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There are two items of interest in the Big KerFFRFle, the dispute in which the Freedom from Religion Foundation appears to be melting down over an episode in which they removed my post on gender from their website.

The first is an account of the fracas by Yontat Shimron in the Religion News Service (RNS). The piece is pretty objective but has a few glitches. Click below to read it, or find it archived here. The most interesting part is its confirmatio—heretofore only a rumor—that the FFRF has dissolved its entire Honorary Board, the board of 18 honorees from which Richard Dawkins, Stephen Pinker, and I resigned.

I’d heard rumors that the other 15 members of the Honorary Board were also vanished, even though you can still see them at this link, (archived here) found by Googling “FFRF honorary board”. Curiously, you get two links when you Google those words, with the other one, here,  showing only one name, Jeremiah Camara.  But the reporter of the piece below verified that the entire Honorary Board is gone—defunct, sleeping with the fishes and singing with the Choir Invisible.

Click to read or, if the article disappears or changes, the version posted this morning is archived here.

The part that I found most bizarre, but conforming to rumors I’ve heard, is this (also noted in the headline):

The nation’s largest freethought organization has dissolved its honorary board after three of its prominent members resigned in an ideological battle over transgender issues.

And that’s all it said, but if a reporter noted it, she must have had information. I contacted Yonat Shimron, who verified that yes, the honorary board of the FFRF has been dissolved, that this was confirmed to her by one of the co-Presidents of the FFRF, and that it was done at the behest of the FFRF’s governing board.

The conclusion, of course, is that the FFRF does not WANT an honorary board at all. Why? The only conclusion I can reach is that other honorary-board members could, in the future, cause “trouble” in the way that the three of us did, publicly criticizing the organization for its mission creep and adherence to woke gender ideology.  Ditching the other 15 (I hope they’ve been told!) is an often-seen aspect of wokeness: any index of merit that conflicts with “progressive” ideology must be effaced. (Similarly, many American colleges have dropped requirements for applicants to submit standardized test scores, like those from the SAT and ACT.)  It seems that the FFRF doesn’t want to take a chance with people on the honorary board publicly espousing the “wrong ideology.”

A tweet from Colin Wright:

I have internal confirmation that the @FFRF has indeed dissolved their Honorary Board following the public resignations of Dawkins, Pinker, and Coyne.

When your organization has abandoned its core principled, maintaining a Board of principled intellectuals becomes a liability. https://t.co/E1P0OtIoLX

— Colin Wright (@SwipeWright) January 6, 2025

There are a couple of things I am not keen on about the piece, but in general it’s objective and accurate. I do think the sub-headline overly dramatizes my claim that transwomen are more sexually predatory than “other women” (I of course meant biological women). That was certainly not the main point of my piece, which was the definition of “woman”.   But the data certainly support that claim, which shows beyond doubt that, with respect to criminal sexual behavior, trans women are not women. Anyway, this is a quibble; authors and editors have the right to emphasize what they want.

My other beef, however, is more important, as it’s a matter of accuracy. The RNS article says this. I’ve put the contentious bits in bold:

The post, which drew intense backlash, was taken down on Dec. 28, one day after it was published, prompting Coyne, Dawkins and Pinker to resign from the foundation. That led the foundation to dissolve the 14- member honorary board.

The flap offers a peek at a roiling controversy among a select group of New Atheists who have expressed views that are anti-transgender and more generally “anti-woke.” It is a position taken by another atheist group, the Center for Inquiry. But it is also hotly contested by most in the nonbeliever community. In 2021, the American Humanist Association withdrew its “Humanist of the Year” award from Dawkins over his anti-trans comments.

In an interview with RNS, Annie Laurie Gaylor, the co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, took responsibility for publishing and then removing Coyne’s article.

First, I don’t know any New atheist who has expressed views that are “anti-transgender”, only discussing that the rights of transgender people might rarely conflict with the rights of other groups (viz., sports) and need to be adjudicated.  The article makes New Atheists look like people who want to erase trans folks. That ain’t true. (Yes, I suppose you can find a handful of “New Atheist” who are truly bent on curtailing all the rights of transgender people, but they are surely in the minority.)

But the bit about Dawkins is grossly distorted. Below are the purported “anti-trans” comments that Richard tweeted, comments made the AHA withdraw its award, committing a reprehensible act.  As Richard has explained, he was merely posing a question for discussion, a question first raised in 2017 by philosopher Rebecca Tuvel in a published paper (“In defense of transracialism“) that concluded that there was no substantive ethical difference between asking people to accept your non-natal gender and asking them to accept your non-natal “race.”

Tuvel’s paper caused a huge controversy because some people didn’t like the race aspect, though I read Tuvel’s paper and agree with her. Still, the editor of the journal resigned, the journal (Hypatia) apologized, and many scholars called for the paper’s removal. Tuvel, a brave soul, stuck to her guns and the paper is still up. And the question is still worth debating, as Richard noted. Why is there a difference between transgenderism and transracialism?  Isn’t that something to chew on?

Richard noted that he was simply framing the question as one to ponder, as he would with questions posed to his Oxford students to discuss in their weekly essay. You can see his tweet below, and it is certainly not “anti-trans”!  The RNS really should change that, as it borders on defamation.

In another piece, secularist, humanist, and writer Ed Buckner wrote a piece on the kerFFRFle on his Substack site. You can access it by clicking below. It is generally favorable toward the views of Richard, Steve, and I, as well as toward our resignations, but makes one point that I want to emphasize:

Buckner refers to an online essay criticizing my now-defunct essay on the FFRF site (archived here), and to an essay by Aaron Rabinowitz on the Unfriendly Atheist site, to which I’ve added the link:

To turn now more specifically to Aaron Rabinowitz’s essay on Friendly Atheist (link below if you missed it), he criticized Jerry Coyne for allegedly pretending to expertise as an ethicist, for overstepping his status as a pre-eminent biologist. But I reread Coyne’s essay with care and nowhere did he state or imply that he’s an ethicist, expert or otherwise.

And Buckner has rewritten part of what I wrote to make it conform with his own ethical beliefs. In fact I agree with Buckner’s writing, which expresses my real views, views I should expanded on in the original FFRF piece:

Coyne does offer some opinions that are related to ethics, of course.

For example,

Transgender women, for example, should not compete athletically against biological women; should not serve as rape counselors and workers in battered women’s shelters; or, if convicted of a crime, should not be placed in a women’s prison.

My own “ethical” opinion is close to Coyne’s. I would probably—but only after I studied the matter more carefully, including discussions with rape counselors and probably even with women who’ve been victims of rape or of women-batterers, modify some of what Coyne wrote slightly to say:

Neither men or women, cis- or trans-gendered, should serve as rape counselors and as workers in battered women’s shelters, unless the counselors or others working there pass a background check; even then, no one should so serve unless the clients are aware of and accept the status of the counselors/workers.

I can imagine circumstances where there might be an advantage to victims of having a man or a trans woman on hand, but the rights, needs, and wants of the victims, even if sometimes irrational, should be paramount.

I think the second version, expressing Buckner’s views, is better than what I wrote, and it does summarize views I already held (but failed to express). While I still think that at present tranwomen should not compete against biological women in sports, and shouldn’t really be running battered women’s shelters, they should not be completely barred from that job nor from acting as rape counselors—so long as (as Buckner writes), they undergo a background check and the women residents of shelters or women being counseled for rape or sexual assault are made aware that the counselor is a trans woman (a biological man) and are okay with that. This view will, of course still be seen as “transphobic” by some extremists, but there’s a very good case for holding this view in light of the rights of biological women. This involves a conflict between two groups’ “rights”, and in the interests of fairness and the needs of biological women, I come down against sports participation of transwomen and cast a very cold eye on the other two issues.

Buckner’s conclusion (bolding is Buckner’s)

Serious freethinking, requires, in my view, expressing views and understanding and accepting that your views may not be accepted as correct by everyone. Real disagreement can occur, and this should not lead FFRF or anyone else to declare, as it did in (unwisely) removing Coyne’s reply to [Kat] Grant,

We regret any distress caused by this post and are committed to ensuring it doesn’t happen again.

That’s a terrible outcome. Of course FFRF should not publish a hateful, bigoted essay (Coyne’s wasn’t) and then remove it—it should instead post essays that disagree with other essays and promise to keep posting words from people who think freely enough to not always toe anyone’s dogmatic party line—and to say so.

I posted a comment agreeing with Buckner’s rewriting of my views on shelters and counselors, but Richard also posted an excellent related comment (click to enlarge if you’re myopic or reading on a phone):

The fallout from this affair is not quite over, but I think it does constitute a twofold lesson. First, the ideology of Leftist humanists and atheists such as Richard, Steve, and I will sometimes conflict with the ideology of other Leftist humanists and atheists, particularly when it comes to wokeness. We are not a homogenous group.

Second, it is not right for organizations that promote freethought and discussion to censor people whose ideology conflicts with their own, and by “censoring” I mean first allowing the heterodox person to publish material on the organization’s website but subsequently removing it because the publication was “a mistake” that caused “distress”. That is nonsensical behavior, and it does the FFRF no credit. (I hasten to add that I always admired, and still admire, the FFRF’s initiatives to keep religion out of government and educate people about nontheism.)

Anyway, read Buckner’s piece; there’s a lot more in it than I’ve described above.