Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene and The God Delusion, which argued that belief in a non-existent personal god amounts to a delusion, now has something in common with conservative Christians. He has been cancelled.
Dawkins was a keynote speaker at the Global Atheist Conference in Melbourne in 2012 and crossed swords with Cardinal George Pell on QandA.
Richard Dawkins was unafraid to take on the “gotcha” question “what is a Woman” for The New Statesman, a venerable UK magazine that;’s somewhat of a house organ for the British Labour Party.
Drawing on his background as an evolutionary biologist Dawkins writes, “Each body cell of a normal human has 46 chromosomes, 23 from each parent. Among these are two sex chromosomes, called X or Y, one from each parent. Females have two Xs, males one X and one Y. Any mammal with a Y chromosome will develop as a male. When a male makes sperm (“haploid”, having only one set of 23 chromosomes), 50 per cent of them are Y sperm, destined to beget sons, and 50 per cent are X sperm, which make daughters. Birds and butterflies have a similar system, but the other way around. It is females that have XY, except that they’re called ZW. In flies, the equivalent of the Y chromosome is a zero. If a fly has two sex chromosomes she’s female. A fly with only one sex chromosome is male. Many reptiles use temperature instead of chromosomes. Turtles that are incubated below 27.7°C develop as male, warmer eggs as female.”
On the new use of the word “gender,” he writes somewhat sarcastically sarcastically “High priests of postmodernism teach that lived experience and feelings trump science (which is just the mythology of a tribe of oppressive colonialists). Catholic (but not Protestant) theologians declare that consecrated wine actually becomes the blood of Christ. The dilute alcohol solution that remains in the chalice is but an Aristotelian “accidental”. The “whole substance” (hence the word “transubstantiation”) is divine blood in true reality. In the new religion of transsexual transubstantiation, a “woman’s penis” is just an “accidental”, a mere social construct. In “whole substance” she is a woman. A trans-substantiated woman.”
However, he wants people experiencing gender dysphoria to be treated well. “Many of us know people who choose to identify with the sex opposite to their biological reality. It is polite and friendly to call them by the name and pronouns that they prefer. They have a right to that respect and sympathy. Their militantly vocal supporters do not have a right to commandeer our words and impose idiosyncratic redefinitions on the rest of us. You have a right to your private lexicon, but you are not entitled to insist that we change our language to suit your whim. And you absolutely have no right to bully and intimidate those who follow common usage and biological reality in their usage of “woman” as honoured descriptor for half the population. A woman is an adult human female, free of Y chromosomes.”
An opinion piece, “Richard Dawkins has abandoned science to justify his transphobia,” in Religion News Service (RNS), noted that the American Humanist Society gave Dawkins their 1996 Humanist of the Year award, only to rescind it in 2021, as he expressed his views on gender. Hemant Mehta, host of the Friendly Atheist podcast who authored the RNS piece, says he no longer recommends Dawkin’s books on evolution. “It’s also maddening because Dawkins remains the go-to atheist for reporters and media outlets. There are more atheists who are LGBTQ, women and people of color than ever before, yet it’s Dawkins who often takes center stage whenever there are public conversations about atheism. That’s not his fault, of course: He literally wrote the most popular book on the subject. But it’s irresponsible to use his platforms to spread ignorance on a topic that critics have repeatedly said he doesn’t understand and often gets flat-out wrong.”
The Friendly Atheist attacks Dawkins for noting but “casually dismissing” intersex variation. He doesn’t. Here’s what Dawkins notes: “Babies can be born with ambiguous genitalia. These cases are rare. The highest estimate, 1.7 per cent of the population, comes from the US biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling. But she inflated her estimate hugely by including Klinefelter and Turner syndromes, neither of which are true intersexes. Klinefelter individuals have an extra X chromosome (XXY) but their Y chromosome ensures that they are obvious males, producing microgametes, albeit from reduced testes. Turner individuals are unambiguous females with no Y chromosome and only one (functioning) X chromosome. They have a vagina and uterus, and their ovaries, if any, are non-functional. Obviously, Klinefelter (always male) and Turner (always female) individuals must be eliminated from counts of intersexes, in which case Fausto-Sterling’s estimate shrinks from 1.7 per cent to less than 0.02 per cent. Genuine intersexes are way too rare to challenge the statement that sex is binary. There are two sexes in mammals, and that’s that.”
The Southern Baptist theologian and daily podcaster Albert Mohler featured the Dawkins story this week, alerting The Other Cheek and expressing the view that “the transgender revolution, here’s the stunning thing, has been more powerful than the scientific revolution in terms of pushing its ideology.”
The jury might still be out for that. But he makes this acute observation.
“So as Christians, let’s ask ourselves the question, “Why would that be so?” And I think the easy answer we have to come to is this; it’s a very clear answer. When it comes to matters of sex, sexuality, and personal identity, people are far less interested in science than they are in just receiving and demanding affirmation.”