Jerry Coyne, Steven Pinker, and Richard Dawkins are big mad that FFRF removed an anti-trans article from their website
Got to disagree: this is a purity spiral. Especially for an organization that represents freethought, ending debate by shutting it down is unskilled. Only the weakest thinkers defend ideas that way. It’s better to defeat a bad argument with a better argument, prevail truth over falsehoods, & win opponents over. Better to fight bad ideas with better ideas. It’s okay to be wrong.
The controversial article begins from the uncontroversial thesis that “sex, a biological feature” differs from “gender, the sex role one assumes in society”, and that Grant errs in arguing sex can’t be defined. The article as written doesn’t vilify transgender people. His argument, however, draws conclusions incorrectly
- Transgender women should not serve as rape counselors and workers in battered women’s shelters
- Transgender women should not be placed in a women’s prison.
because they are biological males & biological males have higher rates of sexual violence. He also argued that transgender women commit sexual offences at a greater rate based on prison populations.
Countering the argument should have been easy. I would think any qualified person for the role (including biological males) could perform duties in a battered women’s shelter. I’m not sure placing nonviolent transgender offenders in women’s prison would be a problem. (Really, I think the problems inmates suffer in US prisons have more to do with shitty US practices complicit with inmate abuses: other countries have more civilized prisons that stress rehabilitation.) Prison populations are insufficient & unrepresentative of the general population, so that sexual offence rate argument is clearly a fallacy (of incomplete evidence).
His remaining conclusion “Transgender women should not compete athletically against biological women” is harder to deny: sports competitions are separated by sex due to differing advantages of biological sex traits. Transgender athletes who complete transition before puberty mostly lack these advantages, and sports regulations attempt to address this to some extent.
Grant ultimately did raise some good points despite a fatuous argument about biology leading there. Coyne corrected that then drew some wrong conclusions. Healthier debate could have settled differences closer to the truth.
Though I can understand FFRF’s fear to lose donor support, their lack of faith that freethought (rejection of authority & dogmatism) will prevail & settle the truth troubles me. Ceding their values without trying is their loss.
Richard Dawkins actively avoids talking to people who don’t share his views on this matter. He has taken up an uneducated, dogmatic, and pseudoscientific position on gender, and for years now has refused to engage with new information that might clash with his strongly held but poorly founded convictions.
He has lost the plot and joined the evangelical right-wing on this front in the culture war.
I was struggling to grasp your point’s connection to mine until I remembered people read headlines without reading content, assessing arguments, checking primary sources. Friendly Atheist’s post is about people leaving FFRF in response to FFRF removing an unpopular article in response to pressure. Were their reasons true & do they justify their response?
They stated their reasons in the quoted excerpts & linked sources. We don’t need to know who they are to evaluate those reasons. Their reasons appear to be that
- FFRF removed the article due to disagreement.
- Removing the article suppresses disagreement.
- By suppressing disagreement, the organization fails to defend its foundational value: freethought.
Seem true on all counts.
Do the reasons justify the response? Does an organization’s failure to defend freethought justify leaving an organization that claims to defend it? I would think so.
Would this argument justify absolutely anyone (even Dawkins) to leave FFRF? That’s the beauty of a sound argument: who you are doesn’t matter.
Yours is the argument for never ending argument, leaving trans people’s existence and rights “up for debate” throughout their entire lives and until the end of time.
Allowing open, eternal debate over people’s lives and rights is morally the same as continuing the ‘debate’ over whether blacks are more or less than 3/5 human.
What is the alternative? Say a matter once proclaimed settled by someone can never be addressed again by anyone?
Nice to see people on Lemmy realizing what a bigoted shithead Dawkins is. I couldn’t convince very many people of that on r/atheism.
I’ve known Dawkins was a shithead for a while, but somehow I’ve missed Pinker being one as well. The fact they are trying to get help from JK Rowling shows they are much bigger pieces of shit than I originally thought.
I’ve donated to the FFRF for a while. I’ll have to wait and see how this shakes out.
Pinker keeps a lower profile, but there have been a lot of questionable things he’s said in the past.
Oh god, he seems to be milling about the Longtermism crowd, which believes that future (potential) people have as many rights as current people, so any theoretical gains that effect future people are worth doing, even at the expense of current ones,
Billionaires and powerful political people all are jumping on that bullshit.
Ick. That one is new to me. But it makes a lot of sense.
Why is there a church like organisation for Atheists? And Darwin quitting because he disagrees with the gospel is hillarious.
The same reason every other minority advocacy group exists: to coordinate pooling resources to protect that minority’s members from persecution.
Of course in the case of atheists, that persecution isn’t as bad as for other minority groups in the US, but it does exist: there is propaganda saying that atheists can’t be moral and other shit like this that can seriously affect your life.
So optimally that’s what the organization would fight. I know nothing about them, so I don’t know where the “church-likeness” comes from that you mentioned. Care to substantiate that?
Well, FFRF runs programs actively protects Clergymen and women attempting to leave their faiths, and I can guarantee you those particular people are heavily persecuted. Especially former Mormons.
