Atheist and biologist Richard Dawkins signed a declaration in favor of “sex-based rights,” giving the movement an unexpected ally.
Dawkins urged his followers on Monday to sign the declaration, which includes a call to oppose providing gender reassignment surgery and puberty blockers to children and teenagers, “re-affirms women and girls’ sex-based rights, and challenges the discrimination we experience from the replacement of the category of sex with that of ‘gender identity,'” according to its website.
The declaration was written by the Women’s Human Rights Campaign, a U.K.-based organization that describes itself as protecting “women’s sex-based rights.” WHRC’s declaration claims to “reaffirm the sex-based rights of women which are set out in the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women adopted by the United Nations in 1979, which set the international standard for what the notion of ‘equality between men and women’ entails.”
The new declaration advocates for declaring motherhood as an “exclusively female status,” asserting women’s and girls’ rights to “physical and reproductive integrity,” and protecting a woman’s right to “fair play in sports,” a reference to issues related to transgender athletes. The declaration also affirms a woman’s right to freedom of opinion and expression, peaceful assembly, and ending violence against women.
Several Twitter users declined Dawkins’s call to sign the document, describing it as prejudiced against transgender people. The declaration affirms the notion that “the rights of women are based upon the category of sex” and claims that “use of puberty-suppressing drugs, cross-sex hormones, and surgery on children are emerging harmful practices,” according to recommendations offered by the United Nations.
In its FAQ, the WHRC says that “men with a female gender identity should not be included in the category women in the context of women’s human rights.”
WHRC’s statements relating to women’s rights being based on biological sex has led several transgender advocates to declare the organization “an extreme anti-trans group.”
This tweet is not the first time Dawkins has challenged transgender ideas on a public platform. In April, the American Humanist Association withdrew its Humanist of the Year award from Dawkins due to several statements that the association claims “use the guise of scientific discourse to demean marginalized groups.” These include a 2015 tweet comparing transgender people to Rachel Dolezal, the white civil rights activist who posed as a black woman for years.
Dawkins, considered one of the “Four Horsemen” behind the New Atheism movement, has become a controversial figure in British and online politics. Initially an evolutionary biologist, Dawkins published his book The God Delusion about “the irrationality of belief in God and the grievous harm religion has inflicted on society” in 2006.
The biologist has been critical of “moderate Muslims,” claiming that they contribute to making the “world safe for extremists,” and he compared Islam to cancer because of how it treats women and homosexuals in 2019.
