One of the major problems in your response is that you acknowledge that Dawkins is generally an insensitive person, and yet it is my obligation to be (emotionally? intellectually?) charitable toward Dawkins. I agree that, generally, when faced with an adversary, it can be helpful not to sink to their level and instead to take the high road. However, being “charitable” is a bit different. Being charitable usually means assuming (given a lack of evidence to the contrary) that someone's intentions are benign and that their ideas are consistent and meaningful. It means assuming the best possible version of them. This is difficult with Dawkins in this context. Consider: You acknowledge that Dawkins is an insensitive person (to everyone, which includes trans people). So exactly what charitable assumptions should I make here? I said his tweet was rude. He knows he’s a rude person; you know he’s a rude person; everyone knows he’s a rude person. No one is shocked here by the revelation that Dawkins might make a rude tweet. The point of the article was not to misportray or antagonize Dawkins—it is to sway people, specifically those inclined to idolize Dawkins and to imitate his speech, that he is being insensitive on this particular point and that they should not imitate his language on this particular point because his point is intentionally, consciously anti-transgender.

It feels contradictory for you to defend the substance of Dawkin’s particular statements on this issue (maybe his comments about transgender people are acceptable? is that where you're going with it?) and simultaneously to defend him as deserving to be let off the hook because he is insensitive toward everyone. His tweets about transgender people are specifically insensitive toward transgender people. Can we agree on that? Or no?

A — I don’t understand your comment that “Dawkins can neither humor nor respect” but can only “be courteous in this regard”. I don’t know if you’re making a comment about Dawkins’ personal inability to respect anybody or if you’re saying there’s no point in asking him to deeply respect trans people specifically. Either way, I don’t care. People in general should respect trans people. If Dawkins can’t, well, that reflects poorly on him. I do not imagine I can change Dawkins, and I am not trying to do so. I am arguing that everyone else should learn to recognize the disrespect in his comment so that they do not reproduce this particular disrespect when they speak.

B — Of course words have shared meanings. And people argue over those meanings—in isolation and even more so when the word is used within a full sentence and in a social context. Dawkins used the word “courtesy” in a sentence; someone explained to him why his sentence was offensive to them; Dawkins replied “the implication you suggest is…[very far] from my intention", and he suggested there was really no argument to be had since he speaks English well. So, yes, he did claim that his intent is what matters, and he did behave as though his interpretation of the English language is the only one that matters, as he was not curious or caring about anyone else’s interpretation and he did not accept feedback nor engage in open-minded debate. https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/658635505475715073

(You said “he certainly didn’t claim that his intent is what matters.”)

C — A corporate HR’s expectation that a worker “respect” their coworkers is nothing like a loyalty oath or a McCarthyist inquisition. First of all, because respect is actually a good thing to have, and McCarthyism isn’t about respect for differences, so I find no morally emotional resonance in that analogy. More to your point, when considering matters of respect, it seems hard to separate “belief” from “a way of acting.” If you act as if you respect someone but you don’t truly respect them in your true beliefs, you have entered the territory of “courtesy,” and this falls short of what is generally desired (interpersonally, socially, ethically, and professionally) when we need to interact with someone. Mere courtesy might suffice if your job is a cashier and you only have to smile at the customer, but in other careers it simply isn’t sufficient. It is a hypothetical anyway because, in this example, we don't have the exact job and context. (Dawkins tweeted a paywalled article which might mention a specific job type, but I don't have access to this article, most people arguing about the general idea didn't have access to the article either, and some job type that might be mentioned in some article really isn't the point here.) https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/132523127346432409 Right here, at this point in this argument, personally, I am not worried about a hypothetical workplace scenario. I am more concerned with the idea that, in general, we can skate through life faking respect for other people, and that—when our veneer of fakeness is so thin that others see through it, are offended by it, and call us out on it—it’s OK if we just smirk at others and reaffirm that our fakeness is enough. Heck, some of us (case in point: Richard Dawkins) get away outright bragging about how we fake respect and how we think that's enough. This is not about certain transgender people who are "thought-policing". This is about certain cisgender people who are being smarmy and two-faced and both-sidesing in a way that is obvious to others. It is about those cisgender people bragging about their false courtesy and their open hostility.

D – The points re: the Dolezal tweet:

https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/1380812852055973888

1–2. I see no evidence in Dawkins’ tweet that he was using the verb “identify” to mean outward presentation/declaration rather than inner feelings/resolve. Neither did my response in my article's point #1 depend on either interpretation. My response in #1 stands even if we are talking about outward behavior. So, I don’t believe I have “mischaracterize[d]” Dawkins’ statement. My response in #2 did use the term "gender identity" and referred to the "nature vs. nature" debates, and thus it leaned toward the interpretation of “identity” as feelings, not presentation. However, please note my exact words. I wrote that “many people would want to correct him” on this point. The section in general is explaining what is “wrong” with Dawkins' tweet, and part of the problem with his tweet is that he is speaking to an audience of 3 million followers, "many" of whom indeed would be confused by his use of the word “identity,” which (as you pointed out) has at least two meanings. He made an ambiguous statement to a large audience; many of them would want to correct him; that is something wrong with his tweet. His tweet is badly phrased. It is badly presented. He has badly identified his meaning—here, I'm using your preferred definition of "identify"—to others. I did not specify how I, personally, interpret that statement, because I really don’t know what Dawkins thought he meant by that verb, and if you forced me to decide I’d have to flip a coin, and my coin-flip ultimately doesn’t matter. My point is, he should stop making bad tweets. Since, as you point out, it’s apparently hard to do whatever he’s doing “within a tweet’s length,” he could….just stop tweeting. He should.

Also, for the record, he doesn’t believe that anyone can be transgender based on their inner feelings, either. His position is about inner feelings as well as outward presentation. This information wasn’t available at the time I wrote the article. It came out two months ago when Dawkins tweeted: “Please sign the Declaration on Women’s Sex-based Rights. I have just done so.”

https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/1465324057277173772

This declaration said “there is no objective scientific evidence” that anyone is “born ‘transgender’” or that children can be said to have “innate ‘gender identities’.”

https://womensdeclaration.com/en/declaration-womens-sex-based-rights-full-text/

Given this additional information, one might suppose that his April 2021 tweet in which he said “some men choose to identify as women, and some women choose to identify as men” indeed referred to internal identity as a choice. There was no reason for anyone to interpret it otherwise—and, with this new information bolstering that interpretation, in retrospect, the “many people [who] would want to correct him” weren't wrong.

The purpose of the declaration, by the way, was not merely to make a comment saying that no one is really transgender on the inside. The purpose of the declaration is to restrict trans people’s access to healthcare, legal documents, and nondiscrimination protections.

https://sandraduffy.wordpress.com/2021/10/26/an-international-human-rights-law-analysis-of-the-whrc-declaration/

3–5. There IS ambiguity in his use of the word “literally”, for the reasons I explained in my article. Since he did not provide his definition of what it means “to be a woman” or “to be a man,” we do not know what it means (in his view) to “literally” be that gender, and why “identify[ing]” as that gender (again, whatever “identify” means) is an insufficient qualification.

8. My article does not vilify Dawkins. I described his tweet as “rude,” “bad,” and “bullying,” and I gave reasons. I criticized his words; that is not the same as “vilifying” him. If he is too fragile to hear criticism of his words—or if people who feel some kind of kinship with Dawkins in this matter feel that they are too fragile to hear criticism of Dawkins—that is their emotional limitation. This limitation—the inability to hear and and process criticism—is often called “fragility.” I discussed it in this very same article. Also: I said that an anti-transgender person could, hypothetically, lose their job “depending on how obvious and severe their bigotry is.” Please try to imagine how I was mapping out my hypothetical here. If a transgender customer walks into a coffeeshop and the barista yells a slur and spits on the customer, the barista might be fired. That would be an appropriate consequence. I don’t care whether the firing of this hypothetical barista is said to be “vilifying” the barista—maybe, as "vilification" is a subjective assessment. Nor do I care whether the consequence for this barista was "grave"—maybe the income loss will hurt, but maybe they can get a new and better job tomorrow. What's important is that the barista has been reasonably criticized and has faced an appropriate consequence. (If someone behaves like a villain, maybe they deserve to be vilified? If they treat someone else in a gravely offensive way, maybe they deserve to have grave consequences?) In my article, I was saying that Dawkins, by talking about people like him possibly being “vilified” for expressing anti-transgender sentiments, was being overdramatic and fragile and was launching an indirect passive-aggressive attack on his own victims, when he could instead have acknowledged that some people are indeed reasonably criticized for their words and that they face proportionate consequences for their offenses. By making a general assertion that anti-transgender people are unfairly vilified, he is being hostile and unhelpful.

E — My statement “Trans people are trying to survive” (as well as the brief paragraph below it) in no way implies that Richard Dawkins is trying to incite the murder of trans people. (You think I was “spectacularly ungenerous” towards Dawkins because I allegedly misinterpreted his motive? I could easily say you are “spectacularly ungenerous” toward me for attributing a meaning to me that is nowhere to be found in my actual words. I did not attribute any such motive to Dawkins.) I included that paragraph near the end of the article as a moral/attentional redirect, essentially to say, Stop paying attention to Dawkins' internet trolling, start caring about the difficulties that trans people face, and do something productive to help them, or at least stop tweeting unhelpful things. Here is the meaning of that paragraph, as I meant it to be received, given life context that I thought was obvious: Trans people face specific hardships. When someone is not believed to be the gender they say they are and when they are otherwise not respected in society, they may have trouble with their legal IDs, healthcare access, jobs, romances, and family life, and this makes it harder for them to survive. They may have trouble earning enough money. If they end up depending on a manipulative person or if they are living on the street, they are at higher risk for suffering violence. So, when a cisgender academic like Dawkins tweets about how trans people aren’t what they say they are, it contributes to this social marginalization, which in turn makes trans people's survival harder. As I said, while Dawkins may think it’s an amusing pseudo-intellectual exercise to tweet about trans people, “survival is not an academic exercise” for the trans people themselves.

Trans Day of Remembrance counts the numbers of murdered transgender people worldwide. For reasons I think are obvious, these are difficult stats for organizations to obtain and compile. (Trans people are not always out as trans; sometimes they are out, but they do not "transition" in a way that causes others to acknowledge their transness; and when they are dead, they cannot advocate for their gender identities. Their families, local police, and local newspapers may not recognize them as transgender. Their murders may not get reported to Trans Day of Remembrance.) I mentioned these numbers briefly, not because I felt the need to argue specifically that that trans people are being murdered at a rate higher than the general population, but rather to point out that organizations are reporting more murders of trans people each year. Maybe their reporting is simply getting better? It doesn't matter. This is not a data-based argument. This is a moral redirect that cisgender people collectively must stop making snarky trolling statements about transgender people because transgender people are sometimes murdered not incidentally while being trans but sometimes as an indirect result of discrimination or even as a hate crime simply for being trans and this has happened more than once. By implication: I would like everyone to be part of the solution instead of part of the problem. Saying that transgender people aren’t the gender they say they are is being part of the problem. Brazil is relevant here in part because their president Bolsonaro is politically similar to Trump, and I would like people to think qualitatively (if not quantitatively) about that, because homophobia/transphobia in Brazil today is related to homophobia/transphobia in the United States. Mexico is relevant because it borders on the United States and people might like to broaden their thinking a little bit about how those two countries are related. Someone with 3 million Twitter followers does need to think about the political movements and cultural leanings to which he lends his solidarity.

Dawkins is not among trans people’s “natural allies,” nope. As I mentioned above, two months ago he signed an anti-transgender declaration and encouraged his 3 million Twitter followers to sign it. Is it somehow transgender people’s fault that Dawkins is anti-transgender? Why? Because he made a bad tweet and because some people, including me, wrote articles rationally explaining what was wrong with his tweet? Dawkins, an 80-year-old academic who has published at least 17 books, supposedly can’t handle being criticized? And his way to lash out is to sign a declaration against trans rights? And it is trans people, who have to be trans every day whether we like it or not — not Dawkins, who has a PhD and could do actual thinking and research or else just stop talking if he has nothing to say on this subject — who are responsible for making “good arguments” to justify our existence in public life, because apparently all our current arguments suck, and we deserve to have academics signing statements against our healthcare access unless we can think of better explanations of why and how we exist? (I have written three books that address topics adjacent to being transgender and I have another book forthcoming. Has Dawkins bought and read my books? No. But I have an obligation to, I don't know, write a fifth book that is better than the books he hasn't read? I already brought this up, too, in my article.)

Please consider the possibility that, in general, when a hypothetical cis person (and I am not naming names) makes a transphobic tweet, it is not because a hypothetical trans person hasn’t worked hard enough to deserve their right to exist, but, just maybe, it is because the hypothetical cis person who made the transphobic tweet is a transphobe. Occam's Razor right there.

What if we sympathized with trans people first. What if we were charitable toward trans people first and assumed that trans people's arguments convey the best possible versions of their own meaning, rather than prioritizing crusty academics who you admit are unkind toward everyone and therefore don’t really merit having us waste time assuming the best of them. Academics who tweet words like "man," "woman," "choose," "identify," "courtesy" without defining their terms and then simply declare themselves masters of the English language when someone who also speaks English raises an objection to their actual words. What on earth would the world look like then, if we cared about the downtrodden, picked-on minority first.

“Don’t act surprised?” You say. No. No. Don’t tell me not to be surprised when people launch anti-transgender campaigns as if I deserve to lose my legal rights for pointing out that a man was making an anti-transgender tweet when he was making an anti-transgender tweet. That was exactly how I began my article (section: “Why It Is Tiring For Me To Do This”) I am repeating the idea here because you have forgotten. He did the thing, and I said he did the thing. In saying so, I did not provoke the thing that already happened, nor do I deserve a worse resurgence of the thing.

Your comment not to "act surprised" (if someone makes "strident arguments" against the validity of my gender or against my assessment that a transphobic remark is transphobic) is hostile. You may not have consciously intended hostility, but I interpret it as at least unconsciously hostile, and the effect of this comment on me is like the effect of any other hostile comment I might receive. There is no way for me to be any more charitable toward you on this point. Regardless of your intention, you could stop making this kind of comment.

I did not antagonize Richard Dawkins. He made a bad tweet all on his own, which some people in my values-based (atheist/humanist) community refused to recognize as a bad tweet, so I wrote an article explaining why it was bad. The article was for the benefit of people in my extended community. I spent days shaking in anger and humiliation, and worked for days on this article, and presented good arguments to make my case. I am shocked that you think that it is my ethical responsibility to waste yet another Sunday, explaining to you, whom I do not know, things that I already explained in this article, including that I deserve to live as a member of society, and that internet trolls are internet trolls, for the same reasons I can only explain so many dozens of times to people who don’t truly care and are deliberately wasting my time.

You said my argument has a “high error rate,” but you have not convinced me that any of my points are wrong.

I am angry at myself for taking the time to explain these things to you. I could have been doing paid work this afternoon, and instead I chose to spend my afternoon explaining this to you. I occasionally do this partly because, if I don’t do it, someone on the internet might read your comment and think you’re right—but also because I hope that you, personally, might listen and change. I provided the arguments you said you wanted, on your own terms, following the structure in your own reply. I don’t know if you will read. I don't know if you will care. I don't know if you will change.