Richard Dawkins Urges People to Sign “Declaration” Opposing Trans Rights

I regret to inform you that Richard Dawkins is at it again.

On Monday, the well-known atheist author urged his nearly 3 million Twitter followers to sign the “Declaration on Women’s Sex-based Rights,” a document that effectively aims to deny civil rights to transgender women. (It’s always trans women who are the problems for this crowd, never trans men for some reason.)

Heron Greenesmith, writing for Religion Dispatches, explained the group behind this document and their intentions:

Best known among anti-transgender circles for their proposed re-writing of the 1981 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) in an attempt to deny access to gender-affirming care, accurate identity documents, and nondiscrimination protections to transgender and nonbinary people, the [Women’s Human Rights Campaign] has also been directly linked to disinformation campaigns about international LGBT groups.

These are the people Dawkins is now asking his followers to align with by signing a document that treats trans mothers like they’re taking rights away from real mothers, aims to deprive trans women the ability to play women’s sports, and hopes to impede the ability of trans children to receive transition-related health care.

Dawkins doesn’t even bother trying to couch his bigotry here in scientific wording like he did last month when he said a trans woman is “not a woman” from a scientific point of view — a point only ever raised by people who oppose civil rights for trans people by reducing their very being down to a chromosomal binary (that plenty of scientists would say is not binary at all).

Dawkins added in that same interview that, from a “personal point of view,” he would accept their gender identities (as if he were doing them a favor) and that he had “sympathy” for trans women (even though they weren’t asking for any).

If you want to call that nuance, well, he’s not even bothering with that anymore. The day before, he praised Kathleen Stock, a former philosophy professor turned hero of the anti-“woke” crowd who refers to trans women as “biological males” as a way to delegitimize them or justify revoking their rights.

It’s all just a continuation of a pathetic thread Dawkins has been unraveling for a while now. Even worse, the people surrounding him apparently refuse to educate him. (As I’ve said before, the Center for Inquiry, which merged with the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason & Science years ago, has been virtually silent on all these controversies.)

Many of the responses to Dawkins’ latest anti-trans tweet come from people who, at some point in the past, looked up to him. Now they’re just plain disappointed (if not angry).

It’s sad how the author who so brilliantly explained evolution through his books can’t seem to wrap his mind around civil rights and actual persecution.