Dawkins's Gender Dilemma

On December 30, Richard Dawkins resigned from the honorary board of the Freedom from Religion Foundation (FFRF) after it retracted an article arguing that gender is based on biology. Steven Pinker, who also resigned, accused the foundation of “imposing” a “new religion”—trans ideology. Debbie Hayton, in the U.K. Spectator, was quick to argue that Dawkins’s longstanding polemics against religion are not incidental to the world where trans ideology has become so plausible: “Maybe the key lesson from this sorry debacle is that it is not so easy to expunge the need for religion from human beings than atheists might like to think. If there is a God-shaped hole in us then without established religion, something else is likely to take its place.” (Hayton, curiously, is a man who identifies as a woman but is critical of transgender ideology.) Dawkins understandably bristled at this, a useful reminder that he considers himself a “cultural Christian” only in a highly qualified sense.