The latest to resign is Richard Dawkins who served on FFRF's board. Dawkins and the other resignees are scientists who reject the left's contemporary infatuation with transgender ideology whereas FFRF is evidently totally committed to it to the point that they actually unpublished an article written by one of their members rebutting a previous article which argued that the only way one can define what, or who, a woman is is by what the individual in question tells you.
Here's Dawkins's letter of resignation:
It is with real sadness, because of my personal regard for you both, that I feel obliged to resign from the Honorary Board of FFRF. Publishing the silly and unscientific “What is a Woman” article by Kat Grant was a minor error of judgment, redeemed by the decision to publish a rebuttal by a distinguished scientist from the relevant field, namely Biology, Jerry Coyne. But alas, the sequel was an act of unseemly panic when you caved in to hysterical squeals from predictable quarters and retrospectively censored that excellent rebuttal.You can read an excerpt from the article which triggered Jerry Coyne's rebuttal at the above link (the entire article is also linked to there). It was written by a lawyer named Kat Grant and she appears to argue that the existence of intersex individuals makes any attempt to define "woman" problematic. Intersex individuals are people born with some sex characteristics such as chromosomes, genitals, reproductive organs, secondary sex traits, and/or hormonal patterns that don't align with their other sex characteristics.
Moreover, to summarily take it down without even informing the author of your intention was an act of lamentable discourtesy to a member of your own Honorary Board. A Board which I now leave with regret.
I was particularly interested in Coyne's rebuttal which was originally published by FFRF and then yanked when members complained that Coyne was committing heresy by refuting Grant's argument. Sexton writes that "[Coyne's] basic response is that a) biology doesn't care about your feelings and b) a tiny number of exceptions to these universal categories of male and female does not mean the categories are useless or unscientific."
Here's a part of Coyne's argument:
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.”Sexton adds that that's not even half of Coyne's essay:
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.
It’s important to recognize that, although this gametic idea is called a “definition” of sex, it is really a generalization—and thus a concept—based on a vast number of observations of diverse organisms. We know that, except for a few algae and fungi, all multicellular organisms and vertebrates, including us, adhere to this generalization. It is, then, nearly universal...
Yes, there is a tiny fraction of exceptions, including intersex individuals, who defy classification (estimates range between 1/5,600 and 1/20,000). These exceptions to the gametic view are surely interesting, but do not undermine the generality of the sex binary.
Nowhere else in biology would deviations this rare undermine a fundamental concept. To illustrate, as many as 1 in 300 people are born with some form of polydactyly—without the normal number of ten fingers. Nevertheless, nobody talks about a “spectrum of digit number.” (It’s important to recognize that only a very few nonbinary and transgender people are “intersex,” for nearly all are biologically male or female.)
[Coyne] closes by saying, "One should never have to choose between scientific reality and trans rights." But apparently the FFRF disagreed. After a backlash, they pulled Coyne's response down. He responded in an email, calling the decision "quasi-religious."Coyne left FFRF as did psychologist and author Steven Pinker. Dawkins was the third person to leave the group.
“That is a censorious behavior I cannot abide,” he wrote in an email. “I was simply promoting a biological rather than a psychological definition of sex, and I do not understand why you would consider that ‘distressing’ and also an attempt to hurt LGBTQIA+ people, which I would never do.”
“The gender ideology which caused you to take down my article is itself quasi-religious, having many aspects of religions and cults, including dogma, blasphemy, belief in what is palpably untrue (‘a woman is whoever she says she is’), apostasy, and a tendency to ignore science when it contradicts a preferred ideology.”
I'd add that the argument that one cannot define what a woman is because the boundary between male and female is indistinct is like arguing that we cannot define the color red because in a color spectrum the boundary between red and orange is indistinct. Though there may be a very small number of instances in which an observer cannot really tell where orange ends and red begins it does not follow that red cannot be defined or that we cannot accurately discern the color red in the overwhelming number of cases.
