"The Trans Delusion": My Argument with Anti-Trans Biologist Richard Dawkins
Hormones are poison, pronouns are silly, and most trans people are docile sheep. This according to one of the most famous thinkers in the world?
Damn, I didn’t expect to finish a book today, but here I am.
Not only have I finished writing, editing, and creating the art, but I coauthored it with the very famous evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, The Selfish Gene, and many other popular science books.
The kind of coauthor attention Richard has given me in the last day has simply been unparalleled, and I could not have written this 11-page book without him.
But let’s start at the beginning.
Richard Dawkins is a stalwart of American atheism. He’s rich, respected, and very powerful among certain nonprofits. People move out of the way to let his opinions through, and sometimes those opinions are truly odious. Like the time he told my friend Rebecca to shut up for being scared of men in enclosed spaces (it’s not as bad as being Muslim while female, Dawkins glibly asserted).
For years, I thought the guy’s whole deal would be having a blind spot about women, but recently he’s moved on to another group to completely misunderstand.
A few years ago, Richard started getting media attention by saying monstrous things about trans people.
This made some people wonder what exactly to do with him.
For his part, Richard apologized for some bit of his language, but never made a turnaround on the heart of the issue. He continued to appear on podcasts and at conferences and lament the growing “problem” of trans kids.
Then, in November 2024, the Freedom from Religion Foundation – which Dawkins unofficially advised – published an article by a nonbinary staffer, arguing for the basic trans-positive view that “a woman is whoever she says she is.”
Jerry Coyne, the brilliant-but-blindered Curmudgeon of Psychology Street, objected to the article. He called Grant’s rights-based definition of woman “a tautology,” and all but threatened to remove himself from the board if FFRF caved to what he saw as “gender activism.”
In his post, Coyne argues that he isn’t a transphobe, but:
“Transgender women… should not compete athletically against biological women; should not serve as rape counselors and workers in battered women’s shelters; or, if convicted of a crime, should not be placed in a women’s prison.”
Although the FFRF placed a disclaimer on Coyne’s article, they immediately received complaints, perhaps about the hostile work environment this would CLEARLY create for at least one member of the staff.
So FFRF leadership took the post down, much to Dawkins’ chagrin. He took the opportunity to discredit whoever spoke up as overly emotional:
“[Coyne’s post] didn’t represent the views of some of [FFRF’s] more emotional young employees, whose way of disagreeing with something was the now fashionable way of summary suppression rather than constructive debate.” It was “an act of unseemly panic.”
Coyne’s article was immediately archived in three places by allied organizations. But its removal from the FFRF site was so upsetting to Dawkins that he, Jerry Coyne, and the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker all dramatically resigned from the FFRF’s honorary board, citing FFRF’s censoring of Coyne’s anti-trans post. In response, FFRF accepted those resignations and disbanded the honorary board. Meanwhile, the Center for Inquiry doubled down in defense of Dawkins, Coyne, and Pinker (all three of whom are cis).
When Coyne shared those three resignation letters on his website, he included an earlier email from Pinker, in which the famous author wrote,
“It’s counterproductive to force people to choose between trans rights and scientific reality. Those who favor scientific reality will be alienated from the cause of safeguarding trans rights.”
Yes, that’s right, Steven Pinker.
If you force people into a rights-versus-science binary, they will rebel and choose their rights.
That’s right, Steve.
Do you want it a different way, Steve? You’re worrying me, here, Steve.
All of this wasn’t enough for Dawkins, who needed to take to Substack to unload his FINAL HOT TAKE (FHT) on this whole affair, in an essay called
Is the Male Female Divide a Social Construct or Scientific Reality?
(Heyyyyy, that’s another false binary!)
When I finally came to Dawkins’ essay, ready to read why he is so eager about this damn issue, I quickly became disappointed and irritated. A less curious engagement with the subject matter could not exist.
Worse, he mocks Kat Grant’s identity and calls their position –which, again, is that trans people exist – “silly.”
Reading this antiquated ignorance, I felt like inviting Richard to cohost a Substack Live, in which he gets to declare everyone’s gender, and we all have to nod and say “Yes, King Richard, I accept.”
(I ran this by people in my Substack chat and am pleased to report that people are down; come on over, Rich.)
But maybe he’s got no time for that, because Dawkins is now defending Donald Trump, America’s tyrannically anti-trans president and E Jean Carroll’s rapist.
Writes Dawkins:
“In America, the otherwise loathsome President Trump made the upholding of biological maleness and femaleness the subject of an Executive Order, as one of his first actions (perhaps the only good thing he has ever done) after taking office. I happily anticipate successful lawsuits against surgeons who, in violation of the first clause of the Hippocratic oath, have cut off the breasts of girls below the age of consent, for no better reason than an assiduously encouraged childish belief that they were ‘assigned’ the wrong sex at birth.”
The childish belief.
Assiduously encouraged.
Please.
Dawkins goes on for 8,459 words about this whole saga. He manages to talk about Rachel Dolezal, bird harems, identitarianism, and anorexia. Buried deep within this unstructured infodump is his argument, which functionally goes like this:
Maleness is mostly consistent.
Femaleness is mostly consistent.
Therefore trans people are not members of the sex with which they identify;
they are members of the sex to which they were assigned at birth.
But this isn’t actually a good argument against Kat Grant.
Grant clearly acknowledges that maleness and femaleness are mostly consistent. The area of interest here is the trans exception, and the ways in which minorities disrupt the overarching rules.
Not at all ignoring the problem, here’s Kat, offering seven ways people have tried to define “woman”:
“Some people define a ‘woman’ as someone with a vagina [1]. This presents problems, as transgender women who receive bottom surgery have vaginas.
So, then, perhaps it is someone born with a vagina [2]?
Well, what does that mean for intersex people, who are often given genital surgery at birth when their anatomy does not firmly meet criteria for a penis or vagina?
It can’t be based on whether or not the person has a uterus [3], because not only does that present issues for intersex people, but also women who have hysterectomies.
Even more issues arise if you attempt to define womanhood based on the ability to conceive children [4], or have a period [5], as it would also exclude women who have any number of medical conditions, or who have gone through menopause.
Maybe the issue is that there is simply too much potential variation in macrolevel anatomy. Instead, we should be looking at genetics. Does having two X chromosomes make you a woman [6]?
Or is it just that you do not possess a Y chromosome [7]? Even more so, this approach to defining what a woman is does not work the moment that you remember intersex individuals exist. The chromosomal approach is also a deeply impractical one, as people can go their entire lives not knowing their chromosomal makeup.”
Grant clearly knows that trans, intersex, and gender nonconforming experiences are minority experiences, and Dawkins begrudgingly accepts this, so what even is the problem, Rich?
He’s got it!
It’s the eggs that define the woman.
“I shall advocate instead what I shall call the Universal Biological Definition (UBD),” writes Dawkins, “based on gamete size. Biologists use the UBD as the only definition that applies all the way across the animal and plant kingdoms, and all the way through evolutionary history.”
Yes, Richard Dawkins’ inspiring definition of WOMAN has come!
Women are Large Gamete Producers!
A welcoming definition that is sure to inspire folk festivals for decades to come!
So.
That’s his argument: biologists are able to bifurcate all the other species into male and female based on the size of their gametes, and humans should just fucking live with it and talk like biologists, OKAY?!
I put Grant’s central argument next to Dawkin’s, like this, and pondered.
I decided I needed to write about this.
I emailed Dawkins, and asked him to review my image for accuracy.
For the next 24 hours, I would be going back and forth with Richard Dawkins, on a whirlwind tour of definitions, retorts, and getting blamed for Donald Trump.
Richard never found anything wrong with my summary of his anti-trans position, but he sure lodged a lot of complaints anyway.
Among them:
HE REFERS TO HORMONES AS POISON.
HE DOES NOT ACKNOWLEDGE POPULAR USAGE OF GENDER: “I don’t acknowlege [sic] or use the word “gender”, except in the grammatical sense. As in ‘La table in French is a feminine noun. Kivunjo has 16 genders.’”
HE BELIEVES MOST OR ALL TRANS WOMEN ATHLETES ARE CHEATERS.
HE IS OPPOSED TO TOP SURGERY FOR AFAB MINORS: “[I am] very strongly hostile to doctors who chop off the healthy breasts of girls [sic] too young to know their own mind.”
HE FEELS TRANS PEOPLE AND THEIR ALLIES GAVE AMERICA DONALD TRUMP: “If a faint note of hostiliy [sic] towards Kat Grant can be detected, it stems from my perception that it’s the thousands of people like her [sic], and appaently [sic] you, who are partly to blame for giving us – giving the world – the monstrous, loathsome evil that is Trump.”
HE THINKS MOST OR ALL TRANS PEOPLE ARE DELUSIONAL: “I’m not saying a majority of those who voted for [Trump] were motivated by hostility to the trans delusion. But…”
HE ACKNOWLEDGES EXACTLY ONE TRANS WOMAN: “I am aware of people who hold the vitalistic belief that they harbour some kind of opposite-sexed soul lurking ‘in the wrong body.’ I’m inclined to be sympathetic to those, such as Jan Morris, who reached this conclusion by independent and original thought.” [As did Kat Grant, but OK.]
HE THINKS MOST OR ALL OTHER TRANS PEOPLE ARE “DOCILE SHEEP.”
HE THINKS THE TRANS SUICIDE PROBLEM IS MADE UP OR INFLATED.
AND THAT’S NOT ALL!
After the paywall, you can get my 11-page book with Richard Dawkins.
It’s an entertaining, if lamentable, journey. Enjoy.
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