Oh boy.
Richard Dawkins have a few words on trans issues and woke in general.
This will seriously blow minds on "the Left". Most people, it seems like, have very deep, embedded tribalistic urges. You have to accept *all* dogmas in order to belong to the tribe. If you do not -well, it must mean you are member of the *other* tribe- you know, the evil ones we have to destroy, so you are an enemy. (Punch a Nazi, Kill a TERF, #killallwhitemen - you know the drill.) Weirdly enough these things do not trigger any wide-spread Left-wing protestations, as even Ukrainian soldiers wearing actual Nazi insignia are no problem (now it's "complicated") -but showing an OK sign absolutely means you *are* a Nazi. But this is besides the point -all part of the tribe-thing.
The problem comes when people who are on the Left have issues with the new, identity-politics based "Left", and point out the inconsistencies, the lies, and the straight out idiocy. They immediately become hated, right-wing figures, regardless of what ideas they really hold. See: Rowling.
There are a lof of these views, sometimes mutually contradictory, but the "woke" could always gaslight, suppress and intimidate people on all sides to accept them on face value - see how things like "gender is a spectrum", "sex is a spectrum", "white privilege", the redefining of what sexism and racism means, the "gender pay gap", "racist math", BLM issues, issues about domestic violence, etc. are absolutely dominated by their narrative. Anyone deviating from the officially accepted dogma will be labelled as a heretic or worse. These people took over academia, even the STEM sciences (just read Scientific American and Nature articles), policy making - and everything else. They became truths.
All dissenting voices are now on the fringe, and can be ignored, since only alt-right Nazis have these opinions. There is no need for a conversation. In fact, just engaging in a conversation with these Nazis only validates their views, so we have to ban them, censor them, and make sure they are destroyed in every conceivable way. Of course it is illiberal, but we, liberals, cannot tolerate intolerance. Obviously. It shows an incredible lack of self-awareness for them not to recognize that they are the intolerant ones in this paradox, who were tolerated by the liberal majority and now took over the narrative. This sort of mentality is not new -if they could, they would still make ice statuses of people like in the good ole' days. Heck, just look at Reddit.
For a post that asked exactly what "hateful ideas" Rowling propagated I was permanently banned from r/fantasy for being a Nazi who has no business to be on reddit. Yes, the mod did call me a Nazi. OK, I guess, Dawkins is a Nazi, too, because boy, he had some opinions for sure. He did not just ask.... He said some pretty hateful things. Like sex is binary. And men have no place competing against women in sports. That female spaces should not be invaded by men. You know - worse than Hitler. When I literally made his points in r/scienceuncensored, my account was banned for promoting hate. (My post was about not accepting the strict distinction between gender and sex, and that trans women are not women.)
Anyhow
Richard Dawkins is a special case - he is very much the darling of the Right-hating hard-core "leftists", because he never was shy about confronting religious and other dogmas. Since despite of all the evidence, this new "Left" prides itself being evidence-based, science-based and rational, they will absolutely claim someone who is a humanist and an unwavering rationalist to be their champion.
Except he isn't. He seems to confront -as any true humanists and liberal should- dogmas from all sides.
This is a welcome news for many different reasons. First, finally people, who are visible, and have very real credentials in hard sciences are standing up for the truth. I mean I, too, am a biologist, but my voice means nothing; if I engage in this issue, I will lose a lot of friends on one hand, and if I do it publicly, I can be very easily cancelled and end up like Richard Bilkszto who was bullied until he committed suicide. Intellectual giants, like Dawkins, cannot be dismissed, cancelled or tarred and feathered so easily.
Second, it feels nice to be vindicated. For years now I have felt I may be going insane. I held opinions that I felt were based on reality, which were taken as hateful, alt-right views by "the establishment". To name a few: women are not oppressed by men - there is no Patriarchy today, there is a victim-olympics going on currently with all the critical theories (4th wave of feminism and CRT particular), that Academia has been overtaken by ideologs, that trans women are NOT women, that sex is binary (and race is not), yet somehow we can change sex (but not race), that gender is an idiotic construct that was invented in the "Grievance Studies" line of "sciences", that freedom of speech is important even if conservatives are the ones being silenced, and so on and so forth - and these things are very much going against what Nature, Sci American, Guardian, WaPo, Hollywood, policy makers, etc., etc. push. I guess this is what it feels like to be gaslighted. You are still very much the left-leaning liberal who feels that he had not changed, yet suddenly now his views place him squarely into the freely punchable group. (And that also now he is suddenly evil because of his immutable characteristics of being white and male... something he did not feel ten years ago.) Having Dawkins express the same thoughts I hold means I may not actually going insane, but that the inmates truly are running the asylum. May not be a good thing if you look at the big picture (one guy going nuts vs the whole world), but at least it is conforming to me.
So yes. I guess the tides are turning. There will be still people who fall victim of the woke mob, but now there are credible voices raised. Let's see what happens now.
