ANTI-WOKE CONSERVATIVE FANGIRL 
Richard Dawkins interview: ‘I shall continue to use every one of the prohibited words’

Judith Woods
Sun, 17 September 2023 

'Is trans ideology becoming a religion? Well, it has some of the attributes,' says Dawkins - John Lawrence

Who would be a man of sober facts in an age of strident feelings? A scientist dedicated to empirical proof at a time when “lived experience” now seems to trump objective evidence?

Richard Dawkins is just such a man. Bestselling author of The Selfish Gene and The God Delusion, he is both our foremost eminence gris in the field of evolutionary biology and our most famously vocal atheist.

He was brought up in Anglicanism but by his early teens had rejected its central tenets on the grounds of logic, truth and the laws of physics. But he is mellower than his youthful rebellion would suggest. “I sort of suspect that many who profess Anglicanism probably don’t believe any of it at all in any case but vaguely enjoy, as I do,” he admits. “I suppose I’m a cultural Anglican and I see evensong in a country church through much the same eyes as I see a village cricket match on the village green.”

At the age of 82, and about to fly to the US for a conference, he is also working on a new book (he has already written or edited more than 20) and could be forgiven for embracing a quiet, intellectual life in the sequestered groves of academe, far from the noisy passive-aggression of the gender wars. After all, research published by the Policy Institute at King’s College London earlier this year revealed just 32 per cent of British people consider themselves to be religious. Surely his job is done?

But Dawkins is not the retiring sort, in any sense. Quite the opposite; he is in combative mood having not only witnessed but experienced first-hand the thuggish tactics of the “paranoid, hypersensitive” transgender movement that flies in the face of science by insisting that sex is merely assigned at birth, that men can become women and demonises anyone who disagrees. “Is trans ideology becoming a religion? Well, it has some of the attributes,” muses the author of The God Delusion, which prompted uproar when it was published in 2006. “Of course, it’s not a religion in the sense of believing in the supernatural, but the zealous hunting down and punishing of heretics, that’s very like a religion. The Salem witch hunts do come to mind and there is something ruthless and unforgiving in the way people like Kathleen Stock are treated.”

Prof Stock is the leading academic who was threatened, harried and bullied out of her job for daring to voice the entirely mainstream view that trans women are not the same as biological women and therefore should not access female-only spaces or take part in women’s sports. Dawkins has spoken out on her behalf a number of times, but to be honest, she’s old news.

Protesters gathering against Professor Kathleen Stock at Sussex University - Brighton Pictures

In downtown Salem, there’s an insatiable appetite for fresh sinners to torch; at present it’s the singer Roisin Murphy, who was first vilified on social media and then abruptly axed from the BBC’s Music 6 line-up (although the corporation begs to differ) after she described puberty blocker drugs as “absolutely desolate” and called for “little mixed-up kids” to be protected from Big Pharma.

Shocked by the backlash, she later apologised, but to no avail. It’s the modern way; excoriation followed by excommunication. Dawkins hasn’t heard of her, but then he is driven by principles rather than personalities.

“The worst aspect of the whole phenomenon is that if someone disagrees with you, they won’t engage in debate, instead they will brand you hateful, cancel you and sometimes destroy your career, by putting you in the virtual equivalent of the village stocks and hurling horrible things at you,” he says. “I don’t like, understand or endorse taking offence for its own sake. It’s childish. If an idea is silly, then, of course, I’m going to say so.”

Fighting talk. Believe it or not, calling someone “silly” can be construed as an existential attack. In the surreal, overwrought world of 2023, keyboard warriors routinely try to censor the academic who turned science into literature (how pleased CP Snow would be) and ushered in a new publishing genre aimed at “educated lay people”. And let’s be honest, who doesn’t fancy themselves as one of those?

'I don’t like, understand or endorse taking offence for its own sake. It’s childish' - John Lawrence

They say you should never meet your heroes. I freely confess Dawkins has long been one of mine; back in 1976 two seismic events tilted my world on its axis. Thin Lizzy released The Boys Are Back in Town. And I read The Selfish Gene: “We are survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.” I was 10 years of age and it blew me away.

“What a precocious little girl you were!” he exclaims when I tell him. It sounds terribly rude. It isn’t meant to be. He is actually beaming with pleasure – the cognitive dissonance between the precise meaning of his words and their emotional interpretation neatly sums up what one might call The Dawkins Effect. It explains the mismatch between the man and the myth. Here he is, engaged and thoughtful company yet caricatured as a furious contrarian.

“I do find it quite frustrating to be portrayed as angry,” he says mildly. “I am just focused on clarity and on truth. I’m emphatic and perhaps that gets misconstrued as fury.”

Given his fearsome reputation, the polite, charismatic man who greets me at the door of his bright warehouse apartment on the fringes of Oxford, where he is an emeritus fellow of New College (having previously been the fabulously-monikered “professor for public understanding of science” at the university) is not at all what I expect. He is in his stockinged feet, dressed in a suit (although mercifully tieless), has the erect bearing of an army officer and is gracious to a fault – I can’t recall the last time any man opened a door for me.

I look around the charming open-plan sitting room furnished with books and quirky pieces of art. Some of his many awards are laid out on his baby grand piano. Curiously, they all appear to be made of clear glass. Maybe it’s a science thing; full transparency and all that.

“Do you live alone?” I ask with a deliberate hint of mischief as I know he has a partner, whom he fastidiously keeps below the radar. He shakes his head and although the gesture is small, it effectively conveys that his personal life is out of bounds.

When I quip that having no fewer than three ex-wives (one of whom includes Lalla Ward, an actress who played Romana in Doctor Who and was once married to Tom Baker) and a current girlfriend is surely the very essence of The Selfish Gene, I watch him narrow his eyes and steadfastly refuse to be in the least bit amused.

“Nobody has any interest in my private affairs,” he says crisply. I demur but as I don’t have any peer-reviewed evidence to offer him by way of backing up my assertion, I have no choice but to let it go. Eventually, he concedes he has a daughter, Juliet, who is a GP with a young son and expresses “great pleasure” in being a grandfather. What follows is less an interview and more of a free-wheeling conversation.

With pleasing perversity, we begin at the end and talk about death – he is an advocate of assisted dying: “I think if it were available, fewer people would die by suicide because they would have the reassurance that they would get help when they needed it.”

I agree it would be humane then murmur something facetious about not being sure if that would jeopardise my hopes of getting to Heaven. “I don’t think anyone seriously thinks their soul survives death,” he gently reproves before catching sight of my raised eyebrow and literally gasping in utter astonishment. “You don’t really believe in God do you? Is it because you are Irish?”

Ought I to feel offended? I could but I don’t give a monkey’s what anyone thinks about my beliefs and it’s really quite funny. He’s Richard Dawkins for pity’s sake, so what else is he going to say? I grin, give an elaborate agree-to-differ shrug and we turn to the way language is being weaponised and used as a tool of identity politics.

“It’s one thing to be polite, and I would certainly refer to a person with the pronoun of their preference,” he says counterintuitively. Are his enraged, spittle-flecked opponents hearing this? He doesn’t sound like any sort of hate-filled transphobe now. Then he goes and spoils it all. “But. It is quite another thing when activists absolutely insist that you change your language and your terms of reference. That is not acceptable.”

'I would certainly refer to a person with the pronoun of their preference' says Dawkins - John Lawrence

In February of this year, what he calls “crackpot” North American evolutionary biologists called for a ban on certain terms for not being “inclusive” enough. They suggested labels such as male, female, man, woman, mother and father should be replaced by “sperm-producing” or “egg-producing” to avoid “emphasising hetero-normative views”. “The only possible response is contemptuous ridicule,” retorts Dawkins. “I shall continue to use every one of the prohibited words.” It seems crazy that such mania has taken hold. But Dawkins (aged 82, remember) remains reassuringly phlegmatic. “I’m pretty sure this will pass, just as McCarthyism did. It’ll pass because it flies in the face of scientific reality,” he says. “I speak as a biologist. There aren’t many absolutely clear distinctions in biology. Mostly what we have is a spectrum. But the male-female divide is exceptional in biology. It really is a true binary.”

I can hear the mob sharpening their pitchforks already. But Dawkins isn’t bothered. He actually revels in it and certainly isn’t beyond a bit of mischief; he brands Twitter a “cesspool” and “the equivalent of scribbling on a lavatory wall”, but he still has an account with three million followers. Sometimes, he films himself reading aloud the inane abuse he gets and posts it on YouTube.

There’s also the US-based Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science, its stated mission being to promote scientific literacy and a secular worldview and sees its job as “nothing less than changing America’s future”. The home page drolly states: “Our Members Have Unselfish Genes.”

Born in 1941, Dawkins, who has a younger sister, spent his early childhood in Nairobi, Kenya, where his father was stationed during the Second World War working as an agricultural specialist with the colonial service. As a child, he was sent to board at Oundle School in Northamptonshire (founded in 1556), and when the family returned to England in 1949, Dawkins went to Balliol College, Oxford, where he read zoology. He remained at Oxford, where he gained master’s and doctorate degrees in zoology, before becoming an assistant professor of zoology at the University of California in Berkeley. He returned to Oxford to lecture in zoology in 1970 and six years later published The Selfish Gene, to huge acclaim. For all his brilliant intellectual sparring, he’s at his best, his most charismatic when he speaks about science and the sense of wonder he still retains.

“The world is marvellous!” he cries. “Science is based on evidence and the grandeur of the universe, of geological time and astronomical space puts all our parochial, trivial concerns into perspective.” Well, that will definitely have triggered someone somewhere. How dare anyone put their parochial concerns into perspective?

Dawkins is putting the very final touches to his sumptuous new book, The Genetic Book of the Dead, due to be published next year, which explores the untapped potential of DNA to transform and transcend our understanding of evolution. “The main thesis is that the individual is shaped by the natural selection of its ancestors and if we only had the eyes to see it we would be able to observe how any animal is the palimpsest of the forbears.”

I squeal inwardly because he (correctly) assumes I know what palimpsest means. “The book is aimed at the same audience as The Selfish Gene,” he adds. Would that be educated lay people and precocious little girls, I inquire. He chuckles, then slides his copy across the table to me.

What is fascinating, old-fashioned and admirable, in a bloody-minded sort of way about Dawkins is this. He can – does – effortlessly mesmerise and convince with his scientific eloquence. But when he states something that could (absolutely will) be construed as hugely controversial by the hurt feelings brigade, he feels no obligation to qualify his statement.

Not even for the mealy-mouthed sake of self-preservation.

One example is when we turn to the incendiary yet increasingly fashionable concept of apologising and making personal reparations for slavery. It is documented that his ancestor Henry Dawkins had “owned” more than 1,000 enslaved people in Jamaica by the time of his death in 1744.

“You can’t say sorry to people who are dead,” says Dawkins bluntly. Robust statements like this are – certainly ought to be – the meat and bones of higher education and are intended to provoke discussion in the tutorial room. But such economy of speech jars in the real world. I have to encourage him to elaborate.

“Slavery was the most abominable thing, but there’s no logic in giving people money just because they happen to be the same colour as those who were enslaved. They aren’t the same people. Nor is there logic in me saying sorry for deplorable deeds that were done by people who happened to be the same colour as me. The whole idea is racist.”

It’s a strong take on the subject. And then (too late for the haters) he softens his stance: “But having said that, let’s talk about it and exchange views.”

Again, this is not how the world works. Ideally, we would indeed all be able to marshal facts and express cogent opinions, but the idea of nuance died out many years ago.

We move on. A peculiar form of Unnatural Selection has compelled Dawkins too to evolve. He used to be a leftie but feels politically homeless now that end of the spectrum has been infiltrated and brainwashed by the trans lobby; Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer can’t quite bring himself to say definitively that 100 per cent of women don’t have penises and Lib Dem Ed Davey is very clear that some of them do.

“I certainly won’t be voting Conservative. But beyond that, I’m not sure…” for the first time, Dawkins equivocates. It doesn’t suit him. “I rather think for the first time that I might not vote at all.” On this too, we mournfully agree and slip into silence. But not for long: he is indefatigable.

“Maybe we should recognise a distinction between sex and gender?” he asks, rhetorically. “Perhaps it’s really true that some people sincerely feel they have been born in the wrong body. Maybe they sincerely feel female even though they have a fully developed male body. Maybe they really are of female gender albeit of male sex,” he continues.

“But when such a person enters a women’s athletic event, say a swimming competition, it is not their female psychological gender that gives them the stature and the upper body strength to carry off the medals. It’s their male sex. And it’s their penis, not their psychological gender that upsets women when they strip off in a women’s changing room. Of course, you might say, ‘What’s so intimidating about a penis?’ But if you follow that line of argument, you might as well abolish separate changing rooms altogether.”

Except, as we have established, there is no framework for any sort of discussion, just shrill, shouty argy-bargy. He has a rather ingenious solution for that too: “I think children should be taught critical thinking from an early age: how to discuss and how to argue based on evidence, rather than everybody citing their own ‘lived experience’, which is of no relevance to the rest of the planet. Young people are inevitably swayed and carried along by ideology and I do have some sympathy for them, so let’s give them the tools to think for themselves.”

Given Britain’s crumbling school estate and dismal showing in international numeracy rates, the introduction of Socratic questioning – the fine art of disciplined and rational dialogue between two or more people – to the curriculum sounds like it might be a stretch.

But something needs to happen if we are to break the current cycle of outrage and cancellation that is at best coarsening and at worst entirely stymying public discourse.

Sadly, our time is up so I leave, clutching The Genetic Book of the Dead, my inner 10-year-old skipping with joy, my adult self grateful that eminent figures like Dawkins refuse to be silenced by the transgender vigilantes who would see the rights of the many subjugated to the sensibilities of the few.