On August 5, 2023, Richard Dawkins released an interview between him and Peter Boghossian, in which Boghossian complains that transgender is fake gender. As I explained elsewhere:
"In his remarks, Boghossian inserts small but powerfully offensive digressions: 'I translate the word ‘trans’ in my head as ‘fake,’ cause I get mixed up by the words' (22:45–58) and 'I don’t want to say ‘actually trans,’ because I don’t even know what that means.' (21:20–37) To him, 'trans' means fake, and since the phrase actually fake makes no sense, he won’t say anyone is 'actually trans.' When he calls someone trans, it isn’t a recognition of their gender; he’s calling them out as a pretender or a deluded person."
(That's from my article "Richard Dawkins Had Peter Boghossian on His Show" (unpaywalled "friend link" on Medium).
If you think something is fake, there often isn't very much to say about it. Boghossian however has found quite a lot to say about his nonbelief in God, and I guess now he's leveraging that talent to talk about his nonbelief in trans, which he assumes (or pretends to assume) is a parallel non-thing.
It occurs to me now: Other people who get bored by saying "fake things are fake" may tend to pick up the "reverse victimization" claim. If you believe something is obviously fake and that you're the only one brave enough to call out "the emperor has no clothes," the next thing you're worried about is whether you're bullied for saying so.
This may be helpful to retrofit an understanding of how transphobia works. When someone says I'm being victimized for having an opinion about trans people, we should ask what opinion they have about trans people. They may be starting with the assumption that there are no "trans people" because "transgender" isn't a real experience, feeling, or a thing you can be, and that it's only an adjective that means "fake." They don't have a lot to say about something whose existence they wish to deny, so they shift to focus on their right to deny it. Denialism, for them, as an ideology or activity, is not only pointing out what (they believe) is false but also about propping up their ego as denialists.
In their worldview (I'm hypothesizing), since no humans are validly transgender and people only have the sex they're born with (and perhaps the gender society imposes upon them, from which they may nonconform but cannot fundamentally distance themselves), the only real distinction regarding a transgender "question" is whether a person incorrectly believes transgender is possible or correctly believes it is not.
I have so many articles
I've written so much about transphobia and I invite you to read it.
On November 30, 2023, Dawkins posted a YouTube video essay that seems to be reciting from an article in The Evening Standard that he published in August 2023.
Dawkins had recently tweeted about athletic abilities based on sex. He apostrophized a particular audience (“you,” trans women) and concluded: “You can’t eat your cake & have it.”
Apparently someone reported the tweet as hate speech. Twitter briefly took down Dawkins’s tweet, but then reinstated it. Hence Dawkins complains in the video:
”A certain type of activist has a level of paranoid sensitivity that almost literally warps their hearing. You can say: ‘I disagree with you for the following reasons,’ but all they actually hear is: ‘Hate, hate, hate!’ So, instead of putting a counterargument, which I would be interested to hear, they resort to censorship. All too often, it goes further, and they boil over in virulent abuse. ‘Transphobe! TERF!’”
This is obviously a generalization. Possibly one person reported the tweet. A child might have done so. It doesn’t mean there’s “a certain type of activist” who was behind it. And many tweets end up suspended and then are reinstated for a variety of glitches. But assuming that a real person did report this for a real reason, Twitter’s categorization of their complaint wasn’t necessarily the person’s own assessment. When one reports a tweet, one selects from Twitter’s available categories to report it; Twitter doesn’t offer a text field to provide one’s own reason and explanation. A person who reports a tweet may have their own nuanced reasons for doing so, and their thought process doesn’t show up in Twitter’s report. Dawkins’s real complaint here is with Twitter’s corporate choices for how tweets are reported, removed, and reinstated, yet he’s angling his complaint at trans people, implying that the way Twitter reports work accurately reflects the way that queer people think, even though it mostly reflects the way that Elon Musk thinks.
He then brings up his 2021 Rachel Dolezal tweet yet again (which I've explained, both the background and the consequences). As well as his July 2023 YouTube interview with Helen Joyce, which resulted in “a restriction on our video’s license to advertise.” He complained of “the ludicrous hypersensitivity of the complainant. Those warped ears heard not reasonable argument deserving a reply but ‘hateful and derogatory content’ and ‘hate or harassment toward individuals or groups.’” He said: “I earnestly challenge readers to search diligently for literally anything that a reasonable speaker of the English language could fairly call ‘hateful.’”
“Does ‘hate’ mean to you what ‘hate’ means to everyone else? Or there’s ‘violence.’ The Oxford Dictionary defines it as ‘the deliberate exercise of physical force against a person, property, etc.,’ and that is certainly the meaning I understand.” And maybe one could add “incitement to violence,” he allows. He’s complaining about people who “redefine ‘violence’ to include the nonphysical.”
“If someone uses an incorrectly gendered pronoun, he says, “I might see it as a mild discourtesy, but if you see it as a violent threat to your very existence, then our interpretations of incitement to violence, and hence freedom of speech, are going to diverge sharply.”
He then cites a couple examples of trans people who have used the imperative form of the verb to exhort others to “punch” or “decapitate TERFs,” and he called these “a textbook example of incitement to real violence.” In choosing examples only from trans people and not from cis people, he’s implying that trans people are the only people who ever use violent language, and that there’s no such thing as transphobia.
"No doubt," he says, "I shall be labeled right-wing for writing this article, and that’s the most unkindest cut of all." He expresses no interest in analyzing why someone might call him "right-wing" (there might be a reason for it) and no awareness or sympathy of names that trans people are called — or physical violence they suffer — that are, in fact, unkinder than his "most unkindest" experience.
But wait, it goes on
Dawkins then brings up the case of one Harry Miller. He cites a February 14, 2020 Guardian article, so I looked it up. The Guardian says:
"Police officers unlawfully interfered with a man’s right to freedom of expression by turning up at his place of work to speak to him about allegedly 'transphobic' tweets, the high court has ruled.
Harry Miller, a former police officer who founded the campaign group Fair Cop, said the actions of Humberside police had a 'substantial chilling effect' on his right to free speech."
When I go further and look up news reports from the original incident, I find this from the Telegraph (24 Jan 2019):
"A docker from Humberside has been investigated by police over a limerick he posted on Twitter after an officer claimed it constitutes a ‘hate incident’ against transgender people.
Harry Miller, 53, from Lincoln was contacted on Wednesday by a community cohesion officer following a complaint that had been made about the plant and machinery dealer’s social media posts.
* * *
The married father of four was alerted to the investigation by his company directors after they were approached by officers trying to make contact with Mr Miller.
The complainant had managed to identify Mr Miller’s place of work, despite there being no reference to his business or his full identity on his Twitter account.
* * *
...[PC Mansoor Gul] confirm[ed] that he had spoken to Mr Miller for 20 minutes."
Furthermore, the website of Miller's own organization, Fair Cop, says he spoke to an officer by telephone:
"Harry Miller, a former police officer from Humberside, was investigated by police over a poem that he posted on Twitter.
A “cohesion officer” from Humberside Police telephoned Harry and told him that, while his tweets had not broken any laws, he should not to engage in political debate on Twitter “because some people don’t like it”. The officer cited 30 ‘potentially offensive tweets’, but the police have so far refused to identify the tweets they deem to be offensive.
Although no crime was committed, sharing the poem online was recorded as a hate incident.
That page continues (bolded emphasis mine):
In Harry’s words...
“PC Gul described it as a limerick. It wasn’t but that is beside the point. My retweeting of a gender critical verse had apparently so enraged someone from ‘down South’ that they felt it their civil duty to act as Offended-in-Chief on behalf of my employees ‘up North.’ Not that anyone from my firm of around 90 staff had complained, of course, but again… that’s beside the point. PC Gul rang my work, spoke to my MD, then spent 32 minutes lecturing me on hurt feelings and in-vitro body parts accidentally growing from a lady brain as I sat with my shopping at Tesco. Sarcasm, satire and talk of synthetic breasts was sufficient to prompt the most urgent of police intervention. That PC Gul didn’t appear in Tesco car park with his blues and twos blaring, I suppose, is a small mercy.
‘Were any of the tweets criminal?’ I ask.
‘No,’ says PC Gul.
‘Then why are you ringing me?’
‘I need to check your thinking,’ says PC Gul.
Right here, I'm not questioning whether Miller's account is accurate in all ways, and I'm not making a debate point over whether you like his description or whether you agree with the officer's actions. I am pointing out that this was a telephone call.
Dawkins illustrates the telephone call with stock video of a cop brandishing a pistol, pointing it through a doorway as he enters without the owner's permission.
Dawkins is saying that words are violence.
No "paranoid sensitivity" here!
Of course, since Harry Miller was himself a "former police officer," according to the Guardian, he and the PC (a former colleague?) likely had a reasoned conversation. He may not have liked it, and he may have found it patronizing, but by Dawkins's own definition of violence (physical force), the conversation wasn't violent.
As the Guardian reported: "Miller, 54, from Lincolnshire, said an officer told him he had not committed a crime, but that his tweeting was being recorded as a 'hate incident'." Furthermore, the judge ruled that Miller "reasonably" believed “that he was being warned not to exercise his right to freedom of expression about transgender issues on pain of potential criminal prosecution” (emphasis mine). Being criminally prosecuted (even if falsely or unjustly) is one thing. But surely Dawkins isn't saying that criminal prosecution is equivalent to violence? Because violence only involves a "the deliberate exercise of physical force," right? Yet here Dawkins (or his hired assistants) have chosen to illustrate a telephone conversation about the mere possibility of criminal prosecution as equivalent to one armed cop bursting with a gun into a former cop's workplace. What Dawkins is doing here is recasting a reasoned conversation as physical violence.
He goes on, discussing the phrase “assigned mammal at birth.” Dawkins says, “That’s what satirists do. They get good-natured laughs and perform a valuable service to society. ‘Assigned mammal at birth’ satirizes the trans-speak evasion of the biological fact that our sex is determined at conception.” The problem here is that the "laughs" at trans people's expense are not "good-natured" from trans people's perspective, nor do they provide a "valuable service to society" if "society" is understood to consist of trans people.
He concludes:
“But shouldn’t we just indulge the harmless whims of an oppressed minority? Maybe, were it not for a strain of aggressive bossiness which insists — not so very harmlessly, and not sounding very ‘oppressed’ — that the rest of us must humor those whims and join in. This compulsion even has the force of law in some states. And alas, we often zip our lips in abject self-censorship, because we aren’t as brave as J.K. Rowling and don’t fancy becoming a target of Twitter mob vitriol.”
Here, he's complaining about trans people's tone. Apparently, at least some trans people are bossy, and this means that they can't possibly be oppressed. An oppressed person should, perhaps, speak in a pleading, pitiable tone of voice and can never express anger about their own oppression; their ability and willingness to express anger, or to propose actionable solutions for their own liberation, somehow proves they aren't oppressed. Also, the fact that they aren't uniformly oppressed everywhere, and that some laws have been passed to remediate their oppression ("law in some states"), implies that they are oppressed nowhere. Since they are not oppressed, and merely speak with "aggressive bossiness," their "whims" don't need to be "humor[ed]."
He worries that "we" (non-trans people who are skeptical of trans people above all) may "zip our lips in abject self-censorship," or in other words, simply refrain from speaking. He does not worry that trans people might also self-censor.
He seems to think that trans people simply don't know science, and their "aggressive bossiness" means that their ideas need not be entertained. Never mind another cohort of people who is trying to say that it's important to be a jerk as long as you're telling the truth so that you can do real true science.
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