In the News:
FFRF Capitulates to Butlerian Pseudoscience, Dawkins Withdraws

The Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) is a major American secularist organization which prides itself on promoting separation of State and church. In November 2024, it published on its Freethought Now website the article “What is a woman?” in which the author Kat Grant asserts that “A woman is whoever she says she is.” Thus, the article promotes the postmodern, pseudoscientific view that biological sex is not well defined and that a person may change their sex simply by a declaration of intent.

The following article “Biology Is Not Bigotry” was written by Jerry Coyne, a professor of Ecology and Evolution, as a response to Grant, explaining that biological sex is binary and unchangeable. It was briefly published on the Freethought Now website, but was abruptly unpublished by the FFRF, who thus capitulated to currently fashionable Butlerian ideology.

Biology Is Not Bigotry, Jerry Coyne, Reality’s Last Stand, 2024-12-30.

The redefinition of a term with a long biological history can be seen only as an attempt to force ideology onto nature.

In the Freethought Now article “What is a woman?” author Kat Grant struggles at length to define the word, rejecting one definition after another as flawed or incomplete. Grant finally settles on a definition based on self-identity: “A woman is whoever she says she is.” This of course is a tautology, and still leaves open the question of what a woman really is. And the remarkable redefinition of a term with a long biological history can be seen only as an attempt to force ideology onto nature. Because some nonbinary people—or men who identify as women (“transwomen”)—feel that their identity is not adequately recognized by biology, they choose to impose ideology onto biology and concoct a new definition of “woman.”

Further, there are plenty of problems with the claim that self-identification maps directly onto empirical reality. You are not always fat if you feel fat (the problem with anorexia), not a horse if you feel you’re a horse (a class of people called “therians” psychologically identify as animals), and do not become Asian simply become you feel Asian (the issue of “transracialism”). But sex, Grant tells us, is different: It is the one biological feature of humans that can be changed solely by psychology.

But why should sex be changeable while other physical traits cannot? Feelings don’t create reality. Instead, in biology “sex” is traditionally defined by the size and mobility of reproductive cells (“gametes”). Males have small, mobile gametes (sperm in animals and pollen in plants); females have large, immobile gametes (ova in plants and eggs in animals). In all animals and vascular plants there are exactly two sexes and no more. Though a fair number of plants and a few species of animals combine both functions in a single individual (“hermaphrodites”), these are not a third sex because they produce the typical two gametes.

[…]

As a result of the FFRF’s capitulation to Butlerian pseudoscience, three prestigious members—Richard Dawkins, Jerry Coyne and Steve Pinker—have withdrawn from the organization’s Honorary Board.

See also:

• I resign from the Freedom from Religion Foundation, Jerry Coyne, Why Evolution Is True, 2024-12-29.
• Another one leaves the fold: Steve Pinker resigns from the Freedom from Religion Foundation, Jerry Coyne, Why Evolution Is True, 2024-12-29.
• A third one leaves the fold: Richard Dawkins resigns from the Freedom from Religion Foundation, Jerry Coyne, Why Evolution Is True, 2024-12-29.
• Highlights of AFT Presentation to the Comité des sages
• Protect Trans Rights, Yes, But Not in Defiance of Reality
• Separation Between “Wokism” and State
• Manifesto for Universalism