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New ‘New Atheist’ Cry: There Is No Trans
Yes, Dawkins did fall down the transphobia rabbit hole. QED.
Richard Dawkins, a biologist famous for his book The Selfish Gene (1976) and for his later collaboration with the New Atheists, made a transphobic tweet in April 2021. Consequently, the American Humanist Association revoked an award it had given him 25 years earlier. One might imagine there were other reasons; in any case, this bad tweet was the last straw.
As Dawkins has a large following of admirers, this event generated debate over whether what he’d said was actually transphobic, and if so, why.
This Was Exhausting
I was personally affected by this.
No, not because I’m a snowflake and the tweet made me melt. There are millions of transphobic tweets every day, and I rarely take them to heart.
The reason this particular incident hit home for me is that I had, a couple years earlier, made a large effort to network in-person with an international group of humanists and atheists. I had assumed that a secular group would be trans-inclusive or at least not outright transphobic. It hadn’t occurred to me to gauge the community sentiment.
Upon Dawkins’s tweet and the subsequent debate over the revocation of his award…
