(I don’t find myself on the same side as Richard Dawkins much, but he got this one 100% correct.)
New book warns against denial of scientific truth by ‘astonishingly vicious’ trans activists and other threats on science
The slogan “trans women are women” is scientifically false and harms the rights of women, Richard Dawkins has said.
In a new book, the evolutionary biologist warns that scientific truth must prevail over “personal feelings” and argues that academic institutions must defend facts above emotion.
In The War on Science, Dawkins joins several scientists and philosophers contending that academic freedom and truth in universities was being stifled by diversity, equity and inclusion policies that promoted falsehoods under the banner of social justice.
“I draw the line at the belligerent slogan ‘trans women are women’ because it is scientifically false,” he said. “When taken literally, it can infringe the rights of other people, especially women.
“It logically entails the right to enter women’s sporting events, women’s changing rooms, women’s prisons and so on.
“So powerful has this postmodern counter-factualism become, that newspapers refer to ‘her penis’ as a matter of unremarked routine.”
Dawkins told The Telegraph that the trans-activist community had become “astonishingly vicious”, hounding people out of their jobs and calling for women who disagreed with them to be decapitated and physically assaulted.
He warned that even senior publishers were bullied by junior colleagues into censoring their authors who did not accept that men can become biological women.
“Both politics and personal feelings don’t impinge scientific truths and that needs to be clearly understood. I feel very strongly about the subversion of scientific truth,” he said.
“I think part of what’s happened is the move of academia towards postmodernism, which is pernicious, and probably does account for the current vogue for the nonsense lie that sex is a spectrum.
“There’s this post-modern hubris which presumptuously and falsely dismisses science as a social construct. The human conceit here is the idea that personal feelings can change reality.
“I have been told by publishers that they are under strong pressure from junior members of staff to censor books for this kind of reason, and the astonishing viciousness of the trans lobby, they are very dogmatic and hectoring.
“JK Rowling can look after herself, but you look at the way they hounded Kathleen Stock out of Sussex University, and it’s always women who suffer.”
At London Pride demonstration in 2023, Sarah Jane Barker, previously Alan Barker, told a crowd, “If you see a Terf punch them in the f------ face.”
Dawkins said: “I don’t think I’m unduly guilty of sexist stereotyping if I say such language is more typical of the sex that ‘Sarah Jane’ claims to have left that the other she aspires to join.”
In the new book, Dawkins explained that believing sex was on a spectrum was a “denial of genetic reality”.
He argued that female gametes were much larger than male gametes – known as anisogamy – which was how biologists determined male and female.
He said: “A politically powerful lobby today thinks your sex is not genetically determined but is malleable under your personal whim. If you feel you’re a woman you are a woman.
“Amid a rainbow of sexual habits, parental practices and role reversals, the one thing that remains steadfastly constant is anisogamy.
“There are welcome auguries that the fashion is finally on the wane, at least in Britain.”
The new book was edited by Lawrence Krauss, the Canadian-American theoretical physicist who believes that the diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) agenda is a huge threat to universities.
In the introduction, Krauss warned that Western universities and science institutions were “no longer guaranteed to be places where the free and open exchange of ideas is encouraged”, or where research can be carried out “unhindered by ideology”.
When The Telegraph carried out a poll of academics last year, nearly one third did not agree that sex was binary.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/09/25/richard-dawkins-trans-women-slogan-scientifically-false/
No comments:
Post a Comment