Brendan O'Neill at Spiked has a go at those New Atheists who now seem to be embracing the new religion of gender – the likes of Neil deGrasse Tyson, Stephen Fry, Phillip Pullman, Stewart Lee….even Humanists UK:
The rationalist bluster of the New Atheists was all sound and fury, it seems. The minute a real struggle over reason exploded into public life, they vacated the battlefield or joined the other side, crying ‘transwomen are women!’ as they went to signal their fidelity to the new faith. It’s easy to bash the old religions, especially Christianity. Newspaper columns, invites to literary festivals and conference halls full of the fawning godless middle class awaited those who said: ‘Jesus walking on water? As if!’ The consequences of deviating from the trans ideology are far more severe. Columns are taken away, invites evaporate, the middle classes will gather to scorn not cheer. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that some public atheists value their reputations more than rationalism.
What makes their desertion of reason even more galling is that they’ve done it in response to a neo-religion that really is harming the young. Fundamentalist Christians might try to convert gay kids out of their homosexuality, but this new religion mutilates them out of it, by transing young lesbians into ‘boys’ and gay lads into ‘girls’. Faith schools might promote zany miracle stories to their pupils, but this new cult imbues kids with far more disorientating beliefs about 72 genders and girldick and lesbians with penises. The old religions frown on blasphemy, and so does this new one, with its treatment of any ‘denier’ of its theological criteria as a social leper. Especially if the ‘denier’ is a woman: yes, this religion also hates uppity women. And yet it is at this moment, with all this unfolding, that some rationalists take a break from rationalism. It is moral cowardice in the garb of social justice.
Fair enough. But then he gets on to Richard Dawkins, who has unequivocally spoken out against the whole gender nonsense.
So, yes, there is a line from Dawkins to trans. Dawkins’ contribution to elite thinking was colossal, especially with his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene. He made evolutionary biology mainstream, the idea that we humans are not as special as we thought. Our universe has ‘no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference’, he once wrote: ‘DNA neither cares nor knows. DNA just is. And we dance to its music.’ Dance to its music. The most striking thing about Dawkins and other neo-Darwinists was not their atheism, said the great moral philosopher Mary Midgley, but their ‘fatalism’. In The Solitary Self, her stinging critique of the new evolutionists, Midgley rebuked Dawkins for his depiction of ‘helpless humans enslaved by a callous-like fate-figure’. Only his fatalistic view was more deadening than that of Ancient scribes, she wrote, because this time the ‘cosmic bully’ controlling our fate is not a ‘pagan deity’ but ‘a chemical, DNA, a part of our own cells’. ‘Like other organisms’, she lamented, we’re seen as ‘lumbering robots ruled by [biology]’.
Well….the problem with Mary Midgley's interpretaion of Dawkins is that she didn't understand what he was saying. I wrote about this years ago, and don't want to rehash the whole argument here, but basically Midgley interpreted The Selfish Gene as saying that we are governed by our genes to be selfish, and that displays of altruism therefore disprove Dawkins' point. She even stated, as though it was some kind of clincher, "Genes cannot be selfish or unselfish, any more than atoms can be jealous, elephants abstract or biscuits teleological. This should not need mentioning, but… The Selfish Gene has succeeded in confusing a number of people about it… ". Not least Midgley herself. Dawkins, of course, didn't believe genes could be selfish and went out of his way to make this clear. She clearly didn't understand his argument, and appears to have had no interest in understanding his argument.
She didn't get it.
O'Neill doesn't get it either. He goes on:
And here’s the thing: if we are our biology, and that alone, doesn’t it make sense that individuals who want to change themselves would feel the need to change their biology? If we dance to the music of our DNA, doesn’t it follow that people who want to become something else, something different, will have the urge to change the music of their DNA? In short, there is a link, surely, between the post-1970s reduction of the human being to mere genetics and this new millennium’s fad for trying, however forlornly, to alter oneself at the level of genetics. Taking hormones, cutting bits off, removing testes, removing ovaries, injecting, mutilating, pursuing a ceaseless, pitiless war against one’s very biological essence. That the trans movement, and identitarianism more broadly, treats the body as the sole site of change should not be surprising in our era of biological Thatcherism where there is no society, no morality, no good, no evil – just bodies, stardust made flesh, all following genetic impulses. There is a close relationship between the modern ideologies of atomisation and the fruitless infernal war the young now wage on their own bodies, on their DNA prisons we’re all told we inhabit.
Perhaps Dawkins is the grandfather of transgenderism. I jest. But I do think we need to wriggle free from this clash between biological determinism on one side and self-destructive biological ‘liberation’ on the other. Biology is real, but it does not control us….
This supposed biological determinism has nothing to do with Dawkins. He argued in The Selfish Gene that evolution works at the genetic level – but that by no means needs to affect how we as humans develop and live in our culture. Biological determinism is Midgley's fantasy of what Dawkins said; not what he really said.
Mick Hartley 
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