Postmodern counter-factualism

From the Telegraph:

The slogan “trans women are women” is scientifically false and harms the rights of women, Richard Dawkins has said.

Gosh. Men are not women, says leading scientist. Putting on a wig and a dress and some lippy and changing your name to Daphne doesn't mean you actually are a woman. 

Not criticising Dawkins here, who's been a solid voice of reason against the trans madness – just the fact that this point needs making, and is actually newsworthy. Scientist says earth is round and revolves round the sun…

In a new book, the evolutionary biologist warns that scientific truth must prevail over “personal feelings” and argues that academic institutions must defend facts above emotion.

In The War on Science, Dawkins joins several scientists and philosophers contending that academic freedom and truth in universities was being stifled by diversity, equity and inclusion policies that promoted falsehoods under the banner of social justice.

“I draw the line at the belligerent slogan ‘trans women are women’ because it is scientifically false,” he said. “When taken literally, it can infringe the rights of other people, especially women.

“It logically entails the right to enter women’s sporting events, women’s changing rooms, women’s prisons and so on.

“So powerful has this postmodern counter-factualism become, that newspapers refer to ‘her penis’ as a matter of unremarked routine.”

Dawkins told The Telegraph that the trans-activist community had become “astonishingly vicious”, hounding people out of their jobs and calling for women who disagreed with them to be decapitated and physically assaulted.

He warned that even senior publishers were bullied by junior colleagues into censoring their authors who did not accept that men can become biological women.

“Both politics and personal feelings don’t impinge scientific truths and that needs to be clearly understood. I feel very strongly about the subversion of scientific truth,” he said.

“I think part of what’s happened is the move of academia towards postmodernism, which is pernicious, and probably does account for the current vogue for the nonsense lie that sex is a spectrum.

“There’s this post-modern hubris which presumptuously and falsely dismisses science as a social construct. The human conceit here is the idea that personal feelings can change reality.

“I have been told by publishers that they are under strong pressure from junior members of staff to censor books for this kind of reason, and the astonishing viciousness of the trans lobby, they are very dogmatic and hectoring.

“JK Rowling can look after herself, but you look at the way they hounded Kathleen Stock out of Sussex University, and it’s always women who suffer.”

For years – well, decades – postmodernism had largely kept itself confined within academic circles, gradually rotting away "soft" subjects like English and History. More recently it's turned its aim to science – how could it not? Now gender ideology is perhaps its first real-world manifestation. Welcome aboard.