The fundamental problem Dawkins is struggling with is that he is asking for reasoned disagreement on Twitter, which is well-known for a desert of reason. If he truly desires thoughtful discussion, he needs to do it with real people in the real world.<p>And that's so obvious that I begin to wonder if he's sincere, or if he's just stirring up shit to capture people's attention.
Emotionally charged topics shouldn’t be avoided, but we should all strive to have rational and compassionate conversations about such things.<p>I always like to introduce people to this rules of civil conversation during such exchanges.<p><a href="https://therulesofcivilconversation.org/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://therulesofcivilconversation.org/</a><p>Equally helpful to maintain conversations that are positive is to check out own biases and fallacies:<p><a href="https://yourbias.is/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://yourbias.is/</a><p><a href="https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/</a>
Reading this, it struck me how the dynamics of the current 'cancel culture' or whatever resemble those of the traditional religious institutions Dawkins has previously critiqued. Both, at their extremes, exhibit an intolerance to differing viewpoints as a threat to their literal existence. Both can become insular, shutting out any deviation from the 'accepted' narrative, and this poses a real threat to free thought and inquiry.
It's really a shame Dawkins hasn't dipped his toe into social epistemology. It's very clear that this is a grounding issue that's highlighting that different categories have different grounding rules and that within categories, individuals have different grounding rules. Furthermore, grounding rules have cultural-geofraphic territories and change over time.<p>It's how I can get a new job and call myself a Data Scientist, but as Rachel Dolezal is mentioned in the article, cannot alter her appearance and be Black. The categories are simply grounded in different things.<p>Ásta Kristjana Sveinsdóttir, does a phenomenal job at describing this principle in Categories We Live By. It's a plus that it's both fairly short and approachable.
Has Dawkins sat down with numerous trans people to listen to their stories and perspectives... and why his actions and words are offensive? Of course, offensive doesn't mean he has to pull back or go a different route. But sometimes, our choice of words causes us to have social repercussions. It certainly has me throughout my life. Often, I can repair those damaged relationships by listening, learning, and growing - sometimes, I cannot. Isn't this part of what it means to live in a society that is free and contested, where folks can push and pull in various directions? I just don't get this article. Is he a victim? Or what? What does he want us to do? Not criticize or complain about his dumb tweets?
Dawkins interview with Helen Joyce, author of Trans: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hu72Lu5FqE4">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hu72Lu5FqE4</a>
Maybe trans people are tired of having their existence debated or being treated as a problem to solve (often in an unnuanced way that tries to simplify trans people in exactly the ways we are pushing back against).
> 1984’s Appendix lays out the principles of Newspeak, the nascent language of Orwell’s dark dystopia. Newspeak was designed to make unorthodox thoughts impossible. There would be no words to express them.<p>> The Times (January 18) reported that “a transgender woman has denied raping two women with her penis”. If “with her penis” is not quite 2+2= 5, it’s getting close. 2+2= 4.5?<p>It's so curious that Dawkins, of all people, seems to be complaining that unorthodox thought -- that is to say, a rejection of traditional religious doctrine -- is expressible in the English language.
Love to see articles simultaneously attacking trans athletes for being taller, and attacking the self-determination and gender exploration which would allow trans people to avoid the natal puberty causing them to suffer intense physical dysphoria (including shape, muscle mass, and height), and struggle to pass as their preferred appearance to themselves and others.
The "accept our shaky premise or else" crowd is annoying. The intimidation has backfired. The first big public controversy for transgender bathroom rights was in 2016. right before the US presidential election,[1] and may have pushed Trump over the top and into the White House.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2016/05/timeline-bathroom-wars/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2016/05/timeline-bath...</a>
I agree with a bunch of what's said at the beginning of this. Dialog is the way, cancelling is not. But then he started to lose me:<p>> the biological fact that our sex is determined at conception by an X or a Y sperm.<p>Ever heard of people who are intersex?
Given the diversity of the human condition that some people are born feeling not like the sex of their body at birth does not seem far-fetched to me.<p>> What I didn’t know, and learned from Joyce in our interview, is that small children are being taught, using a series of colourful little books and videos, that their “assigned” sex is just a doctor’s best guess, looking at them when they were born.<p>Is this is actually happening on a significant scale? All that I have ever seen were books for children that say, it's ok if you feel different and not a single one that said you will be better if you are different.
I am disappointed by the absolute paucity of reasoned discourse in this comment thread so far. All I have witnessed are lazy dismissals and thought-terminating cliches [0] without anyone actually engaging with the substance of the article.<p>Recalling the HN guidelines:<p>> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.<p>I expect Dawkins has run into quite a bit of the same mode of equivocation and redefinitions of terms he writes of, when he went around striking down anti-scientific Creationist arguments such as "evolution is just a theory." A Creationist would parrot this line, thinking that "evolution is just a guess." A scientist understands this to mean, "a falsifiable hypothesis verified through empirical evidence and experiment."<p>It's worth taking a look at what Frege had to say with respect to words, their meanings, and what they can refer to [1]:<p>> It might perhaps be said: Just as one man connects this idea, and another that idea, with the same word, so also one man can associate this sense and another that sense.<p>Hence the necessity for interlocutors to "come to terms" on what exactly they mean by stating their definitions clearly before there is any hope of rational discussion.<p>This is rapidly becoming more and more difficult, as old words with a long history of usage such as "gender" are being appropriated to mean, and refer to, things quite different from the original senses and references of those terms.<p>[0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_clich%C3%A9" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_clich%C3%A...</a><p>[1] <a href="http://www.scu.edu.tw/philos/98class/Peng/05.pdf" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://www.scu.edu.tw/philos/98class/Peng/05.pdf</a>
> But shouldn’t we just indulge the harmless whims of an oppressed minority? Maybe, were it not for a strain of aggressive bossiness which insists, not so very harmlessly and not sounding very oppressed, that the rest of us must humour those whims and join in.<p>Goodness, what a whine. If you’re not a person who is directly confronted with this, why are you throwing yourself into this debate? The only reason to enforce your idea of a person’s gender over their own view of it is because you’re a jerk. It’s that simple. Stop being a jerk.