“No service member should have to decide between their family’s health care access and their call to serve our nation,” except trans service members (or service members with trans children), apparently. But as usual, they don’t count. Trans people aren’t people, and don’t do anything, they exist purely to terrify TERFs and Republicans with no other life or goals or needs beyond that.
/s
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Jonathan Lemire, co-host of MSNBC’s Morning Joe, breaks down the latest news from Washington, D.C., including what got included in, and cut from, the spending bill that averted a federal shutdown; President-elect Trump’s speech in Arizona and remarks on transgender identity; and more.
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Jerry Coyne. Why am I not surprised.
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Perhaps I’m misunderstanding something here. I thought that one of the big reasons the Nationalist Christians and Evangelicals and other fanatical religious types are so transphobic is that it’s "Against God’s Will"™. I wouldn’t expect atheists to buy into that argument, given that "There Is No God"™. What am I missing?
The rational and logical view would be that trans people are, you know, people, like everybody else. What makes them “different” is the same thing that makes everybody different: we’re all individuals, and our “differences” are products of genetics, environment, and probably a zillion other things we still don’t have any clue about. They are what makes each of us interesting and worth getting to know and learn from.
So, what am I missing? Am I not seeing some critical detail that would make me see the errors of my ways? Or are they all just self-righteous assholes who have lost their sense of wonder and the joy of learning, and have devolved into hateful bigots who only continue to exist as long as they can prove they’re superior to someone else?
What a wretched way to live that must be.
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From what I’ve seen, the secular and atheist TERFs replace “God’s Will” with “Natural Laws” in all places and continue identically.
They’re the ones who keep going on about how there are only two sexes because that’s how it works, and when you point out that that’s not how it works at all, they say, yes, but we’re dimorphic, and when you point out yes but it’s more of a bimodal distribution than a strict binary, they start talking about sessile and motile gametes, and when you ask what that’s got to do with anything, they witter on about how there are clearly male and female morphotypes, and when you point out the overlaps, they … until they basically end up with “BECAUSE IT JUST FUCKING IS, OK!!!” and block you.
At least, that’s how it worked in my experience.
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Their supposed beliefs are entirely based on following the evidence wherever it leads, whether or not that leads to uncomfortable truths, so I don’t think it matters to them if they end up agreeing with people whose beliefs they’ve opposed in the past, as long as they think the evidence supports their conclusion. It’s not based in any kind of morality, but in cold logic, at least in their eyes. What I can’t understand is why they think the evidence doesn’t support the reality of trans people when, to the best of my knowledge, it absolutely does. So rather than following the evidence, they’re deliberately choosing to ignore it, something which should be the closest thing to a sin that exists in their worldview. Why they’ve chosen this one specific issue to throw away the standards they previously were proud to hold themselves to, I don’t know.
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Because they’re bigots and not prone to introspection. They’ve never really held themselves to that standard.
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There was a 19th-centure English sceptic who refused to believe anything without evidence.
And other people’s accounts of voyages around the world were hearsay, not evidence, since he had not been on voyages around the world.
And other people’s reports of ships disappearing over the horizing, with the hull disappearing 1st and the masts last, were hearsay, not evidence, since he had not been at the ports seeing these ships.
He made his own measurements at local canals, and determined that the earth was flat, with evidence that satisfied him.
Just as he did not observe other people’s voyages, these new skeptics and sceptics have not observed other people’s inner experiences,
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[three transphobes leave FFRF]
Don’t let the door hit ya where natural selection split ya!
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Well at least she has made her position clear, and now I know what to think of her. She was always a little ambiguous before.
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I’ve heard all three of them mentioned for motivated reasoning on other issues too, picking and choosing evidence that just happens to match a conservative world view. Like sqlrob says, I don’t think they’ve ever actually held to the standards you describe.
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I knew Dawkins had displayed sexist behavior in the past, but was unfamiliar with the other two before now. It’s distressing how many skeptics and atheists (at least the white, male ones) have drifted further and further right over the years, especially during Trump’s administration, right in the heart of the right wing’s complete abandonment of what little science and reason they did embrace.
I’ve mentioned it before at the old place, but I canceled my subscription to Skeptic magazine around that time, after noticing how Michael Shermer repeatedly wrote about what a horrible travesty and danger college “cancel culture” was, while remaining dead fucking silent for years about Trump and everything he and his administration were doing.
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Well, now you’ve met Coyne, so here’s something on Pinker that might explain how he slipped so easily into transphobia. 
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I don’t know much about Coyne or Pinker, but Dawkins has a long history of misogyny, and transphobia is, at its core, a subset of misogyny. Dawkins clearly believes that men are superior to women in every way except being able to birth children. And he cannot fathom why any rational person who was “born male” would want to be a woman, ergo any such person is clearly irrational and suffering from a delusion. Now, he’s smart enough to not express it in those terms, but that is, I am convinced, what he thinks.
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Off topic, but that is a very well designed website.
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It seems to me like a lot of “skeptics” (who really get into it as an identity thing, not just what I think of as normal healthy levels of skepticism) are Libertarians, and in my experience if you scratch a Libertarian you often find a conservative.
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