Thanks for reading and for your thoughts.

I did read Dawkins’ book “The God Delusion” shortly after it came out in 2006, and it was influential for me. I was then in my late twenties, and I’d been trying to sort out the philosophical arguments for/against the existence of God for about a decade. My suspension of judgment had kept me at a low level of existential anxiety. “The God Delusion” shifted that for me. Dawkins did take a condescending attitude toward religion, and I disagreed with that attitude and would describe it as generally unhelpful for the cause of interfaith/atheist dialogue, but perhaps it was helpful *for me* insofar as it served as a kind of razor, or a kick in the pants, that prompted me to pick a side. With “The God Delusion” and similar books by Harris, Hitchens, and Dennett, I finally decided once and for all that the better arguments were on the atheist side, and this resolved my anxiety over the question. It’s not that Dawkins’ condescension improved his arguments, nor that he was always fair to religious people or that his statements were always correct; in fact, I wrote, and still have, a list of his points that I disagreed with. It’s just that his direct speech and his sense of urgency made the question “Does God exist?” seem like I could give it a “No. Final answer.” and then move on. I appreciated that, for what it was worth to me at that time.

I belong to humanist (secularist/non-religious) and atheist groups, and that is how I heard of Dawkins’ bad tweet in the first place. There is some dissent within the very large, diverse humanist/atheist communities about whether they should side with whatever-Dawkins-wants-to-tweet or else emphasize the importance of respecting transgender people. I think that question answers itself, but. For many people, it does not.

Dawkins, coming from Oxford, must be aware that the fields of Gender Studies and Critical Race Theory exist, but I suppose he does not care. Scholars do write about the varied meanings of gender and race, but it’s not necessarily done as a sensationalized “Gender = Race? Compare! Contrast!” so it won’t serve him well if his goal is to get attention on Twitter. It is often more focused on real-world problems, as when a large employer claims “we’re not racist, we hire Black men; we’re not sexist, we hire white women” and meanwhile doesn’t hire Black women, and no legal complaint can be filed against the company because there isn’t even language to talk about what is happening (“intersectionality,” someone finally had to name it). If someone’s worried about that kind of problem, I imagine that, to them, the “problems” of analytic philosophy, like “What does it feel like to be a bat? How do you know you’re not a cat?” seem entirely unrelated questions, not especially urgent, and (depending on the context in which they are raised) hostile deflections from real-world complaints.