Oh no, Richard Dawkins, stop. He’s asked in an interview what he thinks of doctors being arrested for gender affirming care, and his old eloquence is completely gone. He stutters, he stammers, he struggles to get an answer out, and he looks for an excuse to evade the question — for adults, he asks, or children. Like it makes a difference, like there’s an age that justifies suffering. He finally gets out…
I had a wide ranging interview today with Richard Dawkins. In this clip, I ask him his views on the potential of jailing doctors who provide gender-affirming care pic.twitter.com/8dQtfVkcsS
— David Pakman (@dpakman) July 11, 2023
I would have strong objections to doctors injecting minors, children, or performing surgery on them to change their sex
Note that this does not answer the question. Should doctors be jailed for providing gender-affirming care? I don’t care if someone has opinions and objects, the question is whether it is right for the state to arrest care-givers for giving care?
OK, so he doesn’t think children should be treated for this issue — not that they’re getting sex change operations anyway, they might at best be given therapy and reversible puberty blockers. What about adults?
If they’ve thought about it properly
As if trans people don’t even think long and hard about it, and as if he’s the right person to judge if they’ve properly thought about it. He goes on to say that it might be OK if if they struggle
and suffer
over it. You can be trans, according to Dawkins, if you’ve been made sufficiently miserable.
What we’re seeing now is a fashion, a craze, mimetic epidemic which is spreading like an epidemic of measles or something like that
Oh, just go ahead and spit out the words woke mind virus,
it’s what you really want to say, boomer.
That doesn’t even make sense. Is measles a meme now? Is it really a good idea to compare a fashion
to a serious, life threatening disease? Is the state of being trans a biological disease at all?
Dawkins really needs to learn that if he doesn’t have an informed opinion on a topic, he should refrain from answering…especially if he’s just going to regurgitate that anti-trans crap that is so popular over there on the other side of the Atlantic.
This is elder abuse.
I can’t even pretend to care what Richard Dawkins thinks about anything much less something he knows nothing about.
Well, at least this is a testable hypothesis.
It’s been tested.
He is wrong.
This is just the old Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria lie due to Social Contagion and social media.
ROGD doesn’t exist.
Dawkins must be a big GOP fan then, I really have a hard time distinguishing this anti-LGBTQ ramblings from the far right’s hate spiral
and “change sex” is a classic binarist Dawkins
@raven #1
even if he wasnt a TER(F) I do not find Dawkings appealing in any regard
1) his arguments for atheism are everything but original, reading philosphers like David Hume , Jean Meslier, Nietzsche,.. is far more “enlightening. There have even been atheists in ancient Greece. And if you want to know aout atheism on modern platform there are plenty of other options, at least nowadays , who havent forgotten to release the parking brake
2) his biological expertise is obviously also not one of a kind, even without his TER(F) nonsense , he would be one anmong many
People have actually done real research on the timing of gender identity in Trans people.
As opposed to questionaires on anti-Trans websites populated by bigots.
Rapid Onset Gender Disorder doesn’t exist.
.1. Someone needs to teach Richard Dawkins how to use the search engine, Google.
..2. So why are Trans people appearing right now?
It’s a lot of things but mostly for the same reason gay people started appearing a decade or two ago.
They aren’t hiding in the closet any more!!!
They’ve always been here, but when you can lose your job or your life by coming out,… few people come out.
.3. It is the same with atheists, witches, and Pagans BTW.
Why are there atheists and Pagans all of the sudden?
Why was the USA 90% xian a few decades ago?
Up until a few centuries ago, being an atheist, wiitch, or Pagan was a death penalty offense in a lot of places.
Being an atheist still is a death penalty offense in 13 countries. I doubt there are many out atheists in Iran.
Here is a recent article on gender identity timing and Trans people.
https://fenwayhealth.org/new-study-undercuts-the-rapid-onset-gender-dysphoria-hypothesis/
True.
But The God Delusion was well written and appeared at the right time.
I give Dawkins some credit for speaking truth to power here, power being 2 billion xians, some of whom actually believe their mythology.
In a sense, being an atheist is picking the low hanging fruit.
“The gods don’t exist and heaven and hell don’t exist either.”
These days that is obvious.
The xians have had 2,000 years to come up with some evidence and they’ve come up with nothing.
@raven #6
if they cared about evidence, then they’d stop presupposing their god whenever they can
@ raven #5
“So why are Trans people appearing right now?
It’s a lot of things but mostly for the same reason gay people started appearing a decade or two ago.
They aren’t hiding in the closet any more!!!
They’ve always been here, but when you can lose your job or your life by coming out,… few people come out.”
I think it would be hard to overestimate the importance of the internet in the phenomenon of so many transpeople coming out.
Back in my day, growing up in the 50s and 60s, you had virtually no access to (1) good solid information and (2) other transgender people. You were on your own. And it’s not obvious to you what’s going on inside you. OK, you’re supposed to be a boy and yet you have this inexplicable attraction to “girl things”. How do you explain that, and what is the significance of it? You have no easy way of finding answers to such questions. Especially since you have absolutely no one you can approach to give you any help.
It was the internet that eventually got me out. When I learned that there were lots and lots of people in the world like me–I wasn’t some lone freak–it changed my outlook completely. And when I saw that there were so many people coming out and living their lives as themselves–that was something I never knew was possible. For a lot of years I’d kept so much bottled up inside me, and suddenly I learned that it didn’t necessarily have to be that way.
Coming out in the 50s and 60s would have been well-nigh suicidal. These days the possibilities are greater, though there are still many obstacles in your path.
It makes you wonder if there should be a mandatory retirement age for those past their “best before” date. Or at least exclusion criteria such as a maximum number of lies, racist garbage, etc. coming out of their mouths.
The ilk of Dawkins, Cleese, Maher, etc. have all shown they have nothing left to say. All they’re doing now is living off old glories and hoping to stay in the spotlight as their own light is fading.
100% agree. The level of arrogance and hubris Dawkins exhibits when offering his idiotic opinions on topics he clearly knows little to nothing about is mind blowing. This is Michio Kaku level stupidity.
You’d think someone so smart would recognize when they’re clearly suffering from Dunning-Kruger, but clearly not.
Ugh. I can’t say that I’m surprised.
Antivaxxers are going all-in on transphobia too, but they’re now co-opting evolutionary arguments in a way that makes my brain hurt—and not from thinking but from neuronal apoptosis from the blithering waves of ignorance snd stupid.
https://popularrationalism.substack.com/p/evolutionary-analysis-of-the-trans
I sometimes think it’s the “smartest” people who are most prone to Dunning-Kruger when they venture into areas in which they are not experts, because they think they can pick up anything and they are very good at motivated reasoning.
In Australian news: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-07-13/qld-medical-insurer-drops-cover-private-doctors-gender-dysphoria/102592298
This is not a time to debate or take issue with Dawkins’ latest pronouncements. This is a time to solemnly say goodbye to him, and to acknowledge that advanced age and cognitive decline have taken their toll, and his best years are behind him.
Some while ago I noted a dichotomy in that people raised atheist found Dawkins to be insufferable already decades ago. Our parents who were raised religious but became atheists, liked him until recently.
Dawkins is 82. I’m 75. I guess I’m young enough to blame his stupid narrow mindedness on his age, his age-related cognitive decline, or something. Sadly perhaps it says something about what I have to look forward to. I hope not. As of now, I don’t think I’m too prone to age-related ignorant bigotry even though I’m 75 and was raised in a climate of ignorant bigotry. It baffles me that a person with his cred, his standing should take such ridiculous stances. He apparently isn’t even smart of enough to know that he’s being interviewed by David Pakman, who could be counted on to ask thorny, complex questions, and should do some homework first. I can only marvel at his ineptitude.
I wonder if others watched a different clip.
Dawkins seemed mentally competent enough to me, but trying hard to be as evasive and anodyne as possible while not repudiating his evident opinion.
(And remember, if we make it there, we too shall be that age)
[meta]
Seriously, Robro.
“Dawkins is 82. I’m 75. I guess I’m young enough to blame his stupid narrow mindedness on his age, his age-related cognitive decline, or something.”
I was born in 1960, so you are older than I am by a greater margin than Dawkins is older than you.
#18: John Morales
[…]
“Dawkins is 82. I’m 75. I guess I’m young enough to blame his stupid narrow mindedness on his age, his age-related cognitive decline, or something.”
I was born in 1960, so you are older than I am by a greater margin than Dawkins is older than you.
Errm, if you were born in 1960, you’re 63 now.
Something needs to be corrected there…
Sorry, can’t edit, so following up…
Sorry, I misread. The point you seem to be making just doesn’t make sense to me, which may explain that…
nomenexrecto: “Something needs to be corrected there…”
No, someone — that being you. Therefore:
(82-75) < (75-62) was the ostensible point.
Perhaps Robro got the insinuation, perhaps not.
Note that since I was born in 1960 I am in my 63rd year but am only 62 years old until I hit my birthday in November.
“When Goldman and Kropotkin argued about sex” (YT link):
(There’s too much ambiguity about the word “sex” in this anecdote, but I assume it was meant in an inclusive sense as it relates generally to patriarchal oppression and the possibilities of liberation.)
John Morales @ #13:
Stop threadjacking, John. :P
raven @ #5, thank you for that. Very interesting.
It’s not a hypothesis. It’s a crackpot notion used to foment a moral panic.
Wikipedia on Free Society/The Firebrand, the paper Goldman and Kropotkin are discussing:
Reminds me of my grandfather’s favorite political meme: I come before you to stand behind you and speak of something I know nothing about!
@SC (Salty Current) #25
But but it says “both sexes”. Checkmate wokeists! (casually ignoring its age)
Dawkins seemed mentally competent enough to me, but trying hard to be as evasive and anodyne as possible while not repudiating his evident opinion.
If I wanted to be really charitable, I suppose one could interpret it as Dawkins starting (if only just barely) to come to grips with the likely consequences of his bigotry becoming public policy.
I absolutely love that he cites Jan Morris.
Delicious.
Grace
… it’s what you really want to say, boomer.
Dawkins, born in 1941, doesn’t fit in the “boomer” box: never has, never will. /nitpickery
[since it’s quiet]
Pierce, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OK_boomer
Basically, a form of ageism. A touch less overt than Robro’s version, but there.
(Or, it’s not literally about boomers, it’s about being old-fashioned)
I have heard a saying “old age makes your worst qualities worse” or something like that and I think it’s true with respect to Dawkins. He was always a know-it-all who thought he could easily walk into new territories and drop pearls of wisdom. In some areas he was right, for example, it doesn’t really a genius to figure out that all the arguments for the existence of God are bullshit and so it worked for him there. But in all the other actual intellectual areas, it just has not. He immediately reveals that he is out of depth. He was basically the atheist equivalent of J. B. Peterson in that aspect.
I was a Christian into my thirties before I became an atheist, and Dawkins’ supercilious manner has always rubbed me the wrong way. Is it strange that I didn’t have the same problem with Hitchens?
The whole point of the original D-K paper was that people afflicted by the problem it identified were unaware of it… The paper’s title was “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments“.
That inability to recognise that you’re suffering from it is the key factor which distinguises it from common-or-garden cluelessness.
lotharloo:
“He is an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford, and was Professor for Public Understanding of Science in the University of Oxford from 1995 to 2008.”
“Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt.”
Dick needs to spend more time being quiet.
@32: He’s also had at least one stroke. Make of that as you will.
@37,
googling this reveals “minor stroke in 2016”, so I don’t think this is relevant now, and I see no obvious sequelae.
Watching the interview, he tries to give answers to very vague and somewhat stupid questions, so I would want to cut him some slack for stammering a bit trying to see what on earth the interviewer is actually asking him.
The answers he does give eventually are predictably wrong, and it is disappointing.
Age is a real thing and I certainly resemble my own remark! I found that in my volunteer work so long as I showed up and performed my role more or less adequately, the organization was quite happy to let me expire in the saddle, so to speak, rather than make the effort to recruit a younger generation. So, I retired. Hung up my spurs. Got me a rocking chair on the porch and an old hound dog.
Whattya know, suddenly a new crop of volunteers came out of the corn field. My evil plan worked!
I don’t regret stepping back. Like the song says, you got to know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em.
John Morales @ #31 — You seem to get my point but perhaps missed my tongue-in-cheek. I need to work on satire. Ageism appears to be a form of bigotry that some people are oblivious to and/or comfortable with, and find a handy way to chastise someone for saying something stupid in public.
Doc Bill @ #39 — I’m facing something of the same problem, only if I retire now the organization I work for can’t replace me due to hiring constraints. So, a warm old body is better than no body at all.
@John Morales
Since 2008, the position was given to Marcus du Sautoy, a mathematician.
Professor for PUS? Shouldn’t that be given to some aging punk? Perhaps Johnny Rotten? ;)
@38: I kinda figure that said minor stroke basically demolished his filters. Or at the very least, let his mask slip so we can see him for the base metal he always was. I wouldn’t be surprised he’s always had that streak but he doesn’t try to cover it up since 2016.
robro @40, fair enough. Too subtle for me.
The problem is he believes he has an informed opinion…
So is this Dawkins admitting that it’s actually completely possible to change sex and any past claims he made about “immutable biological sex” were a lie?
…and that he absotively posolutely has to be part of everyone’s conversation…