Richard Dawkins is officially a curmudgeon

Brad MacClure - 2 September 2024

I realise this is pretty old news now, and I apologise for that, but just in case some of you missed it when it happened, or you didn’t feel it was attention-worthy, I wanted to discuss this thing that happened a month ago.

I’m talking about when Algerian boxer Ihmane Khelif won gold at the Olympics.

Khelif is a woman, assigned female at birth. She identifies as female, in fact it’s illegal to be transgender in Algeria. There were false stories going round that she had XY chromosomes. Even if the stories were true (and there’s no evidence for this) it doesn’t justify the abuse and bigotry that she has received. This misinformation about her chromosomes came from 2023, when Khelif and another boxer were eliminated from the International Boxing Association’s World Championships when that association’s Russian president said they failed a gender test due to “XY chromosomes.” No evidence was given at the time, and conveniently Khelif’s disqualification at that event greatly advantaged the Russian athlete she had just beaten!

As far as I can tell, JK Rowling (the Harry Potter author) started things off online with a transphobic tweet to her 14 million plus followers about Khelif (accompanied by a photo of Khelif hugging her opponent):

“The smirk of a male who’s knows [sic] he’s protected by a misogynist sporting establishment enjoying the distress of a woman he’s just punched in the head, and whose life’s ambition he’s just shattered.”

Elon Musk weighed in with more actual misogyny (as opposed to Rowling’s fake withering anti- misogyny), and Donald Trump (because of course) posted “I will keep men out of women’s sports!” with a picture from the fight with Italian boxer Angela Carina.

Then we had Richard Dawkins, with this: “two men, masquerading as women, are being allowed to box against real women in the Olympics.” At least his grammar is good, if not his facts.

The online abuse that followed was abhorrent and disgraceful. Remember this is a young woman, likely in the greatest moment of her life, and having to deal with a torrent of disgusting misogyny because of these false statements. There’s a whole hilarious side story about Dawkins accusing Facebook of shutting him down because of the tweets… I’m not sure how that works, as X (Twitter) is a different company to Facebook. OK boomer, I guess. Also heaps of other misinformation goes unchallenged on Facebook so, um… Dawkins was wrong about being shut down and has since admitted that mistake, but has not addressed the important mistake - the transphobic bigotry.

There are two untruths in this tweet. The important one, the statement about the “male boxers”, to my understanding has not been acknowledged. Oh, he’s so very sorry for besmirching Facebook’s good name, just not for repeating Russian propaganda I guess.

OK, here we are discussing one thing, but in the back of my mind is another: this doesn’t address the wrongness, even if he had been right! What do I mean? Well, (glad you asked) what concerns me about this is that in pointing out his factual incorrectness we might be, in the process, ignoring his moral incorrectness. So far this big ‘issue’ which Dawkins is losing sleep over hasn’t even happened yet. (I’m assuming we all know he’s talking about trans women when he calls them men). OK, but it’s still troubling right? The day may come when we have to actually address his bigotry, not just say “it’s OK Mr Dawkins, she really is a woman!” I mean I’m going to be saying that anyway, but we should think about it. This time he’s not only bigoting, he’s bigoting wrong! Next time he might bigot right, but we need to call it out then too.

Dawkins (et. al. - Rowling, Musk, Trump) thinks the problem is that a person is trans. We point out she isn’t, but at some point we probably need to deal with the other thing too: so what if she was?