Richard Dawkins loses award over ‘demeaning’ transgender tweets

Evolutionary biologist stripped of ‘Humanist of the Year’ over remarks on transgender rights that ‘demean marginalised groups’.

Richard Dawkins.

Richard Dawkins has been stripped of an award by the American Humanist Association, which said that his statements on transgender rights “demean marginalised groups”.

Voting to withdraw a 1996 “humanist of the year award”, the AHA said that the evolutionary biologist and author of The God Delusion was no longer “an exemplar of humanist values” after his tweets appeared to question whether people could choose their gender.

Dawkins responded by claiming that the loss of the award would have little practical effect on him because it turned out that he had never used it. “Apparently the honour hadn’t meant enough to me to be worth recording in my CV,” he said.

The AHA acted after Dawkins made a comparison between transgender people choosing their gender and a woman in the US who had been a senior member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, despite it later emerging that she was white.

“In 2015, Rachel Dolezal, a white chapter president of NAACP, was vilified for identifying as black,” he said on April 11.

“Some men choose to identify as women, and some women choose to identify as men. You will be vilified if you deny that they literally are what they identify as. Discuss.”

In 2015, Rachel Dolezal, a white chapter president of NAACP, was vilified for identifying as Black. Some men choose to identify as women, and some women choose to identify as men. You will be vilified if you deny that they literally are what they identify as.

Discuss.

— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) April 10, 2021

After the tweet led to criticism, he followed it with another. “I do not intend to disparage trans people. I see that my academic ‘Discuss’ question has been misconstrued as such and I deplore this. It was also not my intent to ally in any way with Republican bigots in US now exploiting this issue.”

I do not intend to disparage trans people. I see that my academic “Discuss” question has been misconstrued as such and I deplore this. It was also not my intent to ally in any way with Republican bigots in US now exploiting this issue .

— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) April 12, 2021

The AHA said that this was not enough. “Regrettably, Richard Dawkins has over the past several years accumulated a history of making statements that use the guise of scientific discourse to demean marginalised groups, an approach antithetical to humanist values,” it added in a statement.

“His latest statement implies that the identities of transgender individuals are fraudulent, while also simultaneously attacking black identity as one that can be assumed when convenient. His subsequent attempts at clarification are inadequate and convey neither sensitivity nor sincerity.”

The censure by the humanist association was welcomed by other groups. Alison Gill, vice-president for legal and policy at American Atheists and a trans woman, said that it was not enough for Dawkins to claim he was just asking questions.

“Trans people are under constant attack across our country,” she said. “Implying that our identities are somehow fraudulent and questioning whether we even exist dehumanises us and helps justify this violence.”

Tom Holland, the author and historian, who has written about the enduring influence of Christianity, said that there was an irony, though, in the denunciation coming from secular groups. “Even the factions that define themselves as post-Christian are given to excommunications and denunciations of heresy,” he said.

Previously, Dawkins has advocated the use of preferred pronouns out of politeness, if not biology. “Is trans woman a woman? Purely semantic,” the professor of evolutionary biology wrote in 2015. “If you define by chromosomes, no. If by self-identification, yes. I call her ‘she’ out of courtesy.”

Dawkins, 80, said that he had accepted the decision of the humanist association and taken steps to expunge the award.

“Thinking to do my duty by deleting the entry, I opened up my CV,” he said. “Only to discover that there was nothing to delete.”

In his own words

“All the world’s Muslims have fewer Nobel prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge. They did great things in the Middle Ages, though.”

“X is bad. Y is worse. If you think that’s an endorsement of X, go away and don’t come back until you’ve learnt how to think logically. Mild paedophilia is bad. Violent paedophilia is worse. If you think that’s an endorsement of mild paedophilia, go away and learn how to think.”

The Times