The closest I ever came to considering atheism was as an undergraduate at Brigham Young University, having read almost the entire oeuvre of existentialist Albert Camus over the course of one semester. I rebounded after that tortuous feat, but my brush with that steely intellectual tradition made me sit up and take notice when several of the most prominent honorary board members of the Freedom from Religion Foundation abruptly quit that organization recently, accusing the group of having, in essence, embraced religion.

The pedigrees of those who quit were quite remarkable. They included one of the best known and most vocal defenders of atheism in the world — the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins and also luminaries such as psychologist Steven Pinker of Harvard. What could possibly have happened?

The catalyst was the censorship of an article by foundation board member Jerry Coyne, an evolutionary biologist emeritus at the University of Chicago. The article, entitled “Biology is Not Bigotry,” was a response to a previously published article on the foundation’s website, entitled “What is a Woman?” That article asserted there is no biological foundation upon which that question can be answered.

Coyne, on the other hand, asserted there is very much a biological foundation for sexual distinction. And given his area of expertise is biology, one would think Coyne had the standing to comment authoritatively on the matter. His response was briefly posted on the foundation’s website, but then summarily deleted. The co-presidents of the foundation then issued an apology: “Publishing this post was an error of judgment, and we have decided to remove it as it does not reflect our values and principles. We regret any distress caused by this post and are committed to ensuring it doesn’t happen again.”

Biology is Not Bigotry” was then made freely available on evolutionary biologist Colin Wright’s Substack, “Reality’s Last Stand.” Coyne’s argument is very straightforward:

“Feelings don’t create reality. Instead, in biology ‘sex’ is traditionally defined by the size and mobility of reproductive cells (’gametes’). Males have small, mobile gametes (sperm in animals and pollen in plants); females have large, immobile gametes (ova in plants and eggs in animals). In all animals and vascular plants there are exactly two sexes and no more. Though a fair number of plants and a few species of animals combine both functions in a single individual (’hermaphrodites’), these are not a third sex because they produce the typical two gametes.”

He went on: “No other concept of sex has such universality and utility. Attempts to define sex by combining various traits associated with gamete type, like chromosomes, genitalia, hormones, body hair and so on, lead to messy and confusing multivariate models that lack both the universality and explanatory power of the gametic concept.

“The biological concept of a woman does not ... depend on whether she can actually produce eggs. Nobody is claiming that postmenopausal females, or those who are sterile or had hysterectomies, are not ‘women,’ for they were born with the reproductive apparatus that evolved to produce eggs. As for chromosomes, having two X chromosomes gives you a very high probability of being a woman, but a rearrangement of genetic information can decouple chromosome constitution from the gametic apparatus.”

Coyne’s science-based argument, however, leads him into explosive and politically incorrect territory. He rightly asserts that what is now termed “gender” is not and never has been the same as what biologists mean by “sex.”

“Under the biological concept of sex, then, it is impossible for humans to change sex — to be truly ‘transsexual’ — for mammals cannot change their means of producing gametes. A more appropriate term is ‘transgender,’ or, for transwomen, ‘men who identify as women.’”

For Coyne, the biologist, transwomen are male and always will be.

And that, in Coyne’s analysis, raises some clear issues of fairness and safety for females. One inconvenient truth he points out is that, based on recent U.K. government statistics, incarcerated transwomen are more than twice as likely to have been convicted of a sexual offense than incarcerated non-trans-identifying men, and 14 times more likely than incarcerated natal women. Other analyses of U.S. prison data find even higher rates.

For Coyne, that means that certain policy stances are simply unsupportable: “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.” These are reasonable policy stances, and they accord with the attitudes of a majority of Americans — even in California — according to recent polling data.

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Coyne concludes his piece by asking why the Freedom From Religion Foundation is even involved in this debate, since defining sex has nothing to do with atheism and freedom from coerced religious belief. Or does it? He wonders if “gender activism (has) assumed the worst aspects of religion (dogma, heresy, excommunication, etc.).” Has the Freedom From Religion Foundation been infiltrated by new religionists?

In a later statement, Coyne pushed harder: “The gender ideology which caused you to take down my article is itself quasi-religious, having many aspects of religions and cults, including dogma, blasphemy, belief in what is palpably untrue (‘a woman is whoever she says she is’), apostasy, and a tendency to ignore science when it contradicts a preferred ideology.” Pinker concurred, saying the foundation was “no longer a defender of freedom from religion but the imposer of a new religion.”

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Dawkins, for his part, also criticized the group’s embrace of a “new religion.” He had already been previously canceled by the American Humanist Association and banned by Facebook for asking pesky questions about gender ideology.

Some celebrated the departure of the three board members, with one atheist noting, “The trash has taken itself out.” Other atheists took the opposite tack: “It amazes me that a group that understands the vital importance of falsifiability to the scientific method is now so keen to agree to gender ideology. If you think something ‘is’ because a person says it is, you are not respecting science, logic or truth itself. You’re doing what the religious nuts do, by saying it’s ‘their truth’, like material reality is open to interpretation. The FFRF should be embarrassed by the nonsense they’ve bowed down to.”

There have been a number of interesting analyses that identify religious elements in gender ideology, such as sacred castes, holy days, intolerance of dissent, belief in that which cannot be falsified on the basis of empirical evidence, ceremonial religious processions, belief in reincarnation and transubstantiation, moral prescriptions and proscriptions, revered texts, shunning and excommunication. Maybe Freedom From Religion Foundation apostates like Dawkins, Pinker and Coyne are right in sensing that a new religion is seeping into the atheist community.

The organization’s website describes the group’s purpose in these terms: “The Foundation works as an umbrella for those who are free from religion and are committed to the cherished principle of separation of state and church.” Perhaps, like charity, that principle of separation begins at home.

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