Indeed it is. Obviously and deliberately. I said as much at the outset. There are plenty of resources for people who are not intrinsically transphobic to learn about subjects like gender from fields across the academic spectrum. Whether you’re interested in biology, psychology, sociology, anthropology, or in fields like literature, you can, and people literally do, spend a lifetime learning. Nothing I could write would be meaningful in the face of the massive amount of material available.

I, instead, wanted to address Dawkins himself. I did so because Dawkins trafficks his opinions exactly on his name and reputation. A scientist, as a social concept, is a person who is both knowledgeable and objective. If I’m talking to a creationist about evolutionary biology, I am doing so as an evolutionary biologist. I don’t even consider it debating, to be honest. I consider it explaining something to someone who has been tragically miseducated as to actual facts, as if they never heard of atomic theory and had no idea that chemistry was a science.

The reason why people give any credence to Dawkins above and beyond what they’d give to any bible-waving preacher in Hyde Park is because of his perceived position as an expert in evolutionary biology. The halo effect, which I also mentioned, means that people will attribute his perceived expertise onto other areas where he is seen to speak confidently as with authority. That was the balloon my dart was aimed at. I was attacking his reputation, because it is his reputation that makes people take him more seriously than, say, Ron DeSantis, even though their opinions both share an equal foundation in fundamental prejudice and an equal lack of scientific justification.

James Watson was credited with discovering the double helix structure of DNA. He wrote a book with that title and won the Nobel Prize for his work. He was also an extremely racist and sexist person whose deep prejudices he regularly broadcasted. They were not simply embarrassing, they were scientifically wrong. His expertise and his contribution to our understanding of our world lays in his involvement in determining the structure of DNA. It’s not in developmental biology, evolutionary psychology, sociobiology, or any field where people study the effects of genetics and evolution. His background is in the physics and chemistry that results in the physical structure of a specific molecule. His reputation, however, and the ensuing god-complex he developed, led him to opine on race and sex and how they influence, in his opinion, intelligence and social worth. Dawkins is the Dollar Store version of James Watson, but with a penchant for self-promotion that has elevated him far beyond his actual contributions to evolutionary biology.