The Dogma of Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins (Photo by Steve Jurvetson)

In the wake of Richard Dawkins leaving the Freedom From Religion Foundation’s Honorary Board in a huff, he has taken to publishing in the right-wing Spectator to explain why one can absolutely loathe transgender people for reasons completely unrelated to religion. He claims it’s about all about science, you see, without actually examining any of the historical, sociological, psychological, medical, or psychiatric literature surrounding trans people.

Instead, he resorts to straw men, stereotypes, and ad hominem attacks against an entire community of marginalized people, while insisting that there’s absolutely no bigotry involved.

His entire premise on why he’s against any accommodations in society for transgender people (including any form of legal recognition) is it’s simply enough that a man cannot become a woman and vice versa. Sex is binary, without exception. By his thinking, humans are bipedal by nature, and therefore supposed to walk, so why should we build wheelchair ramps? Bloody inconvenient waste of money by his thinking.

First, let’s dispense with the pretense that Dawkins holds trans people in anything but utter contempt, while also failing to know the first thing about the subject that he devoted 750 words to. He describes transgender people as a “modish absurdity” and “nonsense”. He states that “the trans-sexual bandwagon is a form of quasi-religious cult.” He scoffs at transgender identities having any validity, comparing them to the theistic concept of a “soul” and talking about being “born in the wrong body.” 

First, if Dawkins had so much as read a Wikipedia article, he’d know that gender-variant people who alter their bodies to match a gender identity have existed since the Kama Sutra was written at least 200 years BCE. There were the followers of Cybele. The Bible describes self-made eunuchs, and we know that the first libraries burned by the Nazis were full of research on trans people. Christine Jorgenson made headlines in 1952. I’m not sure what definition Dawkins is using, but “fads” usually don’t span 2300 years of history across cultures that have no contact with one another.

He also accuses transgender people of being a “faith system” because “the trans preacher posits some kind of hovering inner self.” First of all, I wish being transgender was a religion. Then we’d actually have some constitutionally enshrined civil rights, instead having conversations about when is it time to flee the country. Second, trans people one of the groups most likely to have no religion, or be atheists or agnostics.

Dawkins hand waves away such things as “facts” and data with the insistence that trans people believe “a man literally becomes a woman (or a woman a man)”. This is likely a reference to the slogan “trans women are women.” However, trans people don’t believe that we become identical to the gender with which we identify, but instead that we should be treated as this gender for nearly all legal and medical purposes, and exceptions should be very narrowly tailored. This latter, more accurate definition doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, much less fit on a poster at a rally. 

If trans people believed they experienced such a supernatural transubstantiation (pun intended), why would we need to put trans or cis in front of man or woman at all? Trans people are fully cognizant of their medical history and physiology, and the gender dysphoria that came with it.

Part of Dawkins scorn is that being trans is based on a feeling which cannot be quantified and is therefore worthless. His contempt stems from trans people not being able to just shake off their gender dysphoria and learn to love their bodies. There’s actually sciences about human feelings, and it encompasses psychology, psychology, biology, and neuroscience, and they all have decades of data  that say, yes, being trans is a real thing, and they’re much happier if they match their bodies to their mental self-image. Nor does he acknowledge that every attempt to make trans people accept their bodies as is, worked about as well trying to make gays love boobs.

Basically, Dawkins premise that trans people should just accept reality and intellectually stomp their dysphoria down is advocating for “stay in the closet and maybe it will go away if you think really hard that you’re not trans,” is absolutely indistinguishable from religious based conversion therapy. Which has zero evidence to support it. This makes it even more ridiculous when Dawkins claims to be on the side of science on this issue.

Dawkins rejects any and all evidence that contradicts his thoughts on trans people our of hand, though. “None of that undermines my conviction that what they believe about the nature of reality is nonsense.” He basically denies that people can have some sort of innate gender identity (despite the David Reimer debacle or experiments showing that gendered behaviors can be hard-wired). He denies that there have been people since the dawn of human history who are innately uncomfortable with their primary and secondary sex characteristics, along with assigned gender roles and stereotypes.

I don’t know about you, but taking a position and saying that no amount of evidence across a half dozen fields of study will ever convince you that you’re wrong seems, kind of like religious dogma and… you guessed it, unscientific.

Dawkins kind of gives away the game though when he declares that transgender people should not be recognized legally in any way because it violates the rules of the universe (as he sees them). The thing is, humanity is messy. There are always exceptions, and we make allowances for people with atypical physical or neurological development in every other area. Simply declaring transgender people are a fiction and eliminating all allowances for them in society doesn’t make them go away. It just makes them suffer. 

The European Court of Human Rights declared that the UK’s lack of allowances for trans people in the early 2000s was a violation of human rights, and that became the genesis of the Gender Recognition Act. What Dawkins desires is not only going back to a time before 2004, it’s following the lead of culturally and religiously conservative corrupt dictators Viktor Orban and Vladimir Putin, who have done exactly what Dawkins proposes should be done to transgender people.

“Ah, but…” Dawkins would say. “I’m doing it for scientific reasons, not religious or cultural reasons. So that makes it a good thing.” But, I’ve already demonstrated there’s no real science to Dawkins position, just dogma and a complete disdain for people getting the shit kicked out of them by theocratic fascists. It’s a bit like saying, “I’m nothing like Hitler and disagree with him about almost everything, but we just happen to agree on the need for a solution to the Jewish question. It’s a matter of science,” while quoting Hans Gunther as proof.

Yeah. That still doesn’t make you the good guy. Dawkins is advocating the legal, cultural, and medical eradication of a class of people who doesn’t really hurt (or even impact) him in any tangible way, he just thinks they don’t exist, and every government effort should be used to achieve that end.

There’s a very good reason why his humanitarian award was withdrawn.

Guest writer Eric Tannehill is a student & trans activist living in Montreal, Quebec, Canada