Richard Dawkins, the noted evolutionary biologist and atheist, has been stripped of his Humanist of the Year Award by the American Humanist Association (AHA). The AHA cited a tweet sent by Dawkins, which the AHA said “implies that the identities of transgender individuals are fraudulent, whilst also simultaneously attacking Black identity as one that can be assumed when convenient.”
The tweet in question detailed the case of Rachel Dolezal, a white women who self-identified and lived as a black woman but who became a global news story, and was publicly “vilified”, when the truth became known in 2015. Dawkins pointed out that “some men choose to identify as women, and some women identity as men”, and others are vilified if they deny that those people “literally are what they identify as.” He asked people to “discuss” the comparison of these two events.
Dawkins later stated that he “do not intend to disparage trans people” and that it was merely an academic question which had been “misconstrued.” He said he had no wish “to ally in any way with Republican bigots in US” who are “exploiting this issue.”
The AHA said his “attempts at clarification” were “inadequate” and “convey neither sensitivity nor sincerity.” The AHA also stated that Dawkins had “over the past several years accumulated a history of making statements that use the guise of scientific discourse to demean marginalized groups.”
Dawkins point was one that was brought up in 2015, with supporters of Dolezal, and some academics, arguing that Dolezal’s “transracialism” was merely a logical continuation of the arguments behind transgenderism, and that race and gender should both be considered purely social constructs which people could individually choose to identify with. Critics of this approach argued that the two could not be compared, and that Dolezal had harmed the black community by pretending to be black.
Dawkins was originally awarded the award in 1996.