Dawkins loses humanist title

[Belacqua]

I think that Dawkins loses freethinker points (as well as humanist points) with the Dolezal comment. That particular comment reflects the values of neither.

Here is the tweet in question:

In 2015, Rachel Dolezal, a white chapter president of NAACP, was vilified for identifying as Black. Some men choose to identify as women, and some women choose to identify as men. You will be vilified if you deny that they literally are what they identify as.

Discuss.

So he starts off by appearing to equate Dolezal's case with that of trans people. If we give him the benefit of the doubt, we might interpret him as saying that the cases could be equated, but that he isn't doing so. And he's inviting us to discuss the difference between the cases. He's certainly guilty of clunky writing and being careless on a topic that he should have known you have to be careful about.

Worse, though, is that his wording does deny that trans women are women. He says "Some men choose to identify as women," etc. This says that the people who are identifying as women are not women -- they are men who are identifying as women. And the same with "some women choose to identify as men." In this statement, it is women who identify themselves as men, not men (assigned female at birth) who are revealing that they are really men. 

In his "clarifications" afterward he still doesn't seem to realize what he's saying. 

His statements are made so poorly that it's hard to tell, but the real problem here may well be scientism. If he thinks that gender is determined by science alone, and not culture, personal inclination, etc. -- all things that science can't determine by looking at chromosomes -- then he is guilty of scientism. 

For some people, scientism is just an epistemological error. But in Dawkins' case scientism has been his career and is certainly an ideology. So this controversy boils down to a clash of ideologies on both sides. 

Mostly, though, I think Dawkins is just cementing his reputation as an old man who thinks he knows more than he does, and isn't willing to listen.