Consortium of secular organizations attack scientists deemed transphobic, The Center for Inquiry responds

110 thoughts on “Consortium of secular organizations attack scientists deemed transphobic, The Center for Inquiry responds”

1. “. . . misinformation and outright fabrications. . . .”

   One of my regular questions to people who use the term “misinformation,” or its cousin, “disinformation,” is, What is the difference between misinformation and lies? Why is there a special term needed for statements which are untrue? This statement is one of the few I’ve seen where falsehood is explicitly linked with misinformation, but it’s done in a way that suggests that there is some difference. I seriously ask, What is the difference? What does “misinformation” connote that “falsehood” doesn’t? Why use one rather than the other?

   All I can figure out is the “misinformation” sounds fancy. The would-be powers that wish to fight misinformation make it sound like something very technical and complicated that needs specialists to confront it. Lies on the other hand are quotidian, and something that everyone would expect to be able to confront themselves. As the Left increasingly expresses its mistrust and disappointment in the everyday citizen, it seems like they have given up on our being able to understand and confront lies.

   It is, of course, worth noting that the misinformation the experts confront is always that which is critical of the Left’s pet policies and initiatives. Therefore, whenever I see someone presented as a “misinformation export,” I hear “propogandist.” Whenever I see something labeled as “misinformation,” I assume that it is actually true, but inconvenient to the speaker and their interests.

   1. +1

   2. ‘Disinformation’ is falsehoods expressed with the intention of misleading others, usually by government or official sources. ‘Misinformation’ leaves open the spreader’s intentions. It isn’t necessarily repeated with the intention of misleading – that is, those who express it may not be lying but simply uttering what they think is true.

      Official or authoritarian attempts to correct ‘misinformation’ play on the idea that its repeaters are dupes lacking the wherewithall to recognise their ignorance.

      1. +1

      2. Agree. It’s subtle but it’s not quite the same as “lies.”

   3. Misinformation can be misleadingly composited truths. E.g.: https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations

      This even exists on both sides of the trans debate. There are facts that are known, but cannot be used to infer more than the fact with the evidence we currently have, but are often used to infer more knowledge than we have.

      As a person who is knowledgeable on a scientific topic I know first hand that expert information is sometimes required to confront a claim. Because a non-expert thinks that certain factual evidence indicates one thing when it actually indicates the opposite. (I won’t get into the specifics as it is fully off-topic)

2. Glad to read this.

   I am not a psychologist, but IMHO “phobia” is irrational. E.g. if someone’s appearance reminds me of any creepy low-life from history without learning anything else about their thought.

   Rational aversion is not phobia. E.g. someone’s appearance indicates their beliefs are giving rise to duties of conscience that are published and I can read about. E.g. a white cap hat, white robes with possibly real gold trim – it’s a Catholic Pope. I know and can learn a good deal about their thought by reading their literature.

   Also “Christian Nationalism” in the United States does not exist just because Stephen Wolfe or Andrew Seidel wrote some literature about it. It’s a political psyop to direct attack at any Christians who are proud to freely express that fact and also defend values of the United States or even the Scottish Enlightenment (vs. Kant-Hegel-et. al. Leftism) like liberty, the individual, E Pluribus Unum, etc.— but do not assert the right to a theocracy because of that. I do think such churches exist. At best, IMHO “Christian Nationalism” is an impressive sounding new term for proponents of theocracy.

   Last note : IMHO “gender” needs to be cited in the literature so we know what it is. It is being misused e.g. as a synonym for sex. Judith Butler’s “gender performativity” is really what I think is meant, but motte/bailey argumentation (N. Shackel, 2005) create mystification.

   1. No, there are indeed Christian Nationalists — they’re the ones who want prayer and Creationism in public schools and “acknowledgment” of God in government. The term comes from their regular claim that the United States is a Christian nation. It’s been used for decades.

      1. Right – I think that would be Theocrats or Originalists as we already know them. They wanted e.g. Creationism and got a “no” (at great effort thanks to PCC(E)).

         I do not know where any “Christian Nationalist” churches or pastors are.

         1. What would you call this guy? It looks like he calls himself a pastor:

            https://www.instagram.com/echochurch_/reel/DDX_BhszrYF/

            I just Googled “I am a christian nationalist” pastor and this came up. I have no other knowledge of him. That’s why it is so sad that the FFRF is losing the plot. There are real things to oppose in the church/state separation area.

      2. I’ve never heard that term—Christian Nationalist—in Canada. We usually call Christians who deny evolution “fundamentalists.”

         I may have seen in writing from US sources. If so, I don’t remember it.

         1. It appears to be the new empty term of abuse, replacing ‘racist’ as that slur loses its power through overuse. It cannot last as its emptiness becomes apparent when an atheist or Muslim (who may oppose men having access to women’s spaces or sports) gets called a ‘white Christian nationalist.’

   2. Posting to agree with Bryan.

      Add: The West can assert the values of the Enlightenment with far less friction given some of its proponents being Christian activists wishing for theocracy than allowing The Marxist Spectrum to flourish in its administrative state.

   3. I’ll wind down my comments with this:

      ^^^A new way to refine the “CN” thing for me :

      •Yes, I am seeing this from James Lindsay’s angle
      • No, I do not fathom the entirety of it
      • I am currently in a “Change my mind” mode – so best I can judge, psyop. But I won’t “die on a hill” for this. Lindsay will.
      • glad to hear input per the WEIT principles.

      @A Different Mike : in defense of atheism, I’ll say Stalin was an atheist who did NOT go one god further – the god of human society in sociognostic/theosophic religions.

3. It’s too bad they felt compelled to create guilt by association by tying the debate to “Christian nationalist ideology” or to “voices of reason or science” who offer only a “veneer of legitimacy.” That would seem to be a convenient way to stifle all debate on the topic, which is of course the goal. A statement that they affirm the rights of all members of the LGBTQ+ community to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness would have been sufficient.

   1. But that’s easy to say, isn’t it, Norman. To the trans activists, their pursuit of happiness just is their efforts to compel us to accept legally that transwomen are a subset of women and allow them, perforce, into women’s bathrooms and athletic competition, along with all other women, otherwise they have no rights at all. There is no conflict in this view. Since women include born men who have discovered they are really women, trans rights just are women’s rights. Trans people will never be happy otherwise.

      Americans should contradict me here, but I have read that “happiness” in the 18th century didn’t mean hedonism or even pleasure but rather the development of moral fulfilment that allowed one to become a productive citizen providing for his family in material and spiritual senses….for which one requires liberty.

      1. Since you addressed me directly, let me respond by saying that I’m aware that, for a subset of trans-rights activists, the “pursuit of happiness” means just what you say. (I think that their pursuit will eventually fall short in the realm of women-only spaces and women’s sports. That will take time and, inevitably, litigation.) My main point is that the long list of organizations above would be better off with a more neutral statement of support than what they signed, leaving “pursuit of happiness” open to the reader’s interpretation. Their members are almost certainly more varied in their views than is represented in the statement, so the organizations risk sparking controversies like the one over at the FFRF. I doubt that they want that.

      2. I think you are right about the period literature, which would be Scottish Common Sense Realism authors e.g. Reid, Adam Smith, Beattie, as influenced others such as the Thomases Paine and Jefferson.

      3. More Googling. I think “happiness” as understood by the founding fathers comes from Aristotle and included the cultivation of virtue:

         https://www.pursuit-of-happiness.org/history-of-happiness/aristotle/

         1. Am reminded of JFK, either during an interview or at a press conference, in response to being asked to define happiness, referred to the ancient Greeks’ definition: “The full use of ones powers along lines of excellence.” Reading elsewhere, “with scope” was added at the end.

      4. Leslie, I agree with your intuition on the meaning of “happiness. Our Declaration’s foundation statement was flawed, in my opinion. Here is its antecedent, publish months before July 1776 …

         “That all men are by nature equally free and independent and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.”
         ~ George Mason, Virginia Declaration of Rights.

4. “But they don’t tell us.”

   Exactly: these humanist /secular(?) won’t tell us what they really mean about:
   Sterilizing young gender non-conforming kids
   Doctor’s cutting of the healthy breast of teenage girls
   ….and so on………..

   Here in Europe, after the Cass report and WPATH files, many called out orgs like Humanist UK, and other European “Humanist/secular” orgs about their opinion about the above examples. But they won’t tell us. Still total silence from them here in Europe.

5. Yikes! This appears to me to be tribalism & it’s very discouraging. “If they are for it, I’m against it & vice versa.” — no matter what (…what??? how could Ted Cruz be right about anything?) This degrades the discourse. I continue to learn about this sex-gender-madness and confusion, and it’s a sobering lesson, how well-intentioned, smart people can coalesce reactively around and untenable position simply because a demonized group holds a different thought or value. Thanks for your writings on this, whyevolutionistrue.

6. I am profoundly disappointed in all those organizations who signed on to that ridiculous statement. CFI is a courageous organization!

   One day society will awaken and feel ashamed we didn’t push back against a mostly social contagion—for adults as well as children.

   1. I don’t know, but it could be just the leadership of those other orgs who co-signed. And either the leaders were ideologically captured as well, or they chose to go along bc they need donations and are also not wanting “The Treatment”, if ya know what I mean.

7. Witch hunts (and especially Witch Hunters) need ‘witches’ to hunt whether they exist or not. And if you find that different sections of the community are labelled as witches until all the moral juice is wrung out and then a new group is identified as ‘witches’ – well you may well conclude that it is the ‘hunt’ that is in error, not its prey.

8. The CFI statement accurately it articulates the different positions and the facts that lead to the biology-based (but still humanistic) position. The FFR gang has meanwhile mendaciously painted liberal secularists who stand up for biology with the same brush as far right Christian nationalists and cynical politicians. Yuck. The message to the more silent majority is not subtle: STFU or we will come for you.

   On the issue of biological sex (or just “sex”) and gender, I’m afraid that the ray of hope that we’d have some settlement over the meaning of these terms is pretty much past. Both sides have used them interchangeably, and to be fair it was probably too nuanced to really catch on in the general public.

   1. Agreed I see this conflation of sex and gender even among professional biologists. It’s deliberate and thoughtful, but always limited to humans (no confusion about sex and gender in plants or in other animals). Referring to “transwomen” as female etc. (as in question 32 in that NYT poll).

      If one is trying to keep track of reality this kind of language used in conversation can be disorienting because one is trying to follow what’s true, what the intentions are of the person who’s saying something that’s not true, the possible consequences of disagreeing with that person, who else is listening to the conversation and what they might be thinking of one’s word choice. It’s mentally exhausting. I sometimes think that’s the point: to wear down the opposition with cognitive dissonance.

9. I’ve seen a lot of similar statements, which are invariably couched in the sort of rhetoric which makes it seem like anyone who was in favor of basic human rights ought to be in favor of the statement. Call me jaded, but I don’t think anyone who isn’t a gender ideologue would agree with the vast majority of what’s in those statements.

   I’ve learned to translate. The “human rights” being violated typically come down to a claimed right to have an inner belief prioritized over biology and a narrative about the trans child substituted for basic psychology. Transwomen have a right to be in women’s spaces because they ARE women. It’s not about accommodation or kindness. It’s not about the LGB or fighting against people “forcing gender norms.” It’s not about secularism.

   1. Yes Sastra – it is interesting how the meanings of words can change over the years. Perhaps one has to be our age — above 40 say – to notice this.

      “Human Rights” is a good example. As is “environmentalism”.
      best,

      D.A.
      NYC

      1. I’ll bite. How has ‘environmentalism’ changed?

         1. Hi Chas, good to see you commenting again.
            I’m 55 and in my salad days environmentalism was basically don’t pollute, despoil the environment, harpoon whales, etc.

            Maybe I didn’t notice the hard left anti-capitalism, anti-humanism of it? An example – global warming is a large, collective action problem. There are trade offs, alternatives and discussions to be had.

            In the past few decades it has become an existential threat – GLOBAL BOILING – an apocalypse that requires destroying capitalism, idiocies like “Net Zero”, and anti-nukes, etc. And it is SOOO anti-American.

            In recent years the environmental movement has become enamored of communist Third Worldism – the main thing that keeps the third world…well… third. Exhibit A: Palestine.

            It is possible – growing up in Australia I might have been unaware of the above. Or perhaps environmentalism has changed?
            best,

            D.A.
            NYC / Florida

            1. Ah. Mission creep. Thanks.

            2. In your “salad days” scientists were testifying to Congress about the dangers of greenhouse gas and CFC emissions.

               Yes, there are people in the environmental movement who want to basically become Amish. But it’s a huge umbrella, and has been for longer than you’ve been paying attention, so of course there will be contradictions. It is not a monolithic religion – people disagree on what to prioritize and how to go about things.

               The shareholder’s rights pro-business-as-usual camp has moved the Overton window such that the “trade offs, alternatives and discussions to be had” are green energy for bitcoin mining, what sort of geoengineering to use, and how much the public will end up paying so that far more limited interests can profit (just like how things have gone with superfund sites).

               On the Youtube channels I follow that deal with climate change and pollution I haven’t seen Palestine mentioned at all.

               And De Tocqueville wouldn’t have recognized the USA of the 1880s, much less today, so “anti-American” is, at best, a greatly moving target. (De Tocqueville’s America is one in which the vast majority of the population [unfortunately discounting slaves and indigenous] owned their homes, land, and their means of production. It was a far more left-wing society than today with its large corporations and rents [reminiscent of the British East Indies company and British leaseholds]).

               That’s my rant for today.

10. Thank you for being a voice of reason in this time of knuckleheads on both the left and the right. Makes me proud to be one of your many fans.

11. The contrast between those two statements is delicious and so damning of the consortium position. Bullseye.

12. I see Mandisa Thomas is on the list of signatures. Also Nick Fish.

    Two people whose reputations are in the gutter.

    PS The American Humanist Association never did rescind the “Humanist of the Year” award to Alice Walker, despite her nasty antisemitism and promotion of the work of David Icke.

    1. The AHA did rescind R. Dawkin’s award, sadly Alice Walker remains in good standing with the AHA

13. Wow! The FFRF are deep into the trans cult – with every single one of its straw men and apocalyptic horror stories.

    It reads like something from The Guardian for hilarity and Pink News for obnoxiousness.
    They really can’t see the whole cultish dynamics of it can they?
    Glad the boss and our friends high tailed it outta there! 🙂

    D.A.
    NYC

14. A large part of the apparent strength of the trans-activist position comes from their seeming to be a part of the rainbow coalition of ever-expanding alphabet soup. But the string of letters hides the fact that there are major differences between them. Specifically, the activists are piggybacking on the numbers and social acceptance of the first two letters — lesbians and gays — and relying on the assumption that those communities support everything the activists say. But their agendas are fundamentally at odds: if the activists had their way in universalizing access to gender-affirming care, virtually all people who, currently, emerge from their adolescent uncertainty as gay men and lesbians would have been set firmly on the puberty-blocker and surgery pathway while children, and “converted” into trans-sexuals. The necessary outcome of the trans goal would, effectively, be the erasure of gay and lesbian identities (whether they consciously accept that or not).

    Of course gays and lesbians, just like secularists (not to mention young girls shamed into not complaining about the unfairness of having to compete against boys), are put under enormous pressure of coercive emotional blackmail not to break ranks by pointing this out. But eventually there will be pushback, and the rainbow coalition will begin to fragment when gays and lesbians at large begin to realize how great a threat the trans-activist agenda is to them.

    1. Well said. It’s still a mystery to me why LGB organisations enthusiastically drank that Kool-Aid.

       1. I would say the main reason was that by about 2015 all the battles for LGB rights had been won, at least in the West: decriminalization of homosexuality, antidiscrimination laws, same-sex marriage. LGB organisations needed a new cause to keep the money coming in, and turned into trans rights organisations.

          1. Plausible. But there were and are still major battles to be fought, such as re “conversion therapy”. It is arguable that the current trans-fad among minors is doing more damage to LGB individuals and communities than “pray away the gay” ever did; where is the outrage? And which nation is the biggest official promoter of “reassignment” surgery? I’d give the answer, but if one doesn’t already know they are unlikely to believe it.

    2. The addition of T to LGB was extremely controversial in the 1990s. If you look at pictures of LG rights demonstrations from the 1950s to early 1990s, there was never any T. Most LGB people did NOT want to add T. How it was added is a story of deceit. I think I read about it in one of Michelangelo Signorelli’s 1990s books.

       LGB and T are diametrically opposed. LGB says “we’re born this way” while T insists “we’re NOT born this way.” LGB has zero in common with T. That’s why we did not want to attach T.

       The TQ alphabet soup people have no evidence for any of their claims. In order to get what they want, they have to piggyback and force-team with other issues, such as LGB rights. TQ has also piggybacked on abortion rights and captured legacy orgs like Planned Parenthood. TQ claims that, just as abortion represents bodily autonomy, ‘transition’ represents bodily autonomy, therefore abortion rights = ‘trans rights.’ Again, the two have zero in common.

       If you or anyone else is looking for an LGB group without the T, go to LGB Alliance. They are a global network of LGB people opposed to T and the damage GI has done to LGB rights.

       1. In the UK, the transsexual (as it was then known, and still is in UK law) campaign group the Beaumont Society was utterly opposed to the campaign for gay rights and was utterly homophobic. (The Society consisted entirely of men with internalised homophobia at the time, IIRC. It was later joined by Stephanie “Stephen” Whittle, a trans-identifying female law professor, renamed itself as Press for Change, and modified its stance.)

15. The next step will be scientific organizations also signing onto this pledge of allegiance. Will AAAS or the Society for Integrative & Comparative Biology or the Society for the Study of Evolution also declare that a reasonable scientist like our host (or Pinker or Dawkins) who says “trans women” are males is laundering and giving a veneer of legitimacy to hateful extremists?

    Those orgs should do so. To be consistent with the new orthodoxy, it should not be a matter of conscience for AAAS or SICB or SSE members whether TWAW. Agreeing that TWAW should be a requirement for membership, and disagreeing should be grounds for expulsion and memory holing (in the same way Jerry’s essay was memory holed and his membership on the honorary board was expunged).

    The last steps will be affirmation that TWAW as a criterion for publishing in the journals owned & operated by those societies. After all, it’s almost a requirement for participation in the annual meeting. Remember this plenary at the 2022 meeting?

    I wonder if any of the SSE leadership reads the comments here on Jerry’s website? What say you SSE leaders?

    1. In case the link doesn’t work, at the 2022 SSE meeting attendees clapped like trained seals for the drag queen Nina West who (as per protocol) dressed in giant fake breasts and a wig and did a pantomime of some gross stereotypes of what sexists think are gestures and idiom used by women. By all accounts Nina West is a very nice gay guy from Ohio (Andrew Levitt), and he was pretty funny at SSE, but his warmup act didn’t give me or anyone else any reason to agree that TWAW.

       1. Womanface = blackface. It is misogyny. Hypersexual caricatures of women are NOT funny to most women.

          1. Hell yeah.

          2. To clarify, his warmup act and his banter with the crowd was funny, and would have been funny even if he had just been in street clothes. I agree with you the womanface is misogynistic and not funny.

    2. I watched a bit of this… waiting for the “FREE FREE PALESTINE.”
       I was denied my belly laugh but there’s always next time.
       🙂

       D.A.
       NYC

    3. Yes. Who knows where the organizations stand.

       I did note that in the comments at The Friendly (not!) Atheist they were linking to articles from Scientific American.

16. IANAL, but it sure looks to me, at least, that the consortium of Atheist organizations spearheaded by the FFRF, has gone way out of its lane to label Drs. Coyne, Pinker, and Dawkins as extremists and agents of discriminatory Christian Nationalism. Not a single qualifier is to be found in its public statement.

    That sure seems like deliberate, calculated defamation to me. Personally, I would consider exploring legal ramifications if this was happening to me, though I do NOT presume to speak for anyone but myself.

    1. I don’t think it would stick. Not on this side of the pond, anyway.

    2. +1

17. On the position, “equal rights, except for sports and invasion of women’s bathrooms,” etc.

    Can I discriminate against a trans person? Let’s say I’m a baker and I don’t want to make a celebration cake for a transition party. Or I’m hiring a staff for a new division of my company, and I simply do not want “Trans Trouble,” so I disqualify a trans candidate. In both cases, I verbalize my reasons in public.

    Have I committed a crime?

    The demand for “trans rights” goes all the way to the axiomatic foundation of human reality: it demands that an individual “is” what his imagination and volitional self-construction wills, and therefore earns protection of the law for all elements of that construction.

    1. Right you are.

       CFI seems squishy on this, conceding that there are rights grounded in gender identity alone that have to be balanced against other rights. Good for them in on two sexes but trans ideology finessed this ages ago. The CFI appears to be endorsing personality and ideological views about gender — forget about sex — as sources of rights, protected grounds against discrimination, which will continue endless dispute about where the balance should be, as you illustrate. CFI should have been more careful here.

       If I as a misogynist Marxist make my views known in a hiring interview for a financial firm made up of capitalist women, of course they’re not going to hire me even if I promise to try to fit in somehow. And certainly they won’t if I tell the HR interviewer that I expect the firm to celebrate May Day and Men’s Rights Month with me. I’ll be nothing but trouble. Can I sue the firm for discrimination?

    2. For the baker one, I am pretty sure that if you claim religious reasons you should have protection. But for the other other, I think you could be in legal trouble. The only justification for the matter would be shared restrooms, but there are reasonable accommodations that can be made. So I think there is trouble there.

       Btw, I don’t think describing transgender identities as being a matter of imagination or volition is quite right. Their identify is as real to them as ours are to us.

       1. The baker case hinged on the definition of whether cake baking was a private contract … like a club.. or a common carrier, like a hotel or railway.
          I can start a private club on whatever manias I like (“Only nude Jewish cigarette smokers as members!”) but if I hold myself out as serving the public I can’t.
          It is a pretty neat legal distinction I’ve always thought.

          The court dodged the issue though and threw it out on irrelevant grounds.
          PUNT!

          D.A.
          NYC

          1. What a shame I don’t qualify for membership! Nude Jewish cigarette smokers sound like they might be an entertaining crowd.

       2. On what grounds exactly is there likely to be trouble, Mark?

          A schizophrenic’s delusions are as real to him as ours are to us. But that doesn’t give a paranoid job applicant the right to insist that the employer sweep the workplace for microphones planted by Klaus Schwab’s WEF every morning. The employer would just tell him, sorry, you’re entitled to your beliefs but you aren’t going to fit in here. That’s what John (and I) are proposing the employer should be able to say to the trans job applicant. As an atheist baker I don’t have to cite religious objection in declining to bake a cake for a coming-out party. I just don’t want to do it because it might damage my business among the transphobes who outnumber the trans customers 1000 to one. Or it might not, but it’s my call.

          It would be OK for the trans-identified person to believe privately that he is the other sex, just as the paranoid can privately believe there are microphones in the walls, as long as neither belief degrades job performance.
          But if the employer requires all its staff to, say, dress appropriately as customers expect, and for employees to use the bathroom appropriate to their apparent sex by common-sense appearance, he can fire (or, ideally not hire in the first place) an employee who can’t meet those expectations on account of his gender identification. The state has no business telling him he has to remodel his bathrooms to accommodate the trans employee.

          An employer can refuse to hire any person for any reason, and a business can refuse any customer for any reason, provided the reason is not on the (short) list of prohibited reasons, like race, sex, and creed. (National origin is usually regarded as a type of “race” for discrimination purposes.) Some jurisdictions like Canadian provinces have much longer lists. If I refuse to hire or serve a person for the reason that he is a man dissembling as a woman, that is not a prohibited reason, unless it explicitly is. Of course the low-conflict approach is not to give a reason at all, just say, “Sorry, no appetite for that particular business” or “Here’s your severance. Give me your ID badge and security will walk you off the premises.”

          1. In the US you can’t just say “sorry, you don’t fit in here” for any protected characteristic. This includes the schizophrenic and the trans person.

             There are limits to what the law requires from an employer in terms of accommodations. This limit will vary state to state (just like minimum wage laws vary state to state), but there is still a federal minimum applicable to basically all private employers (IANAL).

             This does not mean that you can’t have standards, or have to accommodate dangerous people or situations (said schizophrenic who is off their meds, for instance). You can require them to obey equally enforced rules, and can fire them for disobeying said rules. If the drug is prescribed for a condition and legal to take then you cannot discriminate against them for taking a drug, including estrogen or testosterone. Unless this drug somehow makes it impossible for them to fill the job role they are applying for, or if already employed any job role at your company. Also if they meet the grooming standards for either sex you cannot discriminate against them for choosing the grooming standards of the opposite sex (this is sex-based discrimination). Neither in hiring, promotion, nor continued employment.

             People are more than one thing. So what most employers do who are bigoted against trans people in general is find a legally plausible other reason to hire someone else instead. I use the word bigoted here because trans people have a broad array of personalities. Not all of them are those who would cause any issues. If you know for a fact that a particular trans candidate would indeed cause issues, because of their past behavior elsewhere, then you have all the right under the law to not hire them for that past behavior, but not because they cross-dress or take hormones.

             This was a 6-3 decision including all current conservative members of the US Supreme court: https://www.dglaw.com/supreme-court-rules-that-federal-law-protects-gay-and-transgender-transitioning-employees-from-workplace-discrimination/

             There are, of course, exceptions for certain kinds of jobs and certain kinds of employers.

18. I read Professor Coyne’s banned letter for the first time. And the comments prior to the banning.

    It IS a tautology to say “a woman is whatever she wants to be.” That is sufficient to invalidate the entire movement.

    1. Maybe I’m being overly pedantic, but no it’s not a tautology. A tautology is something that is automatically true (for example the claim that “a bachelor is not married”).

       The phrase “a woman is whatever she wants to be” can be said to be circular, vacuous, question begging, flat-out false, and various other things, but it is not a “tautology”. Also, since tautologies are necessarily true, they do not invalidate anything.

       1. Coel, perhaps you are correct, technically. I suspect, however, it not a formal tautology only because it is … in fact … not automatically true!

          However, my general intention is this: transactivists WANT IT TO BE automatically true. They consider it a tautology, axiomatically and unchallengeable.

       2. The phrase was “A women is whoever she says she is”.

          Isn’t that a tautology?

          1. A woman can say that she is the Queen of England without it being true, so it’s not true that “a woman is whoever she says she is”, so it’s not a tautology.

             Interpreted literally (as I’ve just done) it’s clearly false. Trying to re-phrase to make a sensible interpretation out of it (“I define “woman” as anyone who identifies as a woman”) it becomes circular and question begging. Either way it’s not tautologically true.

             (Again, perhaps I’m being overly pedantic, but then some like the FFRF are lauding this sort of thinking.)

             1. An addendum: If it is interpreted as: “Any woman who says she is a woman is a woman”, then that is indeed a tautology, since it amounts to “any woman is a woman”.

                But on that interpretation the being a woman doesn’t derive from the saying so, it derives from the being a woman.

             2. I see your point. Thanks.

       3. Formally, I do not think it is a tautology, but it does evade the question of what a woman IS.

          1. It’s a nonsensical claim. The starting point is a woman, and the end point is whatever she says she is. So if a women says she is an elephant, she is an elephant, and this is a claim most of us would not agree with. What the writer is really trying to say is that ‘a man is whatever he says he is—including a woman,’ but she cannot say that, as she already has accepted that a man who says he is a woman is not a man, but a woman. It would have been so much clearer if she had written that ‘A woman is anyone who claims to be a woman,’ which is simply self-identification. Well, clearer perhaps, but still wrong in my view.

             1. Good explanation. Thanks.

    2. It also makes obscure what it means for a trans woman to “identify as a woman” if anyone who does so IS a woman. We have an infinite regress: To identify as a woman means to identify as someone who identifies as a woman, which means to identify as someone who identifies as someone who identifies as a woman, which means etc. It’s turtles all the way down.

19. Does anyone else find it difficult to believe that this trans insanity is really happening? Some days I feel like I must be dreaming it. It feels literally insane.

    1. Nearly every day, Denise.

       I wrote lately that I think our society has changed more in the last decade than it did during the 1960s.

       I’ll get some flak from some readers here I imagine but my argument revolves around the social contagions and moral panics (I count 5) starting a decade ago.
       Mass social media is the “vector” of these fevers – like cholera in a flooded town. A downside we didn’t see coming.

       D.A.
       NYC/FL

       1. The Internet in general has helped popularize ideas much faster than was possible back in the 1960s.

    2. +1

    3. It is really so insane that to most voters, Trump felt sane by comparison.

20. Biologists talk about the inter-connectedness of animals. How we can organize the world of animals into categories ad-infinitum. But at sex we have
    a discontinuity, human sex is a magical mystical rainbow spectrum that no biologist ascribes to any other species that use sex as their means of production. Strange that.

21. Now I largely agree with this statement!

    I’m not sure I do. As Sastra points out, just about all of it is tendentiously worded.

    … I think that LGBTQ+ individuals deserve exactly the same rights and dignity afforded to everyone else, save for a few areas …

    Again, I’m not sure I agree. I don’t agree with the “save for a few areas” qualification.

    As I see it, a trans-IDing male should have exactly and in full the same rights as any other male, save nothing at all! I can’t think of a single right that a male in general has, that a trans-IDing male should lose. (Ditto for any trans-IDing female.)

    If the above phrasing is, instead, intended to suggest that trans-IDing males should have some of the legal rights pertaining to females (but which males in general do not have), then, again, I can’t think of a single example.

    I am, though, open to persuasion on these points, if people give me specific scenarios where a trans-IDing male should indeed have the legal right to be treated as female.

    1. To press this further, once you agree a trans-IDing male should not gain any rights thereby, including any right, ever, to be regarded as female, then there become no such things as any trans rights at all.

       All you have left is that the state should not pass laws that deny trans people the right to sue over a property dispute or a tort, or laws that exempt from prosecution criminal assailants who assault or rob trans people, merely on the grounds that the litigant or victim was trans. Such laws would make them “without-laws” and would be struck down as denying equal protection under the law. As for any “unsympathetic” victim, judges should be very careful to instruct juries not to let their personal animosity toward the victim’s “kind” affect their judgment on the state’s evidence. Prosecutors would want to screen potential jurors to make sure no juror was eager to see a tranny-basher falsely acquitted. If thugs seemed to be getting away with tranny-bashing, some sort of inquiry would be in order but that is always a risk with juries everywhere.

       But no, I can’t see any circumstance where a man’s claim to be a woman should be honoured by anyone who doesn’t love him enough to want to. And if she stops loving him and kicks him out because he “came out as non-binary”, tough love, man. Nor should there be any DEI efforts to hire trans people, any more than there should be DEI efforts to hire anyone with a grievance.

    2. Sorry for overcommenting…In this discourse your disagreement is considered nonsensical because a person (even one with a penis and testes who makes sperm and has an SRY gene on his Y chromosome) who thinks of himself as a woman is female. The language has become completely bowdlerized (I think I’m using that term correctly?).

22. I have had some hope that “wokism” (in the sense of placing ideology ahead of reason) is declining. However, the fact that 16 secular organizations issued such a letter tells me that it is still very much alive. I still expect to hear, for example, that it is okay for a transgender woman to compete against biological women because a “transgender woman” is a “woman”. Of course, she is, but she is not a biological woman, which is the whole point of this argument. That some people do not understand such an obvious fact can only be explain by their “wokism” (as defined above).

23. The trans cult and apologists really don’t see the dynamics of a “gendered soul” and ALL the other commonalities with religion, do they? Dawkins has talked about the transubstantiation similarity.

    I expected more from atheists but evidently FFRF need a bearded old man in the sky fairytale to see how a religion/cult works.

    Trans is a cult – more than just a religion – b/c it encourages its victims to sever links with their support network/friends and “transphobic” family.
    Religions don’t do that, cults do.

    D.A.
    NYC

    1. (Trigger Warning: pedantry)

       JC is alleged to have said something like:
       He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.

       1. Christianity, like most (all?) religions, started as a cult.

    2. Can’t resist one more comment :

       IMHO – since you mentioned “gendered soul” :

       “Trans” might be thought of as short for transsexual, but this begs the question.

       I think “trans” means transcendence of the material and sociological prison of sex.

       That would clearly fit a gnostic concept of the world constructed by a demiurge whose work prevents its inhabitants from becoming like a god.

24. As the former President of American Atheists–years ago–and the former Executive Director of the Council for Secular Humanism (even more years ago) I do here publicly declare that Jerry Coyne is, in my opinion, right about this–first that most of the joint statement is right, but that Robyn Blumner’s is spot on. I strongly support the idea that transgender men or women should, in the vast majority of instances, suffer no disability or disadvantage from the gender. If I need an auto mechanic, a teacher, a writer, an attorney, a state representative, a US Congressional rep, a nurse, a doctor, a barber, or nearly any other person to help with something, I emphatically would not care whether the person was male or female, cis- or natal- male or female–and I’d strongly support laws and regulations to protect all people from the mindless, foolish, dangerous actions of the Christian nationalists and others. Only in very limited areas–who can be a rape counsellor, a prison guard, a battered women’s shelter staffer, and, in some cases, an athlete competing in explicitly women’s sports–would I favor segregation and regulation–and even there, I’d want care taken that it was rational not pointlessly discriminatory. And I would quite strongly support open discussion of these matters–and no insults or ranting over differences over definitions or needs for reasonable rules. People who want to disagree with me–but not who want to call me an asshole, etc.–are welcome to come to my blog–Letters to Free Country on Substack–and tell me why. Or to write a guest essay explaining in detail where I’ve gone wrong. Subscriptions are, now an d always, free to everyone.

    1. Thought I recognized your name, Ed.
       I’ll look up your substack.

       Around 2012-ish/Elevatorgate with that terrible Watson woman, a large fissure opened up in atheist-land between the wokes and the sane.
       best regards,

       D.A.
       NYC

       1. Yeah, Rebecca Watson was the numpty shouting how terribly sexist movement atheism/skepticism was, while at same time engaging in all sorts of drunken shenanigans (and yes, her partners were drunk!) at conferences. She also demanded we “listen and believe” all women, but cut to 2023, and she’s pumping out articles suggesting that the claim that women were raped on 10/7 was “propaganda”.

    2. If I need a nurse or a doctor, I would be more than a little nervous about any applicant who claimed to have been “born in the wrong body”. This would also apply to applicants for jobs as auto mechanic, bridge designer, airplane pilot, and many other positions that depend on interaction with the physical world.

    3. Thanks Ed! That’s very reasonable but not quite on point. There is a wide space between “suffer no disability or disadvantage from gender” and “the mindless, foolish, dangerous actions of the Christian nationalists.” Jerry edged into that space to say that “transwomen” should suffer no discrimination but they should be acknowledged as males (not females). He and others got tarred as a bigot and dropped from FFRF for saying that obviously true thing.

    4. You might not care if your airline pilot was trans. That is creditably broad-minded of you. But unless you are hiring a pilot to fly your own private plane for you, it’s not your decision. The decision to hire pilots is up to the airline. You, the one who doesn’t care if the pilot on your flight today is trans, are only a customer. The airline has to factor in many aspects of job performance in deciding whether a pilot applicant will make a good employee. If the employer has information that trans male pilots, or trans employees in general, cause more HR problems, such as demanding to share hotel rooms with female flight crew on layovers who don’t want them to, and refusing to share a room with a male crew, that is a valid reason, from the employer’s point of view, to not hire a trans pilot. (There could be compelling reasons to hire a particular trans individual for a particular job, at the employer’s discretion.) Or maybe the airline knows that customers other than you regard trans pilots as flaky and won’t fly with it, worried that their next flight will draw that one trans pilot. The customers might assume, with some justification, that the trans pilot was a DEI hire. If the airline is trying to back away stealthily from DEI it will not rush to be the first to hire a newly qualified trans pilot over the usual airforce vet guys.

       Those who want to add gender expression and identity to the list of prohibited grounds that airlines may not use to reject pilots have the onus to convince lawmakers that being trans is as deserving of protection and indulgence as being black. And then you want meticulous regulation to make sure that segregatory exemptions like rape shelters are not being claimed “irrationally”. I don’t think you can do the former and the administrative state shouldn’t be permitted to do the latter.

       1. “Those who want to add gender expression and identity to the list of prohibited grounds that airlines may not use to reject pilots have the onus to convince lawmakers that being trans is as deserving of protection and indulgence as being black.”

          6-3 the Supreme Court of the USA did this in 2020 already. Under title VII grounds (sex discrimination in employment). (Link posted in a comment above)

          Women make better surgeons than men. Should men be categorically barred from surgery schools and employment as surgeons? From a life-and-death point of view it’s at least as important a job as pilot. It’s just that the deaths are spread out over time instead of all at once.

          People are lawfully entitled to be categorical bigots (prejudiced against all members of a group based on assumed, or observed, predilections of some members of a group). Employers are not. At least not if the categorization variable is derived from a protected characteristic.

       2. It is illegal to discriminate in hiring based SOLELY or PRIMARILY on sexual orientation and transgender status and at the same time it is legal for business to protect itself against disruptive behaviors. When the person being disadvantaged by the decisions of the employers claims the behavior at issue is intrinsic to the status at issue and there is no clear legal conclusion otherwise in the court decision precedents, then that dispute could trigger litigation to clarify where the line is drawn.

    5. Thanks for the comment, Ed, and, as I wrote here, I agree with That I might be okay with the possibility of some rape counselors (and MAYBE some battered womens shelter authorities) being transwomen). As I wrote, agreeing with your caveat (and I am saying this for the third and last time):

       I think the second version, expressing Buckner’s views, is better than what I wrote, and it does summarize views I already held (but failed to express). While I still think that at present tranwomen should not compete against biological women in sports, and shouldn’t really be running battered women’s shelters, they should not be completely barred from that job nor from acting as rape counselors—so long as (as Buckner writes), they undergo a background check and the women residents of shelters or women being counseled for rape or sexual assault are made aware that the counselor is a trans woman (a biological man) and are okay with that. This view will, of course still be seen as “transphobic” by some extremists, but there’s a very good case for holding this view in light of the rights of biological women.

       1. Without asking you to restate your opinion, could I at least ask you who should decide if a specific trans-identified male counsellor, who is applying for a job in a violence shelter for women, should be hired? You say you might be okay with it but you aren’t making the hiring decision. You are speaking in the abstract. If you leave it up to the shelters, they will all say No, Nay, Never, Nay Never no more! Are you okay with that? The only people who are going to “completely bar” men from jobs in rape shelters are the shelter directors themselves, and they will probably do that until Hell freezes over. No need for the state to pass a law barring them.

          The way I interpret your view is that if a shelter did make the decision to hire a trans-identifying man (or any man) who seemed promising, you would respect that decision also and wouldn’t sue to block the hire. If so, fine. The specific conditions attached to whether it was OK for the shelter to make the hire would be up to the shelter’s Board and executive director, not to outside observers. Of course no one has to donate money (except through taxation) to an organization whose mission he can’t support. I’m speaking as such a donor. If the centre I support did decide to start admitting men as clients or hiring them as client-facing staff, I suppose I would trust that its Board knew what it was doing and would continue to support them. (Unless the Board was captured by a trans faction, which happens. See ACLU, SPLC, medical journals and associations, etc.)

          The reason I’m interested in this is that it speaks to the power of the state to regulate (or not) private behaviour, a bigger question than the tiny number of trans rape counsellors out there looking for jobs. If I don’t hire Mr. X because he calls himself a transwoman, do I get sued by the government? If I do hire Mr. X (to get the government off my back), do I get fired by the radical feminist collective that is my Board? (Why am I trying to run a shelter in the first place, and not a blood-donor centre or something simple?)

          1. Leslie MacMillan: Mid-size and large size employers are not allowed to discriminate when hiring people for being members of various protected categories (sex, race, religion, etc.). As of now, AFAIK, trans is not a protected category. I am not a lawyer, and what I am saying may be an oversimplification, but it responds reasonably accurately to your question about the “power of the state”.

             1. Thank you, Mathew Goldstein. So it follows that notwithstanding that someone thinks that employers ought not to be permitted to refuse to hire trans people, or be permitted to refuse them only under certain “women’s spaces” conditions to be defined meticulously (and vetted for rationality) by the regulatory apparatus of the state, in fact they are free to refuse them for any job at all (in the US, at least, where gender, or being transgender, is not a protected/privileged category. Not so in other more “progressive” jurisdictions, which is why your note was so helpful to my understanding.)

                This also means that if trans people have full “civil rights”, it means only that being trans doesn’t cause them to lose their civil right not to be discriminated against in hiring or public accommodation on the basis or race, (actual) sex, or religion. But they can still be discriminated against for being trans. So I don’t have to bake a cake for a trans coming-out party unless I want the business (which I probably do. Business is business.)

          2. “Unless the Board was captured by a trans faction, which happens. “

             This is exactly what happened at the Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre – a trans-identifying man, Mridul Wadhwa, was appointed as the centre’s CEO. Mayhem ensued, a member of staff was forced out of her job and won an employment tribunal – the judge was scathing about Wadhwa and described the treatment of the employee as “Kafkaesque”. Bizarrely, the CEO vacancy had been advertised using a legal exception allowing for recruitment to be limited to female applicants and yet Wadhwa was appointed despite the fact that he doesn’t even have a Gender Recognition Certificate so couldn’t even claim to be “legally female”!

             Rape Crisis Scotland, the umbrella organisation for rape centres in the country, has now spent more than a year considering its own definition of “woman”. Ceiling Cat alone knows when they will publish their decision. Meanwhile, most Scottish government and local authority funding for such organisations has a requirement that they be “inclusive”.

    6. In light of some of the further comments here, let me offer a bit of clarification: as I’ve written elsewhere, I’m not a biologist nor a psychologist–nor a professional ethicist. I don’t know what the “correct” definition of “trans” or “anti-trans” is. And I am certainly not competent to determine whether anyone would be qualified to be a nurse or an airline pilot. My own quite limited experience, professionally and socially, with people considered trans is that they met every high standard I was aware of for competence, professionalism, and reasonableness. I’m not striving to appear woke or to earn everyone’s respect for me as a social justice warrior. I certainly do care about social justice, but when it comes to some arenas of human endeavor, I’d need far more education in many areas to know what constitutes irrational discrimination as opposed to what constitutes relevant skills and qualifications. My interest is very much in having people who do have expertise discuss these matters without getting attacked, canceled, or insulted.

25. The wagons are in a circle or is that a ring as in circus… hmmm, it is frustrating to learn that these organisations are at sea with a truth and actively ignore what Jerry and others have actually written. I have no idea how clearly it has to be written before it is taken as a valid stance and not an all out assault on trans rights.
    There us nothing more to be said and Jerry is right to leave alone now.

26. Kudos to Robyn E. Blumner and the Center for Inquiry – that’s a great statement.

27. I’ve come across reports that employers are routinely starting to throw applications from one particular gender into the circular file — the “non-binary” (they/them.) These are the people who claim they’re neither man nor woman because neither one fits them but NO they are NOT just rejecting stereotypes thank you very much it’s TOTALLY different which they know because they KNOW.

    The reason being given by those who are hiring is past experience and word of mouth: these folks tend to be special snowflakes — quick to complain, unrealistic in expectations, and with a general air of grievance/obsessive concern that fellow workers don’t think they’re legitimate. It’s they/them. How many times do they have to remind everyone?

    Maybe. I don’t know. Non-binary is more firmly embedded in Queer Theory, though. Is this an illegal form of discrimination, or at least unethical?

    1. Unethical? The only reason the thems adopted this “gender” is to take advantage of the current gender insanity, cow others into submissions and displace better qualified candidates for the wanted positions.

28. CFI will never cancel anyone for questioning trans ideology?? There will be no mea culpa. Do not look in the past when Robyn squashed debate on the issue, removed a peer-reviewed paper that trans activists demanded be removed and canceled the branch manager that they demanded be fired, and never mind the kowtowing to the bullies who demanded the silencing of detransitioners, The Pique Resilience Project.

    Don’t look either in the past at how James Damore was smeared by CFI.

    Peter Boghossian was right. The cowards will never apologize. They will instead pretend that they never believed any of this stuff all along.

    1. Do you have to link to the paper that was removed? Who was the cancelled branch manager? All I saw when I searched for James Damore and CFI is this: https://cfiportland.org/event/james-damore-peter-boghossian-we-need-to-talk-about-diversity/. It is disturbing to hear he was “smeared” by CFI and that there was such censorship. All of the organizations appear to be ultimately prioritizing recruiting new members and donations over standing firm on principle, which is why as individuals our role should sometimes be as dissenters.

       1. I am the branch manager who was fired. I helped put on that talk by James Damore.

          The peer-reviewed paper Robyn censored was by Lisa Littman on Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria: https://littmanresearch.com/publications/

          CFI’s Paul Fidalgo misrepresented Damore’s position and mocked free speech. https://centerforinquiry.org/blog/8_9_17/

          The article Fidalgo linked to points to the Gizmodo reproduction of the memo with the references stripped out. Fidalgo does not point to articles presenting the opposite view. This was the last straw for my dear friend, Sylvia Benner, who brought CFI to Portland and was the branch manager; she resigned and I stepped up.

          It’s so upsetting that CFI could have been the leader in refuting all this woke madness, instead of coming out only in support of science when it is safe to do so. And then on top of that, claiming always to be in support of science, without any apologies.

          1. I agree. There appears to be no problem with the paper by Lisa Littman of the sort that reasonably justifies refusing to cite it (even before the review updates which improved the paper) and the denigration of Damore qualifies as being slander. There appears to be solid evidence for both rapid onset and for biological sex rooted preference differences that impact employment preferences, and neither should be denied, let alone be deemed disqualifying for contributing to CFI.

29. The so called ‘Consortium of secular organizations’ uses transgender rights to protect positions that they know are really unpopular (with good reason). I suggest asking where they stand on mutilation of children and sex testing in sports. Of course, they are fervent supporters of the former and totally opposed to the later. They are just playing motte-and-bailey games as need be.

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