I have not been able to open this comment all day. I was in bed with exhaustion just thinking of it. I missed a day of work. I have finally opened this comment.

It is not the length of the exchange that tires me. It is the substance. Anti-transgender rhetoric is emotionally poisonous to me.

I transitioned gender in the 1990s. Yes, I am aware that there has been nasty anti-transgender rhetoric especially in the past five years. Generally, I wouldn't call it "dialogue." It is not transgender people's responsibility to respond to this rhetoric on its own terms as if it were offered in good faith, academic rigor, or genuine curiosity. It isn't. It's politically motivated, and it aims to hurt transgender people. Since I have known myself as transgender for a quarter-century of adult life, I have, along the way, learned some things about anti-transgender social forces, and thus I was able to assess Dawkins' tweet last April. I knew, if given the chance, he would side with the sort of manifesto he did sign several months later. Essentially, I predicted this outcome. His leanings regarding transgender people, which are more plainly visible today, are not a surprise to me. I tried to explain it in this article. I tried to warn people, in case a reader was more naive on this issue and really didn't see it but might be ready to see it.

You may not like my writing style, but consider that trans people have certain perspectives and that we see things a cisgender person may be less likely to see. If you stop trying to judge and advise the way we communicate when we are reporting bullying or discussing assaults on our own identities and communities, you can just listen and learn something. Maybe we are communicating in a way that is specifically trans and maybe that is OK. We don't actually have to speak in ways that please cis people, especially when we are talking about being trans. If cis people can't listen to us as trans people, then they aren't allies.

Dawkins knows what he's doing. He means exactly what he says. There isn't some mystery behind it. He's ramping up the directness and harmfulness, like everyone else who heads down the rabbit hole. He's doing it on purpose. This is not a vilification of him. I'm not trying to cast a Disney-villain aura around him. I'm not attributing things to him beyond the specific thing he is doing. It is, more simply, a statement of fact. I am observing the bad thing he is doing. He is anti-transgender. I would be faking naïveté and leaving myself vulnerable to further injury if I pretended that Dawkins doesn't know he's trolling. You don't need to worry about his feelings. He isn't actually fragile and won't break. If he can dish out misinformation, he must handle people calling him out for doing that.

If he actually wanted to learn, he could buy any educational material, hire any private tutor, convoke any symposium, as he has access to prestigious universities and he personally is a millionaire. Unfortunately, he only wants to be an internet troll.

Anti-transgender rhetoric is calculated to hurt trans people. I've seen countless tweets like his. They're not original. It's from an anti-transgender playbook. Please stop defending his use of this rhetoric. He doesn't deserve your defense and he doesn't need your support. Trans people, who are sitting here existing and did not initiate this trolling, deserve and need your support. If you are going to prioritize anyone's feelings here, why not the feelings of trans people? Dawkins is not having his healthcare and identity documents threatened because of his gender. Yet he's encouraging narratives that cause this harm to be done to trans people. He's not doing it out of any sort of kindness, nor from any real knowledge base about who and what transgender people are. I don't understand your interest in defending his speech and his motives. I am getting that you think there is an intellectual argument somewhere buried in the tweet thread, but there is no "there" there.

Please go find an article that Dawkins wrote and send him a long comment about why he wrote his article wrong and how he could write it better. Tell him how to argue better, if you think he can, or how to be a better ally, if you think he is capable of being one at all.

Or, if you care about transgender people's rights, dignity, and welfare, you could write your own article saying so. Why not? It's someone's ethical responsibility to do so, right? That would be good work.

If, on the other hand, you do not have a knowledge base about transgender people other than what anti-transgender people have been tweeting lately, and if you don't actually believe that we are beautiful and that we have equal dignity as human beings and that we are owed respect and inclusion, then please do not write any articles about us.