Richard Dawkins has been trending on social media for days. Usually outrage mobs get sore arms if they hold their pitchforks aloft for more than 24-hours, but in this case, they’ve made an exception.

What was Richard Dawkins’ great crime?

He sat down for a chat about ‘sex’ (or ‘gender’ as the trendy would say these days). Worse, he committed this sin while being a former darling of left-wing thought who has long-railed against religious doctrine and now finds himself at odds with a genuine leftist cult.

Speaking on his podcast, The Poetry of Reality, he said:

‘Sex really is binary. No question about it. You’re either male or female and it’s absolutely clear you can do it on gamete size, you can do it on chromosomes… To me, as a biologist, it is distinctly weird people can simply declare, “I am a woman (though I have a penis)!”’

Kinky.

He went on to call it an ‘odd distortion of reality’ – which is an understatement to people who find themselves labelled as hateful bigots for telling blokes to leave the women’s bathroom.

As someone cleverly pointed out in the comments to this podcast, written in response to one of those ‘but gender is a social/cultural/feeling construct’ replies, sports are not played with philosophical statements – they are played with biological ‘sexed’ bodies. Therefore, if the transgender argument is that gender is something other than biological sex, it does not follow and cannot be argued that transgender people should access sex-segregated activities in which ‘gender’ is being used with the intended translation of ‘sex’.

For example, when women’s sports was created, it was not intended as a category for ‘people who feel as they are women’. It is a deliberate biological segregation to give women a fair go at competition. The inclusion of transgender individuals appears to be a fleeting experiment, as sporting bodies finally bow to pressure from furious women.

In the interview, Richard Dawkins was speaking with author Helen Joyce. She said, ‘I don’t think that “male” and “female” are prizes for effort. They are just observations of categories that we are…’ She went on to say that ‘this is a linguistic movement’. It is an interesting observation, and goes a long way to explaining why censorship – particularly from Australian levels of government – is being employed as barbed wire to keep public criticism out of the conversation.

Here is my conversation with @HJoyceGender on 'The Poetry of Reality', tackling the influence of gender ideology on society, the ideological lens, and its implications for scientific facts. #PoetryOfReality #GenderIdeology #Science pic.twitter.com/jDek4wwdmY

— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) July 29, 2023

The podcast contained a ruthless discussion where nearly every sentence stirred the bristles on the backs of keyboard warriors. They are yet to recover.

‘Science is all about reality,’ said Dawkins. He has spent his whole life within the fold of the scientific community. ‘Science and reality have come up against some competition.’

Richard Dawkins has been stuck with the pointy end of aggressive trans activism before when he was stripped of his Humanist of the Year accolade because of his ‘offensive’ comments on transgender – 25 years after he was given the award.

On that occasion, he was accused of ‘demeaning marginalised groups’ using ‘the guise of scientific discourse’ – which is another way of saying that biological reality, expressed by a person of science, demeans a group of people. This is the same thing as ‘demeaning overweight people by reading their weight on the scales’. It’s an interesting form of victimhood that forces the rest of the world to misshape itself to preserve the serenity of delusion.

‘To be honest, I had actually forgotten that I ever had that award, but it is upsetting when your own side turns against you, of course,’ said Dawkins. ‘I’d never worried about religious fundamentalists disliking me, but when it’s your own team, it’s upsetting. It’s a remarkably foolish thing for them to do, because all I did was raise a subject for discussion.’

In the podcast, he lamented, ‘People think I must be right-wing because “everyone” who agrees with me is on the right.’

He is apparently yet to learn that inviting a discussion that might weaken a lucrative bit of activist propaganda is one of the new deadly sins in the Cult of Woke. There is no longer a ‘left’ but rather a collection of ideological cults shuffling together, loosely bound by a single political god.

Dawkins made other comments during that particular interview that readers of this publication, and the writer of this article, disagree with. For example, he discussed the ‘selfishness’ of the ‘anti-vaccination movement’ during Covid, stating: ‘They just think it’s a matter of individual liberty. They don’t realise that refraining from vaccination for no very good reason is rather like driving on the wrong side of the road … we do owe a certain curtailment of individual liberty in the interests of society.’

We will watch with interest to see if this particular discussion changes as the science chips away at the dogma we had to wade through as a global society during the Covid years.

Returning to the transgender question, Richard Dawkins’ July 26 article in the New Statesman proclaimed, ‘Some argue that lived experience and personal choice trump biology – but they are wrong.’

No doubt adding to the online outrage, Dawkins wrote in support of politeness toward using people’s preferred pronouns, but then added:

‘They [transgender people] have a right to that respect and sympathy. Their militantly vocal supports do not have a right to commandeer our words and impose idiosyncratic redefinitions on the rest of us. You have a right to your private lexicon, but you are not entitled to insist that we change our language to suit your whim. And you have absolutely no right to bully and intimidate those who follow common usage and biological reality in their usage of “woman” as honoured descriptor for half the population.’

What is particularly interesting is the way in which this (enraging?) article from Dawkins was published.

On his blog, Dawkins revealed that the piece was apparently commissioned, but then only published after a long lay over that resulted in the need to publish an opposing view to go with his view. ‘They were having trouble finding one, and I think it shows…’ When an opposing view was finally found, he described it as not making ‘any coherent sense’.

All of this, including the full interview, went up onto social media.

For Australian viewers, we might ask ourselves if we will even be allowed to see these tweets from Richard Dawkins, let alone watch his discussions, if they are deemed to be ‘misinformation’, ‘disinformation’, or ‘harmful’ under Anthony Albanese’s new laws…

Something tells me that science has a few more adversities to overcome if it intends to survive the selfish gene of activism.

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Flat White is written and edited by Alexandra Marshall.

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