Tag: Richard Dawkins

Climbing Mount Insufferable

As someone who’s not entirely science-illiterate but still not a lot better than that, I value scientists who do know what they’re doing in their field (especially if they’re good at making me understand it at least slightly). And then sometimes you wish they’d have stuck to their field instead of branching out into areas they probably shouldn’t have gone near…

Two tweets by Richard Dawkins: Those who say sex is a spectrum don’t realise how rare intersex humans are. Frequency histogram runs out of graph paper, so represent frequency of unambiguous males & females by NY’s twin towers respectively. Then frequency of intersexes is a medium sized molehill. Sex is binary. Fausto-Sterling falsely said intersex frequency 1.7%. Hence eager myth, “common as red hair”. She included Klinefelter (XXY unambiguous male) Turner (X0 unambiguous female) syndromes. True figure 0.018%. Anyway irrelevant to trans “existence”: they don’t claim to be intersex.

…like Richard Dawkins branching out into political issues. I would consider his atheist activism as part of that political activity, including his advocacy for the Smugs… sorry, the Brights, and the results of that haven’t always been pretty, but his further problems with trans people have been even less so. And…

Look, I’m no scientician so I don’t know how fair or accurate this claim is, and I’m not always the best at logic either… but even I can tell this is bullshit. Rarity and non-existence are NOT the same thing, Richard. 99 out of a hundred people may well be “unambiguous males and females”, but the other one still exists. Maybe 0.018% is statistically insignificant if you want to call it that, but that 0.018% is still real. (Indeed, going by the current US population, that amounts to a bit over six million people who actually exist as intersex.) They’re the blip that stops the binary from being 100% absolute. The genetic mutations that eventually produced Homo sapiens, and which separated us out from, say, the Denisovans or the Neanderthals, would’ve been similar blips, therefore by Dawkins’ logic above they don’t count and so evolution didn’t happen and he himself doesn’t exist…?

But such coverage as I’ve seen of this stuff on social media hasn’t mentioned the second tweet, which I think is key to what he’s actually trying to say… I mean, the quotation marks around “existence” are kind of telling in themselves, but even though he says all this is “irrelevant” to trans people, I feel on some level it’s actually all about them, really, cos the worldwide population of trans folk is about the same as that of intersex folk, probably a bit more so but generally considered somewhere between 0.1 and 0.6% of people. Which, even at the low end of that scale, still means about 34m trans people fucking with the gender binary just in the US… and in basically trying to say intersex people don’t matter and the binary is still real, I think Dawkins was trying to covertly say that trans people don’t either.

And even if I’m reading him wrong and being uncharitable, which I quite possibly am, there’s still something weirdly mean-spirited about the entire thing. I don’t understand why this was a point he felt so strongly about making. Maybe it’s one of those “secular Christian” or “cultural Anglican” thing. I used to think Lalla Ward was kind of callous divorcing him in the same year he had that stroke, but now I feel she had a point…