British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins has declared that “trans women are men,” and that transgender ideology is part of a movement to undermine biological truth.
At the launch of his new book, The War on Science, leading atheist and emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford, Dawkins decried the infiltration of postmodernism and transgenderism into the halls of academia.
“Both politics and personal feelings don’t impinge scientific truths and that needs to be clearly understood. I feel very strongly about the subversion of scientific truth,” he told The Telegraph.
“I think part of what’s happened is the move of academia towards postmodernism, which is pernicious, and probably does account for the current vogue for the nonsense lie that sex is a spectrum.”
And Dawkins is not alone in his “Eureka” moment. Late last year, three of the world’s most prominent atheists abruptly resigned their honorary board positions with the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF), an American non-profit organization founded in 1978 to advocate for atheists and agnostics, championing “separation of church and state.” Dawkins was among those stepping down along with evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne and Harvard cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker — all citing the ideological capture of the organization by the transgender movement.
Jerry Coyne, a professor emeritus with the University of Chicago, was first. On December 26th, Coyne responded to a column by Kat Grant titled “What is a Woman?” in which Grant concluded, with no small degree of circular reasoning: “A woman is whoever she says she is.” In a response titled “Biology is not bigotry” on FRF’s Freethought Now!, Coyne asserted that contrary to Grant’s claims, “the biological definition of ‘woman’ [is] based on gamete type.”
Trans activists “came” for FFRF with a vengeance, and Coyne’s column was pulled the following day, accompanied by what few would call an apology titled “Freedom From Religion Foundation supports LGBTQIA-plus rights.”
Steven Pinker concurred with Coyne, submitting his own resignation almost simultaneously, saying FRFF has become “the imposer of a new religion, complete with dogma, blasphemy, and heretics.”
Richard Dawkins followed his colleagues commenting in The Telegraph, “There’s this post-modern hubris which presumptuously and falsely dismisses science as a social construct, the human conceit here is the idea that personal feelings can change reality.”
Dawkins continued, “I draw the line at the belligerent slogan ‘trans women are women’ because it is scientifically false…It logically entails the right to enter women’s sporting events, women’s changing rooms, women’s prisons and so on.”
While the “scientist-trans genderist” parry-passé fencing is amusing, it is rather, what is going on in Britain that is noteworthy. The transgender siege appears to be lifting; its effectiveness is clearly on the wane – in spite of Sir Keir’s reprehensible governance – reason and science prevail in some quarters.
The UK Supreme Court has issued a definitive ruling, finding that “the concept of sex is binary, a person is either a woman or a man.”
The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) later commented on the court’s ruling clarifying that public-facing spaces, such as hospitals, restaurants, and shops, should not allow biological males into female-only spaces, regardless of whether they have a so-called “gender transition certificate.”
The ruling from the Supreme Court came in the wake of a major report from leading British pediatrician Dr. Hilary Cass, which found that “gender affirming care” for children, such as the use of puberty-blocking drugs, was built on “shaky foundations.”
Let us hope this modicum of reason catches hold on this side of the Atlantic.
It has been fascinating to watch the culture wars come to the atheist community. Dawkins has been tangling with trans activists for several years. In January 2024, he vehemently responded to an article defending gender ideology, stating: “This ridiculous article (shame on the once-great Scientific American) ignorantly misunderstands the nature of the sex binary…Sex is not defined by chromosomes, nor by anatomy, nor by psychology or sociology, nor by personal inclination, nor by ‘assignment at birth’, but by gamete type.”
The American Humanist Association had already withdrawn Dawkin’s “Humanist of the Year” award in 2021. The organization justified the move based on the biologist’s “history of making statements that use the guise of scientific discourse to demean marginalized groups, an approach antithetical to humanist values.”
While I have to admit, there is more than a tinge of schadenfreude in watching the anti-theists realize that the atheist “apocalypse” they are experiencing is just as dogmatic as the religions they disparage, it should be noted that the notion of “humanist values” has always been nebulous at best. Science endeavors to demonstrate what is; the idea of a godless ethics poses a wholly other concern; Dawkins, Coyne, and Pinker have been at the forefront of championing nothing short of repulsive applications of their atheism. In 2014, Dawkins responded to a woman asking about a prenatal Down syndrome diagnosis by telling her to: “Abort it and try again. It would be immoral to bring it into the world if you have the choice.”
Stephen Pinker has gone further, writing in the New York Times that laws against infanticide are difficult to defend. According to Pinker, unborn children don’t possess any more morally significant traits “than mice do.” Jerry Coyne is on record asserting that residual Christianity has prevented the legalization of “the euthanasia of newborns, who have no ability or faculties to decide whether to end their lives,” and stated that although “the topic seems verboten now, I believe some day the practice will be widespread, and it will be for the better.”
Coyne adds, “If we euthanize cats and dogs, why not babies?”
Coyne, Pinker, and Dawkins are to be commended (that may be too affirming) for their defense of the biology against the transgender assault on scientific truth. But let’s be clear: this trio have long championed a post-Christian society that has made the transgender movement not just possible, but perhaps even inevitable. Before we become too sanguine over the “conscience” of these “defenders of truth,” we should recognize that this atheist set and their “ethics” are every bit as unpalatable as those they now assail.
