. Especially being in the r/atheism subreddit where atheism revolves around evidence and science. It’s just so strange to get emotional so quickly. Maybe take it as a lesson to dig deeper in to things before posting it on here and before letting emotions take over.
I thought he was a decent pilot. But ever since I flew Einstein Airlines, travel has become a nightmare... Just try crossing a border or going through airport security when you're younger than what the DOB on your passport says.
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Very interesting. I don't know how I hadn't ever thought about gender roles being socially defined and how being trans fits into that. Thank you for your comment.
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Gender dysphoria IS VERYY REAL. I think Dawkin’s issue deals with phrases like ‘Trans women are real women’’ He very much interprets this phrase as people saying ‘Trans women are biological women’ and as a biologist he takes issue. I don’t think he would deny that gender dysphoria affects a certain percentage of the population, afterall, Mutation (variation) is the engine that drives evolution.
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I am trans and I also have an issue which such phrases, yes, trans women should be socially accepted as women, but saying trans women are real women is wrong, even the phrase trans women are women is a bit off.
A bit off how in your opinion?
>I am trans and I also have an issue which such phrases, yes, trans women should be socially accepted as women, but saying trans women are real women is wrong, even the phrase trans women are women is a bit off. Do you think new words would be useful? Like fresh new words or uses of existing words or are trans women/men sufficient and accepted enough? Anything would obviously come from inside the community and only work if it happened organically so pure spec.
If you haven't seen this, it's worth a watch. It's Prof. Robert Sapolsky talking about the actual neurobiology of being trans. There's not a lot of actual studies out there about this topic, but he lays out a lot of \*really\* solid evidence that the sex of the body and the gender of the brain do not always match up. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QScpDGqwsQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QScpDGqwsQ)
I went down a very long Sapolsky YouTube course rabbit hole like 12+ years ago and this is giving me all sorts of memory unlocks - really made biology actually interesting and highlighted the complexity of it all.
Lol was about to post this too
Being a biologist has nothing to do with being an expert in psychological and social constructs. Just because he is right about some things doesn't mean he's right about everything.
I’m a molecular biologist and I have no issue with it because as you study genetics you realize that there are so many factors. People treat genes like a dictionary…immutable but it’s really like poetry…subject to a change in meaning. The environment, society, stress, even if your grandmother had a difficult pregnancy with your mother can all affects how genes are expressed. Put it this way. You may have the genes to grow to be 6’4 but if your child hood was marked by food insecurity and stress you might not get to that height. Plus that’s ignoring the social science around gender.
https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/dna.png
Word We need to accept that two things can be true. We don't have to share all opinions with people when we agree on one thing Honestly that's what makes the Q movement so prolific; people agree with one stance and then feel like whatever else is said must be 'gospel' too
There are way too many people that try to make topics and people they agree with right on absolutely everything all the time for all time and people they don't are always wrong and always were. Reality is more messy.
Right, I want to say something like “ A timer can tell time after a fashion, but it doesn’t cook your food for you.” I’m bad at wordplay this early, but you can’t rely on one thing/person/ideology to have all the answers.
My neighbor might be a great carpenter and offer some help and good advice while I'm building a toolshed, but if I have a health issue, I'm going to talk to my doctor about it, not my neighbor who's a carpenter. Just because he's experienced and knowledgeable in one area doesn't mean he's experienced and knowledgeable in EVERY area.
Being a biologist also doesn't make him an expert in all topics of biology. He has a more narrow field in which he's an expert (evolutionary biology), and he understands the rest of biology better than the layperson, but he's not an actual expert in endocrinology or neurology or psychiatry. Most people in those fields support trans people, and their expertise is more relevant to the discussion.
Spot on. Every single person who has influenced my thinking has said something I don’t agree with.
This. Sooooooo much this. I'll add that's its perfectly acceptable to agree with someone on one thing, and disagree on another.
Dawkins is already well written on social constructs. The Selfish Gene
The irony is that he has argued that non experts chiming in on issues they don't understand should be ignored.
Exactly this. Lots of people who are experts in one field have said some outlandish things when applied to another field. A Nobel prize winning theoretical chemist came out around the time of Covid saying N95s will do nothing to prevent infection because the viron size is smaller than the pore size on the masks. He forgot about electronegativity gradients, infecting doses, and other fundamental reasons why the N95s work.
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Don't get your thoughts and opinions from a single person. Use them to gain your own opinions. If you want a different perspective from another biologist, look up what Forrest Valkai on YouTube has to say on the subject.
The answer to this is to not have gurus. Don't believe what anyone says about everything. No one is right about everything. He can be right about atheism and wrong about trans people.
It literally doesn't matter if the source of the problem is the brain or something else, unless it informs treatment. Your experience is valid, and you deserve the care to live your life being true to yourself. Only you are an expert at being you. I think there is a parallel here to Taylor Tomlinson talking about being bipolar in one of her Netflix specials. If you haven't seen it, watch the first minute and a half of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuue-s8qM8w But the truth she shares there is that the people that judge you for getting the treatment you *need* literally don't care if you live or die. So fuck those people.
There is biological gender and gender expression two different things
Just use the terms sex and gender to avoid confusion. Sex is a fact of your birth and is defined by which role in reproduction your body is adapted to, gender is a social construct based on things like how you present yourself, behavior, roles in relationships and families etc. for most of human history, and in many parts of the world still, your gender was defined by your sex. That’s no longer true in most of the west although it’s still a social norm. There are two issues though: 1) we haven’t agreed whether the term woman refers to a persons sex or gender because it didn’t make any difference for most of history. 2) people don’t seem to realise that just because your sex no longer has to define your gender that doesn’t mean that your gender defines your sex.
I think you are trying to make the distinction between sex and gender? Sex is biological, gender is cultural.
That’s not right, there’s no biological gender. There is biological sex, and gender expression. There’s a reason the accepted term changed from transsexual to transgender. Gender is the socially constructed characteristics of men and women. Sex is the biological characteristics of men and women. Trans women are real women when considering gender.
The use of the word woman comes across as a trespass of language really. Saying transgender women ARE women really requires a redefinition of the word woman to be factual. To say they ARE feminine would still have the same intended meaning but without the impact or affect that people are looking for, no?
There's also gender identity, which is influenced biologically in terms of the brain. Expression and identity are _not_ the same thing and conflating them is harmful.
Yes, one is a fact, the other is a social construct
Correct, the problem is that there's way too many people out there who don't understand when it's more appropriate to use the facts or the social construct.
Being right about one thing doesn't mean you're right about all things. Avoid heroification. This is like the MAGA mentality of "because Trump said it it must be right". Dawkins is right that trans people are not biologically the sex they feel their gender aligns with but he's not right about the social, psychological, and neurological aspects of gender versus biological sex.
Correct. Just like Ben Carson. Brilliant neurosurgeon, absolute moron with anything else. Ran for President. Dude needs to stick to neurosurgery and not speak on anything else.
Also like Dr. Oz, weirdly enough. He was arguably the greatest living cardiac specialist on the planet. Then he dived into the Alternative Medicine pool… and never really came back up for air.
Just because Dawkins was right about some things doesn’t mean he’s right about everything. It’s ideas. Not people.
Which, honestly, is often a solid part of atheist outlook: that there are no "revealed truths" or "divine prophets" who know everything. People are fallible, including spokespeople of atheism and secularism.
Don't put people on a pedestal. He's a man, nothing more. His arguments against religion make logical sense from an evolutionary biological view, because that's his field of expertise. His views on transgenderism may be valid from a biological point of view, too. His public profile doesn't mention anything about qualifications that may be relevant to gender identity, so I would not consider him an authority on the subject.
Do you know Albert Einstein, one of the greatest physicist of the 20th century, the man who created the theories of general and special relativity, as well as explainedBrownian motion, and won two Nobel prizes? He was unable to accept the reality of quantum mechanics. He accused Heisenberg, the author of the uncertainty principle, of saying that God was playing dice with the universe. He spent most of the rest of his professional life trying to disprove quantum mechanics He was wrong. Have you ever heard of Linus polling? He is the only person to have one to unshared Nobel prizes. His first was in chemistry, for researching into the chemical nature of bonding between atoms and molecules. His second was in peace. He invented an artificial blood serum used during World War II and an oxygen detector used in submarines and airplanes, for which he was awarded a presidential medal for merit. He worked on a team that identified the defect in hemoglobin structure that is responsible for sickle cell disease. It was the first time a molecular cause of a disease was found. He spent the ladder years of his life researching the effects of megadoses of vitamins on disease. He came to believe that megadoses of vitamin C would cure not just the common cold but also cancer. He was wrong. History is full of people who were geniuses at one thing or another but absolutely incorrect on another topic. Have you read any of the new research on the trans brain? Imaging studies of people's brains have shown that there are differences between the brains of cis males and cis females. We shouldn't be at all surprised by this. Imaging studies of left-handed people show that their brains are organized differently from right handed people. When they do imaging studies of trans people's brains, it shows that they are more similar to the brains of cis people in the gender they identify as. We know that structurally every human body starts out female. During the process of fetal development, hormones are released at certain stages that, if the body has XY chromosomes (and everything is functioning normally) change the body to male. The proto-clitoris turns into a penis. The proto-ovaries develop into testicles instead. And certain structures of the brain are reorganized. But this process is imperfect. A girl fetus his brain gets a dose of masculinize hormones. A male fetus his brain doesn't get the hormones it is supposed to have. And the result is a baby born with the wrong sex sprain. That baby, with a certain sex chromosome and a body that matches that has a brain that doesn't. They can't think that their gender aligns with their sex, because their brain literally is shaped to think the other way. People used to think that left-handed people were that way because they were possessed by the devil. We now know it's brain structure. It's just one of the variations that humans have. It's like being incredibly gifted at math or music, which also comes from a nonstandard brain wiring. None of this should be a problem other than the cost of replacing someone's wardrobe when they finally realize who they actually are. It's just stupidity and prejudice that we don't accept that this is something that people are sometimes. When we finally admitted that people could naturally be left-handed, we just invested in some of those desks that have The writing surface on the other side. we also recognized that left-handed people seem to have the ability to tap into a creative and artistic side that right handed people didn't always have as good access to. Because their writing and communication centers are on the opposite side of their brains. When we stop expecting everyone to be identical, we can appreciate the beauty and depth that all of our differences bring to our common human experience.
I take your general point here but I want to point out that your interpretation of Einstein here is a common misconception. Einstein helped create quantum mechanics - so not only did he accept the science, he helped create it! but he wasn’t convinced by the Copenhagen Interpretation of the measurement problem that was put forward by Neils Bohr and became widely accepted (although this interpretation is likely wring in itself). The questions Einstein asked to challenge Quantum physics and the measurement problem were relevant, insightful, and are still being asked today. I’ll add that continuing to challenging one’s own findings, and the findings of your peers, with piercing questions is a core part of good science, and is quite different from “being wrong.” The topic of Einstein’s stance on the Fundamentals of Quantum Physics is nuanced: For more you can read “What is Real” by Adam Becker or check out books and podcasts etc from Sean Carrol.
He's a biologist. He looks at it from a biological standpoint. The psychology behind how we see ourselves is not his field. He basically deals with applied chemistry. To him a sperm is made by a male. Not a he/him. Egg are produced by a female. Not a she/her. He's one layer departed from how we express ourselves. You can still listen to him regarding biology. He's a very well educated man in that field. Evolution and all that.
This is the root of the argument. We are animals, that's how Dawkins sees us. Yes there is nuance in human culture, but from the 10,000 ft. view, there are two sexes in humans.
IMHO we've been roped into this divisive bullshit on purpose in order to make us fight each other. I'm a passionate supporter of trans rights too. Are people wrong when they say trans women aren't women? Yes. Is it worth arguing about among ourselves when they already support trans rights ( I'm not talking about bathroom banners here)? Probably not.
Scientifically, yes, if you were born as a male, you will have male chromosomes, you will be more prone to male-specific illness or disease, you will have male specific trait unless you medically tried to alter or suppress it. Is Gender dysphoria real? Absolutely, but in a pure scientific field it would be considered as abnormality(Do note that being abnormal doesn't make your suffering not real), and being abnormal doesn't translate into you being a crazy person, people being left-handed or have different eye colors can be considered abnormal too, but they can still function properly as everyone else.
I think us non trans people would just like you to get on with your best life. Be a good, moral, ethical person. Take responsibility for yourself. Incorporate some stoicism so you’re not emotionally fragile. Don’t compact the entirety of your self and identity into your sex and gender. People love awesome people presented in any package because awesome is universal. Just go out and be your awesome self trans or not.
Try not to worry too much about it. Not everyone is right about everything. You can believe what he says about organized religion without accepting what he says about transgenderism. It doesn't have to be all or nothing.
I think you need to work on a bit of self resilience if you are so affected by what some dude on YouTube said
Very simply… being an informed atheist does not make you right about everything else. It doesn’t make you an expert on all matters. It certainly doesn’t imply that you’re a good person. Beyond that, he is an 83 year old evolutionary biologist. He’s no expert on psychology. He’s clearly out of touch with social issues— which this very much is, and not simply a biological one— other than spreading awareness about religion being a cancer. Don’t let some boomer tell you you’re not valid… you know who you are, fuck everyone else.
I agree with him not being an expert on social issues but all he has said is a trans person is not biologically a woman which is his field and he would still call a trans woman “she” out of courtesy.
No one knows what the fuck is going on or have any real answers. Stop following others and just do what feels right to you. Believe. Don’t believe. Why do you need Richard Dawkins or anyone else tell you what to believe?
Yeah I think OP needs to evaluate their belief system more than worrying about what Dawkins thinks about trans people. One person should not have this kind of sway on your values where if they say something it throws you into disarray
A person can be absolutely right on one topic and completely wrong on another. Happens often, actually.
No, Dawkins is not an authority on whether being trans is valid or not. Be what feels right for you.
It's all semantics for Dawkins. Most people conflate the terms sex and gender, but Dawkins doesn't. For him, male/female simply refers to biological sex, while gender refers to one's gender identity. The former cannot be changed, while the latter certainly can. Just like J.K. Rowling, who Dawkins adamantly defends, he only argues that a person cannot change their ***biological sex*** via force of will or surgery. That's it. Both of them absolutely accept gender identity and that a person's ***gender*** can change. The issue that Rowling and Dawkins have is that some trans individuals conflate sex and gender and wind up making nonsensical claims, e.g., that a trans-woman is a biological woman because "trans-woman are woman". In reality, trans-women --such as myself-- *identify* as the female **gender**. I am ***not*** identifying as being a biological woman because, of course, I am not. Gender is subjective, but biological sex is objective. Their point is simply that sex and gender are not the same, which ironically is the same belief that trans people have. If Dawkins or Rowling were to claim, for example, that I wasn't actually a "woman" they would be referring to my *biological sex*, not my *gender identity*. Again, they both accept that a person's gender identity is whatever they say it is. However, you can't change your biological sex in the way that your gender identity can change. They just aren't the same thing. Understanding their argument, instead of lashing out at them, is key to realizing that they don't disagree with the foundation of trans ideology, but rather the equivocation of words by the trans community that are related to sex and gender.
I don’t want to be cruel to op here, but if you are sincerely saying something Richard Dawkins (or any other public intellectual, celebrity, etc) said “shook you to your core” and you’re now “heart broken and hurting” then that does sound like a mentally unstable response. If your conviction in your trans identity can be shaken so easily, then maybe that’s a sign of whether you’re trans at all. As a counter example, if anyone (public intellectual or celebrity I look up to, even a parent) said I was gay or my sexuality or gender identity was wrong, or a sign I am disturbed or something, I would not be shaken or emotionally harmed, I’d think “no, I’m confident that person is wrong about me” and move on.
Per his post history, he’s been tripping frequently on mushrooms etc through his forties and decided he was trans because he started wearing panties during these trips. Recently divorced. Doesn’t seem like the most stable sense of self
> He’s a biologist so he knows what he’s talking about. This is very, very wrong. He’s an *evolutionary* biologist, so he knows what he’s talking about *in the field of evolutionary biology*. He’s not an endocrinologist, he’s not a sexologist, he’s not a neuroscientist, he’s not a psychologist, he’s not a bioanthropologist, he’s not a sociologist, and he’s not an expert in any of the *dozens* of other fields that even a cursory understanding of which would demonstrate how obviously wrong he is. Although all that aside, I wouldn’t place much stock in anything the man’s said post 2017-2018. During that time he suffered a pretty massive stroke, and he just flat out hasn’t been the same since. Hell, he’s even gotten pretty serious things *within his own field* catastrophically wrong, like his defense of eugenics.
Trans women are women, but trans women aren't cis women, and that's just how it be. I've never seen Dawkins really say more than that. I think as the years go on, language will evolve to catch up with society, and more people will start using "sex" and "gender" in their proper ways, clearing up a lot of this issue. Old men like Dawkins get really hung up on semantics, and the rest of the culture is very sensitive to perceived slights against marginalized people.
Right now I believe there is an effort to get people in the west at each other's throats over ideas of gender. It's a relatively new concept for a lot of people, especially older people. This infighting serves to keep loosely assembled voting blocks from working together to stop fascism.
Never put your whole trust in one source. Read many authors, listen to your heart, and make up your own mind.
I think lots of the replies in this thread adequately addressed and clarified Dawkins' viewpoints. But on a broader scale, he is a human. Even if he *was* downright transphobic, he's still human, he's still fallible, and he can still have bad opinions or be objectively wrong on certain things. It's your job as a sentient adult to take in information from the world and parse it yourself. That means you can accept that, even if Dawkins was wrong about trans people, he can be right about theism/evolution/whatever. He is not simply another interchangeable deity that must be put on a pedestal and purported to be infallible.
Dawkins has never used any language like transgendered persons "are insane" where on earth did you get that.
You shouldn't base your entire personal belief system around the teaching of one individual. That's pretty much the same as religion. Richard Dawkins is not a religion. You can accept his statements on Christianity (provided you actually agree with them and they make sense to you) while not accepting his statements on transpeople. I'd advise against making Richard Dawkins, or anyone else, your sole authority on anything. Research multiple perspectives on everything and go with what makes sense to you. If you are trans, then you know that being trans is not a lie because you live it - it doesn't matter that someone you use a resource may disagree. (Also, as other commenters have pointed out, he seems to draw a distinction between the biology of being trans and the social aspect of being trans). As I'm sure Dawkins would agree, life is about research, multiple sources, skepticism and questioning. Do those things
All religions are lies. Being transgender is less of a lie as it is a mental illness.
I agree with him but it's your life, not his. You got to make your own decisions about life. Define yourself, don't let others do it for you
Sex is not gender. Sex is binary, and that's what he said. Gender is far more complex.
This sounds like the plantiest of plant stories.
The validity of Transness is not a question for biology, but for culture. Culture, also, happens to be subjective. Dawkins is not an expert on that. I say this as a microbiologist who respected Dawkins writing on both The Selfish Gene and The God Delusion but the man has absolutely fallen down a mysoginist rabbit hole since then. Even putting aside his opinions on trans issues, there have been numerous issues pointing to the fact that he doesn’t respect women in the sciences or elsewhere.
Believing that God exists does not mean that a god actually exists. It means that you believe God exists and others who know you believe that, as long as you don’t harass or belittle them, will typically respect what you believe and not belittle or attack you because of what you believe. A biological male that believes they are a woman does not mean that they are literally a woman. It means that they believe they are a woman, and typically most people will respect them enough to not belittle them or purposely use the wrong pronouns to hurt them. With that said, a Christian can’t expect others to play along with their beliefs just because they believe it. They can believe it, but if they ask an atheist if they believe it, or ask an atheist to join them in prayer, the atheist should not be expected to do so. The same for a person with gender dysphoria. They cannot expect a person to agree that they are a woman or force them to use their selected pronouns. A person is entitled to believe what they want, whether that hurts someone’s feelings or not. We can expect basic respect and dignity, and protection from harm or harassment due to our beliefs, but we can’t expect others to play along to appease our feelings.
There are some people genuinely claiming that biological sex is a social construct and I think he's responding to that. I can find examples of this if you want or you can, they're very available. The idea that someone can have a "female soul" or "male soul" seems extremely religious and nonsensical to me - I don't believe in an essential human soul/essence of any kind let alone one tied to concepts of gender - but I'm polite about it in the same way I'm polite about any other idea that seems religious to me. My guess is this is what he is taking a strong position about, because biological sex really does seem to be binary. There are simply two human gametes in my well-researched opinion and that is baseline sexual dimorphism - intersex conditions/DSDs are pretty inherently someone female or male that has an atypical phenotype. In terms of "am I really just a crazy person and my being transgender is all made up?" I would say the choices you've made are not made up, the experiences you have about gender are not made up, dysphoria is not made up. But to say those experiences and choices mean something fundamental about a concrete, real, "kind" of person seems made up to me. I don't think that's a demeaning thing to say and I certainly don't mean it to be. As in, "figuring out who I really am" meaning "discovering a real extant essence that I have" feels extremely made up to me, whereas "figuring out who I really am" meaning "figuring out how to live my own life" is not at all made up. When it comes to accepting who you are, I think you can look at this from an atheist point of view in a way - being gender nonconforming, even immensely gender nonconforming, doesn't mean you're not male or female. I really struggle to understand how man or woman could refer to anything but sex specifically from an atheist standpoint. Obviously I understand that both of those words have strong cultural connotations, and that someone female for example could align with male cultural connotations and stereotypes.
OP, this is a difficult thing to go through. i don't know much about dawkins, but you do have good ability to think clearly about things. this new development can make it really difficult emotionally. i hope you self-soothe when it gets hard, and find people who can be your support when the days are really hard
Stephen Woodford ("Rationality Rules") about Richard Dawkins: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x\_MpSyH5uEA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_MpSyH5uEA) In his interview, he did not criticize Helen Joyce and explicitly agreed with some points. She called gender-affirming care 'child abuse,' 'unethical medicine,' 'mass experimentation,' and a 'global scandal'. “And in the meantime, while we’re trying to get through to the decision-makers, we have to try to limit the harm and that means reducing or keeping down the number of people who transition,” Joyce said.“That’s for two reasons – one of them is that every one of those people is a person who’s been damaged. But the second one is every one of those people is basically, you know, a huge problem to a sane world.” She mentioned Rapid Onset of Gender Dysphoria (ROGD): >ROGD has not been recognized by any major professional association as a valid mental health diagnosis, and use of the term has been discouraged by professional and academic institutions due to a lack of reputable scientific evidence, major methodological issues in existing research, and likelihood to cause harm by stigmatizing gender-affirming care. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid-onset\_gender\_dysphoria\_controversy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid-onset_gender_dysphoria_controversy) What does Dawkins say about this? nothing. >Joyce immerses herself in another debunked theory: ‘Rapid Onset of Gender Dysphoria’ (ROGD) [https://criticallegalthinking.com/2021/10/08/review-of-helen-joyces-trans-when-ideology-meets-reality-london-oneworld-2021-pp-311-rp-16-99-and-kathleen-stocks-material-girls-why-reality-matters-for-feminism-london-fle/](https://criticallegalthinking.com/2021/10/08/review-of-helen-joyces-trans-when-ideology-meets-reality-london-oneworld-2021-pp-311-rp-16-99-and-kathleen-stocks-material-girls-why-reality-matters-for-feminism-london-fle/)
"Question everything" is the right attitude though.
Listen, transgender research is brand fucking new. If you think different, remember it was only a little over a century ago that we started evidence based practice and medical research. Due in large part to Hopkins. No doubt there is much more to learn, but the biggest part, that we need no research on, is that kindness and acceptance are paramount to anyone coming out as LGBT. Don’t worry about it. Just be kind.
It’s almost a hundred years old. Lost a few decades of research when the Nazis took over, killed the patrons of the institution, and burned it down.
People, including researchers and academics with PhDs, can be right about some things and wrong about others. That's why authorities don't matter in science, it's the evidence-based arguments that should speak for themselves. Dawkins can be right about christianity and evolution, and wrong about what it means to be transgender. He has research and evidence for the former, and personal opinions on the latter.
Every aspect of your body and mind has genetic components that control everything. Funny thing about genetics is that it's basically rolling a huge die that can influence how much or how little some particular trait is expressed. Where this really gets tricky is hormone expression and sensitivity. One of the first transgender I remember hearing about was a Olympic athlete (no not that one) who had every outward sign of being a woman but was a XY chromosome. If you want to understand more about how someone who is truly Born That Way is I have a perfect example. Blume didn't find out about her condition until puberty. She's smart and beautiful and surprisingly well adjusted. She's very open and honest with her situation and has posted lots of videos on YouTube talking about it. She does have a lot of other content on her channel but if you search by Popular you'll probably get mostly stuff talking about being intersex. [Blume Has Testicles in Her Stomach](https://youtube.com/shorts/g_cX5-qzQuc?si=ZtLip19-Fe6KKsGK)
People can be right about one thing and wrong about another. If being an atheist is about anything it's that no one source is the whole truth.
People can be very smart in one area, and very dumb in others. The position that Dawkins has made about trans people is not based on biology, but politics. It's not like he has a real scientific justification for what he is saying. The UK has developed an almost pathological hatred of transgender women. You can't let a single person/group's opinion about something to haunt you. No matter what decision you have anxiety about, there will always be someone who will think otherwise. You need to find strength in yourself and not rely on these opinions for validation.
NGL listening to Atheist figure heads is just as bad as listening to a religious figure. Your letting some random guy tell you how to live your life and what's important and generally shape your sense of identity and meaning. It's not somehow better because he doesn't justify it with God but instead whatever he justifies it with. Philosophy is dangerous and must be created for yourself individually not learned from one general source
I understand the heartbreak. Richard Dawkins is a biologist, but he doesn’t actually seem to have any background on gender and sexuality. His statements on Transgenderism seem more informed by his cultural views and pre-conceived biases than on his academic background. Consider this video by a Biologist with the appropriate expertise. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8QScpDGqwsQ I won’t affirm every pro-trans statement out there. The fact of the matter is that transsexuality deals with human complexity in a big way, and so things are never clear cut. Nonetheless, we have very strong evidence that transgenderism isn’t a lie or delusion. Richard Dawkins seems willing to just dismiss the evidence to support his view, which is a particular shame for someone who spends so much time combating that very tendency as it pertains to religion
Came here to recommend Sapolsky.
I would very much like to see those videos because each time it’s mentioned it’s always a big nothing burger. To sum it up it’s basically that he’s reminding the biological definition of gender, as a biologist, as a scientific fact (which it is). I do not think he’s criticizing or questioning gender dysphoria, I also seriously doubt he’s calling trans “mentally insane” at least not in the sense OP puts it (there a difference between calling a murderer “mentally insane” and someone with an anxiety disorder “mentally insane”).
Never ever base your worldview on someone else. No matter how much you respect someone they’ll inevitably do something disappointing. Dawkins unironically uses the term “wokeism” and calls it a religion, he’s not right about everything. No one is.
I’m completely baffled by such intelligent people not having an ounce of insight or understanding of trans people.
Remember the Republican presidential hopeful Ben Carson? He’s a celebrated neurosurgeon. He also once said that the pyramids of Egypt were grain silos. You can be smart about one thing and really dumb about another thing at the same time. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Being a famous evolutionary biologist doesn't mean he knows anything about trans people, psychology or mental health. Scientists can be just as much bigoted, anti-scientifically-thinking assholes as anyone else. All evidence points to trans people being real and that transitioning and acceptance is the most- and only-effective method of health care.
Check other comments here. They clearly quote him distinguishing sec and gender and accepting gender as valid and real. He generally says Trans women are not biologically born women (by body) and women by their definition (mind/identity) and we should respect that. (He does)
Crazy that you took what he said out of context and are now spiraling because of it. You had to have people in the comments pointing out the entire context. Why couldn’t you do that before you started freaking out? Why do you need people here to do the research for you? It’s just incredibly lazy and probably would have taken two minutes to research yourself. Especially being in the r/atheism subreddit where atheism revolves around evidence and science. It’s just so strange to get emotional so quickly. Maybe take it as a lesson to dig deeper in to things before posting it on here and before letting emotions take over.
People can be right about one thing and wrong about another. Einstein was a brilliant physicist, but I wouldn’t let him fly an airplane.
I thought he was a decent pilot. But ever since I flew Einstein Airlines, travel has become a nightmare... Just try crossing a border or going through airport security when you're younger than what the DOB on your passport says.