10 Clues This Guy Doesn’t Want to Hear Your Trans-Inclusive Pitch

On an ‘Evening Standard’ column, in which Richard Dawkins gets mad imagining that trans people might double-score on cake

In August 2023, Richard Dawkins wrote an opinion in the London Evening Standard. They’d commissioned it from him “as part of their campaign in favor of free speech,” he explained on YouTube, where he read it aloud. He also posted the text to X and to his Substack.

The newspaper titled it: “How can we have a proper debate when we no longer speak the same language?”

What it means

Among anti-LGBTQ rhetoric, where there’s a “Debate me!” attitude, there’s a common dynamic that goes like this.

An anti-LGBTQ person says: You can’t call me “homophobic” or “transphobic.” Those words imply something about how I feel: hate, fear, disgust, etc. You can’t know what I feel nor prove that I feel it. Besides, what I privately feel has no impact on your life anyway. You’re trying to prove that I’m a “bad person,” but you can’t know my true character.

This is said in bad faith, since generally we do have a sense of how others feel about us and we’re able to judge their character. This person’s claim about the unknowability of their own mental states is something they’re applying to their own anti-LGBTQ statements (or the LGBTQ people who hear them) but probably wouldn’t apply to everything else they say (or the other people who hear them).

But the LGBTQ person may have little choice except to abide by that restriction. So we say: Very well. When considering your statements about LGBTQ people, I’ll focus my objections on the negative impact your words have on on LGBTQ people. I can identify falsehoods. I can spot the diminishment of legal rights or social status. I can name material damage or physical injuries. I can speak about my own feelings, though I can’t be sure of yours.

Within these parameters, we’ll make our point. We ought to “win” the debate.

So the anti-LGBTQ person decides to put a stop to this. They swing the focus back to themselves. By making those points, they say, you’ve encouraged people not to listen to…