Transgender ideology amounts to a "distortion of reality," noted atheist and biologist Richard Dawkins commented on his podcast "The Poetry of Reality."
Dawkins discussed the topic with "Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality" author Helen Joyce on Saturday’s episode where he reiterated that sex is a "binary" concept.
"Sex really is binary. 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’s distinctly weird people can simply declare ‘I am a woman though I have a penis,’" Dawkins insisted.
He later asked Joyce, "What do you think lies behind this odd distortion of reality?"
While Joyce didn’t have a clear answer on the growth of the gender ideology, she noted that it appears to be treated differently than other issues.
"I would say that when I started to write about it first, I quickly realized that this wasn’t treated the same way as anything else. Just asking various obvious questions like ‘don’t you think that if we allow people to self-identify their sex this will lead to, for example, destroying women’s sports or putting rapists in women’s jails?’ People would turn this back on me and say ‘you think that trans people are predators.’ Or ‘you think the trans people are in bad faith. You’re a bigot.’ And I hadn’t experienced that before in about 14 years as a journalist" Joyce said.
She added, "I slowly became aware that what we were talking about here is an intensely linguistic movement. And there isn’t a sense in which a man can become a woman except linguistically. Yes, okay, he can have operations, and some people do. Most trans people don’t have any operations, don’t take any medicine, don’t have any genital surgery. But that doesn’t change your sex."
Both Joyce and Dawkins agreed that sex has been determined on an "evolutionary" level with Joyce suggesting that the rise in transgender ideas comes from viewing these classifications as "oppressive."
"The only sense in which a man can become a woman or a woman can become a man is by saying so. It’s a speech utterance. And so, I’ve come to see, I think there are many things happening here. There’s things happening in medicine, in politics, but one of the things that’s happening is the long-run, maybe two- or three-century move towards seeing categories and classifications as inherently oppressive," Joyce explained.
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"So people think heteronormativity is a bad thing. They think that the traditional family is constraining," she noted.
Dawkins also criticized the growing transgender movement for "reverting to stereotyped girls like pink and boys like blue."
"It’s a stereotype that I kind of revolt against and yet it seems to be increasingly fashionable," he noted.
He concluded that while he would be willing to refer to people by their preferred pronouns, he refused to refer to biological men as women.
"To say ‘I am a woman’ is a debauchery of language and that’s where I draw the line," Dawkins said.
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In February, Dawkins made a similar attack against academics who called for the avoidance terms like "male" and "female."
"I am not going to be told by some teenage version of Mrs. Grundy which words of my native language I may or may not use," Dawkins said.
In March, he also declared, "As a biologist, there are two sexes, and that’s all there is to it."
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