Richard Dawkins: ‘Trans Women Are Women’ Slogan is Scientifically False
The slogan ‘trans women are women’ is scientifically false and harms the rights of women, Richard Dawkins has said in a new book warning that scientific truth must prevail over “personal feelings”. The Telegraph has more.
In a new book, the evolutionary biologist warns that scientific truth must prevail over “personal feelings” and argues that academic institutions must defend facts above emotion.
In The War on Science, Dawkins joins several scientists and philosophers contending that academic freedom and truth in universities was being stifled by diversity, equity and inclusion policies that promoted falsehoods under the banner of social justice.
“I draw the line at the belligerent slogan ‘trans women are women’ because it is scientifically false,” he said. “When taken literally, it can infringe the rights of other people, especially women.
“It logically entails the right to enter women’s sporting events, women’s changing rooms, women’s prisons and so on.
“So powerful has this postmodern counter-factualism become, that newspapers refer to ‘her penis’ as a matter of unremarked routine.”
Dawkins told the Telegraph that the trans-activist community had become “astonishingly vicious”, hounding people out of their jobs and calling for women who disagreed with them to be decapitated and physically assaulted.
He warned that even senior publishers were bullied by junior colleagues into censoring their authors who did not accept that men can become biological women.
“Both politics and personal feelings don’t impinge scientific truths and that needs to be clearly understood. I feel very strongly about the subversion of scientific truth,” he said.
“I think part of what’s happened is the move of academia towards postmodernism, which is pernicious, and probably does account for the current vogue for the nonsense lie that sex is a spectrum.
“There’s this post-modern hubris which presumptuously and falsely dismisses science as a social construct. The human conceit here is the idea that personal feelings can change reality.
“I have been told by publishers that they are under strong pressure from junior members of staff to censor books for this kind of reason, and the astonishing viciousness of the trans lobby, they are very dogmatic and hectoring.
“JK Rowling can look after herself, but you look at the way they hounded Kathleen Stock out of Sussex University, and it’s always women who suffer.”
At London Pride demonstration in 2023, Sarah Jane Barker, previously Alan Barker, told a crowd, “If you see a Terf punch them in the f—— face.”
Dawkins said: “I don’t think I’m unduly guilty of sexist stereotyping if I say such language is more typical of the sex that ‘Sarah Jane’ claims to have left that the other she aspires to join.”
In the new book, Dawkins explained that believing sex was on a spectrum was a “denial of genetic reality”.
He argued that female gametes were much larger than male gametes – known as anisogamy – which was how biologists determined male and female.
Worth reading in full.
Book your tickets for the October 4th book launch of The War on Science, hosted by the Free Speech Union in Westminster.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
At one of the first A-Level lessons taught to me by my Headmaster Edward Armitage he asked thge class what to trust if the experimental results conflicted with our ideas and expectations. Some of the class got it wrong by saying they would go with their gut, others of us, I am glad to say, emphasised the need to verify the experimental results and method and then revise our opinions.
Odd that after all these years, decades, the scientific establishment is still going with their guts and not the evidence.
Yes, because they are following The Science™ (see Covid, masks, mRNA vaccines approvals, climate change, carbon capture etc,) and not science
Under Covid, The Science started off with the answer (masks, needles and lockdowns) and then worked backward to try to find a question that would deliver this answer. Throughout the course of the pandemic the answer remained unchanged but the question evolved considerably.
If they approach all questions that way, no wonder we are in such a mess.
They are going with the narrative constructed by their political masters. As the UN have declared (about climate change): ‘We own the science’.
I don’t think that we need a coterie of distinguished scientists to tell us this. I learned when I was about 4 that boys have a peepee and girls have a front bottom. Knowledge which has stood me in good stead ever since. The word “woman” or man for that matter has a meaning that stands on its own without any qualification. All the rest is redundant and arguing it with science, logic or etymology just gives credence to the delusional nutters peddling this cr@p
Prof Alice Roberts would disagree. She’s a professor of anatomy, has extensive experience in archaeology, but still thinks women can have penises and Neanderthals were transgender.🙈
It never ceases to amaze me that there are men who demonstrably give more of a damn about women’s sex-based rights than many actual women do. It’s just crazy. The entire trans agenda thing is undeniably just another form of misogyny ( as well as being homophobic ), and yet we’ve got loads of women who are fully on board with it.🤯
But then we’re never very far away from women ( ‘flying monkeys’ ) who would side with and enable narcissists who disrespect and abuse their fellow females on the regular. The ultimate stab in the back from these particular ‘ladies’.🤨
The notion that male children should be castrated before the reach puberty if they can be convinced to “have been born in the wrong body” isn’t exactly friendly to those children, either. The trans-ideologues are pretty much hostile to humanity as such, at least to those humans who accept that they’re just sexually-reproducing mammals and don’t feel particularly oppressed by that.
Once more, cherche les engagement ideologiques. Science usually ends up playing second fiddle to ideology – Alice was formerly the President of Humanists UK.
Follow the money………….BBC
Professor Alice Robert’s seems to be a professor of what ever she fancies at the time!
I believe she was supposed to be a doctor in anthropology when she was on coast. She got her professorship in scientific communication; but like her other friend Elle, who used to be on country file ; it seems that her qualifications change to suit the programme she is presenting.
There’s this post-modern hubris which presumptuously and falsely dismisses science as a social construct.
“Social construct” seems to mean “an arbitrary metaphysical entity constructed by a particular culture, and which has no universal truth, validity, or existence”.
But deep down the holders of this weird belief don’t really believe that science is merely a social construct. Because if science really is a “social construct”, then the products of science must also be “social constructs”. However, the people claiming that science is a “social construct” are not rushing to give up the products of science: mobile phones, cars, air travel, computers, the Internet, modern medicine, etc, etc, etc. Neither are they claiming that these products don’t really exist outside a particular culture.
It’s much more likely, therefore, that the idea that science is a “social construct” is a delusion employed to enable a social power-play.
Not so – truths about nature are not a social construct, but the particular institutions set up to discover them are, and we ignore that bias at our peril (as the whole corruption of medicine and Big Pharma, or of climatology, demonstrate).
Likewise, one can say that God is not a social construct (assuming his existence), but all religious activity is, for even if following a true divine revelation, it’s done by people in a sociological context.
So I’m not knocking science (or religion), but reminding us, as those like Thomas Kuhn and sociologists of science generally, have abundantly demonstrated, that it is a human pursuit. Nobel prizewinners have buried research to maintain their social status, and it is an old truism that science advances over the dead bodies of senior scientists defending old paradigms.
Very good point!
I think it is important to bear in mind that there is a difference between science and its interpretation. Back in my school days I had a religion teacher who said that science was there to answer how/when/where questions and religion (and by extension in my view ethics and public opinion) to answer why and “should I” questions. Science can tell you how to kill somebody or how to get to the moon, but makes no call on whether or not it is the right to do that. I think this distinction was lost under Covid. No, science did not tell us we need to get vaccinated, because that is not the type of question science can or should be answering. Science can tell us maybe how a vaccine works or how a virus spreads. Science can tell you how to build a gas chamber or an atom bomb. It was a political decision to actually do it and use it. Scientists seriously lost their compass when they forgot this under Covid. Now the same thing is true of gender. I guess Dawkins is right about gametes and how these can distinguish genders. I’m no biologist so cannot judge. But… Read more »
You see, Richard, this is what you got wrong:
You thought that once we put all this silly religious nonsense behind us about God and the afterlife, mankind would become all logical, rational and sensible. Scientific thinking would rule and debates would be decided by cool, level headed people like you.
The problem is, Richard, it doesn’t work like that.
We humans are invariably deeply religious. (Yes, you as well. All you can talk about is God…)
When you erase Christianity – yes, together with its value system that allowed you to declare that God doesn’t exist – then all that happens is that the bad old gods and the demons come rushing in to occupy the empty space. And this is what has happened.
By the way, has the police knocked on your door yet? Those trans activists can be quite unpleasant.
This is especially evident in so-called climate change. The earliest gods of mankind were weather gods because the weather is a very powerful and dangerous phenomenon and one whose actual workings are, still today, beyond our understanding. In many pagan belief systems, gods associated with weather phenomenons are the most powerful ones (eg the Greek Zeus or the Roman Jupiter, both thunderstorm Gods). One could go so far as to claim that “religion” is originally a “science” in the sense that it’s some kind of formal system, for predicfing and influencing the weather. Having abolished the somewhat abstract merciful Christian God who, out of his fatherly love for us, will eventually lead everything to a good end, it turns out that we’re still immensely scared of the weather and what it might have in store for us in future. Enter Climate, the beast-god who’ll kill us all unless we sacrifice all that’s dear to us to it, as demanded by the high-priests of Climate, the settled-science scientists, who can not only predict the weather dozens of years from now but claim to know exactly what we need to do surive Climate’s most terrible ire. That’s at least how this works.… Read more »
Indeed.
By the way, despite all his dislike of the Christian God – who, in his fatherly love, is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love (Psalm 103) – Richard Dawkins is very, very reluctant to criticize Islam.
Have a look at the interview with him about Shamima Begum – everybody’s favourite ISIS bride – it’s on YouTube. He is very reluctant to say anything.
Unfortunately, Dawkins is wrong on this: Woman is a word and the meaning of any word depends on a principally arbitrary definition. A definition of woman, and the one that’s traditionally the commonly used one, is adult human of female sex. The trans-theorists dispute this defnition. To them, woman refers to a gender role, a set of socially constructed behavioural conventions, and they demand that this is the definition which ought to be universally used because they believe (or claim to believe) that the sex of an individual ought to be regarded as irrelevant. Science doesn’t help here as the decision for or against a particular definition is political. It basically boils down to “I think offenders of male sex should be sent to women’s prisons for reasons” vs “For other reasons, I don’t.” A very simple one would be the following: Sending someone to prison is an intentional disruption and limitation of his social live for some period of time which is supposed to serve as punishment. This has always, and intentionally so, included cutting this individual off from the kind of sexual contacts most humans are most interested in, namely, to those of members of the other sex.… Read more »
One of the problems with the nonsense term ‘gender’ is that it doesn’t just mean ‘a set of socially constructed behavioural conventions’ – ‘sex role stereotyping’ as we used to call it. If that was all it meant, we could probably agree that yes, girls can like Star Wars and yes, boys can wear pink, and be done with it.
Simplified to an absurd degree, the transclaims are that Likes Star Wars means It’s a boy and Wears pink means It’s a girl and they are telling (or used to tell) this to children at an age where they still have absolutely no idea what sex actually is and are naturally inclined to accept anything adults tell them as true. Further, they demand that adults who do know what sex is are to treat it as irrelevant in all areas of life and they want to use the coercion apparatus of the state to enforce this. And lastly, as glacier on the Empire State Building, they claim to be an oppressed minority because they have to resort to the coercion apparatus of the state to be allowed to tell this to really small children and to force adults to disregard sex throughout their lifes.
“Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. The eminent Kant scholar Lewis Beck used to say that anyone who could believe in God could believe in anything. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be… Read more »
Technically, as Moderator I should have corrected this quote of Prof Dawkins:
“I don’t think I’m unduly guilty of sexist stereotyping if I say such language is more typical of the sex that ‘Sarah Jane’ claims to have left than the other he [not she] aspires to join”
Way above my paygrade though…
Ah, good old Richie Dawkins. I enjoyed reading his science books, he is a very intelligent man and a good writer.
He *was* a great darling of the progessive/liberal left, calling Leave voters racist etc.
However, then they realised that as an anti-theist he is very critical of Islam.
As a biologist he is very critical of transgenderism.
Oh dear, he is now a far-right bigot.
You see, anybody who does not totally, enthusiastically and vocally embrace the latest woke idea immediately and without any hesitation is a far-right bigot.
Yes , absolutely.
That is why lefties do not fear the right, they fear their own.
Dawkins is late to the party and is speaking out now simply to advertise his book, no brownie points for him.
Richard Dawkins is probably not brave.
The proposition that biological sex in humans does not exist is gaslighting. This is a discussion to ignore.
I fail to understand why this is still being discussed.
All those super brains in the Supreme Court have now worked out the “man” and “woman” are terms that must be linked only to biological sex and any attempt to include “trans” people would be “incoherent and unworkable.”
I realise of course that this must have been a tremendously difficult decision to reach but somehow their lordships managed it. They probably took a look inside their pants.
This is a truly unnecessary debate, surely trans women are just that, trans women. Think better description would probably be trans men, but those that are trans probably prefer to have “women”. They are men who want to be women and often they will look like women, but they are still what they are, which sadly is not what they want to be. Personally I would probably like to be a HNWI, but I’m not, and so nobody would describe me as one even though I want to be one. I could dress and behave like one, but that does not make me one.
Dear Richard. If gender is defined entirely by gametes, how does your scientific and logical mind explain that the concept of gender pre dates knowledge of gametes by thousands of years. Or that the primitive and ignorant people who lived hundreds of years ago and did not have the benefit of your scientific insights but instead believed in religious mumbo jumbo, would have dismissed the concept of pregnant men outright, whereas in our age of scientific knowledge this distinction has somehow become a contentious.
Gender is a property of nouns on languages where nouns are gendered (they aren’t in modern English but this is different in other languages like German or French). Sex is a property of sexually reproducing lifeforms (most animals and plants) and Dawkins refers to the biological definition of sex which is based on which kind of gametes a specimen of some kind of something produces. There are two kinds of these, egg-cells and sperm-cells and the biological sex is thus either egg-producing or sperm-producing.