Seriously, Richard? Dawkins Pushes TERF Declaration

So Richard Dawkins has signed, and is now advocating for, a "Declaration on Womens Sex-Based Rights."

For those who don't know what it is, here is the text:
https://womensdeclaration.com/en/declaration-womens-sex-based-rights-full-text/

I will link to Dawkins' tweet, rather than a news article, because the only articles I can find are extremely pro-TERF, and like fuck if I'm subjecting the rest of us to that bullshit:




For those not in the know: TERF = Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist
In short, a TERF is a person who believes transgender women (a person assigned male at birth based on genitalia but has thoughts, feelings, desires, identity, et. al, that are noted as female) are just men pretending to be women, usually to engage in some kind of perversion against "real" women.

It's popular amongst people like Dave Chappelle, J.K. Rowling, and now Richard Dawkins, who is finally agreeing with everything the fundamentalist Christians have to say about trans people. Guess bigotry makes for strange bedfellows, eh?

It's a weird reductionist sort of "feminist" that tries to define women soley by their uteruses and ovaries. Feels like something Republicans or the Taliban might do.

Exactly. It reduces women to their base components, their "usefulness" as baby makers, and essentially dismisses groups of women who fall outside of that as "not actually women."

The term "religious fundamentalist" doesn't always need a cross or a crescent, as we can see here.

Having known a few cis women who have had to have their female bits removed due to things like cancer, and some who were never able to have children to begin with, this does what all trans hate ends up doing. It comes down on cis-women and puts them in the category of it to feed the sexists in society. Trans women know they do not have these things from the start, and that is all too obvious to them. However, many cis-women have had to deal with these things later in life.

I would also not that in america and other racist countries people have taken to involuntary sterilization of minority women and this would just compound that sort of thing by allowing white society to finish the job by not only taking their organs and ability to have kids away, but also to take their status away.

One thing I will say is dawkins is evidence that a penis does not make you a man. Also, as a trans person I really did not ever rely on other people to tell me my gender because I do not give a fuck what a bunch of human beings think. Shit, most of them believe in Bigfoot, lizard people, the torah, the bible, the koran, harry potter, werewolves, vampires, and Incel atheists like richard. Genital mutilation is common across both genders because of gods and superstition. Yet those same assholes are going to tell trans people they are horrible for it while they cut babies dicks, and cut women's bits when they are older?

If the TERFs are going to accept dawkins and chapelle as their white knights then good. You cannot fix stupid, but you can giggle your ass off at it.

What makes a woman a woman? I don't know. Seems to be matter of values and philosophy, and mine are still evolving on this subject.

But I don't know that basing gender in biology (while granting reasonable exceptions) is less valid than basing it in stereotypes (lifestyle and personality) and self-perception. I don't know that it's only the TERFs who want to reduce women to their incidental components.

I do know that there are points in life where the interests of cis women and trans women conflict (e.g., in sports). And adding Dawkins to the list of so-called TERFs seems to be crowding it with very thoughtful, intelligent, and scientific-minded people. So who's to say it's wrong necessarily?

Is that something you know, or is it something you've heard and believed?

Can you cite some of the thousands (if not millions) of cis girls that have lost out on sporting opportunities as a side effect of their chosen sport being completely dominated by transgender athletes?

There are two realities to what we are. There is nature and nurture. Nature is basically the physical body, and nurture is basically what we end up learning.

Just so you know, most of what we have for gender identity is learned and therefor a part of the social construct of gender. You do not like pink and wear dresses and skirts because you have a uterus and female genetics. Yes, that means that wearing a dress is not going to make you a physical woman. I will agfree that some formastive personality and psychology comes from the associations formed in youth. I would agree that ideas of being the baby grower and realizing every month you are going to feel crappy and have other troubles because of your reproductive cycle has effect on the base of the formation of your personality.

Most parts of our personality are not developed by our sexual organs. Most of it is developed by identifying with a gender and then watching what they do and mimicking this. You are told a lot of what you should be doing. Look at high heels. Women do not wear them because they fit their feet better. Have you seen old women's feet? They fuck them up- because of the shoes they wear. That is not something you are born to do because you have female sex organs. This is how females in society are taught to be. Girls learn to put make up on. They learn to do their hair.

The same applies to boys too. This is why the fear of trans people and gay people is rooted so deeply in the people who rely so heavily on their gender identity. It scares most cis and straight people because it makes you feel less like a man if women are not different than you, and vice versa. You were just born liking your identity and have spent your whole life conforming to the construct and thinking it is your birthright. The idea of a girl becoming a man, or a man becoming a woman scares you to your core because deep down the only thing preventing you from being the other gender is your sexual bits. If you wander into the mens room and are standing next to The Rock you can look down at your dick and remind yourself that you are still a man despite being smaller and weaker like a woman compared to his masculine form.

I'm too tired for the inevitable "just asking questions" discussion.

But re Dawkins - this isn't out of left field, he's been effectively TERFy for some time now. Great Britain is overrun with that shit right now.

You give more answers than most of rightforge deserves or wants.

This is an interesting point. I actually don't place much of a value on my gender at all. If the Fairy God Mother transformed me into a woman overnight, I don't know that my life would be much different, other than getting a new wardrobe, learning to deal with menstruation, and adjusting the dating and sex dynamics. It would be an interesting experience to try for a month or two.

This is why it's confusing to me when people place such a high value on their gender, that they feel a strong need to be recognized in the category of their choice. Not saying they're wrong, just that I don't get it.

To your earlier points about nature and nature, I don't know that pink colors and high heels necessarily relate to womanhood and femininity. These are incidental aspects of Western culture that link the two, and in other cultures the link may not exist or be reversed. What does it necessarily have to do with my gender or sex, if I have these stereotypical characteristics or not? Too often it feels like ideas about gender are based on fickle stereotypes.

You would really not believe how much different it actually ends up being. Society has a whole bunch of expectations on men and women. Look at what happens to people who do not conform. Tomboys do not get treated well. Girly dudes do not get treated well.

I was a leader in many situations. For whatever reason, people looked to me. You would not believe how quickly that went away when I came out. Those were people who knew me, and supposedly liked me. It is a lot different meeting people as a woman. I am taken totally differently as a woman than as a man.

If I poofed you into a woman you would not even get to menstruation before you were ready to kill me to get your manhood back. Things would go different poofing a woman to a man. I am not the person to ask on that one as I know enough to know I have no idea how that would bother a woman, but it would. I will no longer speak fully on being a trans man because I know it is different. As a trans woman you are wading into a sexist world where you get the short end of the stick. You do not do it on a lark. You want to be that way, and it is going to fucking hurt.

I don't contest that it's more convenient, safer, and more respectable to be a man. Sexism still plagues most of the world. But that just makes it all the more puzzling to me that someone would choose to override their anatomy and go through life as a woman.

That is the thing. You do not feel everything other people do. Seriously, have you done some major halucinegens or dissassociatives? Have you seen the alteration of the perception of time for yourself? There are ways to perceive this world that you do not know.

To use a star trek reference, do you remember in Star Trak 3 the search for spock when bones asks spock to discuss death with him and spock says he does not have a proper frame of reference? Then bones gets angry because he realizes spock has just told him there is no way to discuss death because bones has never died. It works somewhat like that.

I will admit it gets into a strange area like religious faith, only there is some scientific basis for this. In this world we are contained within this body. All of the things we sense are processed and fed into our consciousness through this sensory vehicle called the body. Some very interesting things change when you change up the biochemical configuration of this sensory machine.

I would imagine there is something biochemical we do not know about that causes this. Sort of like how there is a biochemical way we can hear and sense a being called god within our own head. Much like god and religion gender identity and norms are a social construct that have very little to do with the physical body we exist in.

Oh yeah, he's been a TERF for a long while, unfortunately

I have an atheist FB friend who's as pinko liberal as you can get, but is totally when it comes to Dawkins.
Can't get through to him.

It’s not happening in the thousands or millions but it is happening. Conservative media loves to bring up Terry Miller and Andraya Yearwood from Connecticut. If there’s eight spots in a girls 100m race and two or three of those spots go to trans athletes then of course there will be athletes left out that otherwise wouldn’t have been.

If a small handful of transgender athletes doing well in competitive sports is enough to justify calling it a "conflict" then the domination of black athletes in various sports should be a full-blown international crisis, but I don't see anyone calling for the return of the Negro leagues so white kids can have a fair shot.

Worth mentioning again: Michael Phelps is an actual literal X-Men type mutant whose mutations allowed him to dominate swimming competitions, and no one is talking about stripping him of his medals for having an unfair advantage or banning other athletes with similar mutations. But cis girls with "too much" naturally occurring testosterone are getting targeted. Any guesses why there's such a difference there?

Also worth pointing out that the vast majority of cis women with "too much testosterone" who get targeted are black women.

There's a metric fuckton of overlap between TERF idealogy and white supremacy.

Been meaning to try psychedelics, actually.

And the vast majority of female athletes, regardless of ethnicity, have higher testosterone levels than non-athletic women.

Dawkins has been an asshole since...ever?

He's apparently gotten worse since his wife filed for divorce.

Was it the cause or the result?

I remember Steve Shives putting a video out saying he's put distance from the atheist community because the whole thing has become a boys' club that enables the exact same racist and sexist bullshit like this.

There's a good reason atheist and incel are interchangeable to many.

Which is a perfectly random outcome. Hell the girl who sued over those two beat both of them in subsequent races and she got a scholarship, not them.

What bigots need to do is show a PATTERN, not an outlier.

Which they can't, because no such pattern exists.

What weight do Dawkins' words carry? What power over you does he wield? What consequences can he impose?

Says the guy who blubbers and sobs and whimpers over pronouns.
Words go through you like wet toilet paper.
Just depends what words they are.

Yes, eroding free speech is one potential consequence, you fucking muppet.

Someone doesn't have to possess power over you before you can call them out for being a cunt.

Case in point: you.

All I'm doing is using my free speech to speak out about a man who wants to discriminate against transgender people.

You know why you do this every time someone says something? Because you know speech has consequences. You know it, and you know that deep down what people say matters, and so you have to speak up because it may just be possible you feel the same way, whether about this, or something else, and the notion someone can curtail your ability to use it against them frightens you.