- OK, so by "John was delegitimized" you don't mean "John felt delegitimized" but "people now perceive John as less legitimate". Fair enough, that is indeed an objective sense of the word "delegitimize" that I hadn't thought of. I guess I was particularly misled by the phrasing "the *existence* of trans people was delegitimized", which I never quite understood.
- I can't even write the n-word? Sorry, I'm not American and the taboo around the n-word puzzles me, but this is a whole other debate, so indeed I will be more careful in the future. I have also updated the article to omit the word. I will only spell it out again if I feel I have a reason and I will be careful to explain it.
- The reason why I didn't quote trans people is tricky. On the one hand, I understand that I probably should have, that it is at the very least a sign of respect, an attempt to include them, to be empathetic, etc. I will be more careful to explicitly include trans voices if I ever write about trans issues in the future. On the other hand, I don't care so much about people's identities as I care about their arguments. I didn't quote Kant, Hobbes, Pinker, or Sam Harris because they are cis men, I quoted them because of their ideas. Similarly, I quoted the Scientific American because of the ideas in there. I didn't stop to check if the author was trans because frankly it doesn't matter to me. I care about understanding the main pro-trans and anti-trans ideas, regardless of whether they were originally proposed by trans people or not. But here we go into the whole debate of identity politics and that's out of scope. I saw you had many interesting recommendations so I'll make sure to follow them.
- When I talk about the "anti-Dawkins mob", I don't think about trans people, I think about triggered woke leftists who yell "transphobe" at everyone who doesn't agree 100% with the canonical mainstream pro-trans narrative. If you ask me, I think most of these people are not trans. So no, I didn't mean that the "Mythical Trans Person" is emotional, angry, or crazy. I only meant that the emotional, angry, and crazy progressives are an obstacle to progressive causes, including the improvement of trans lives. Trans people who get emotional and angry I can understand, the white cis Americans who love to be offended *on behalf* of everybody else is the category that drives me crazy. If my article gave you the impression that I paint a bad image of trans people, I apologize, this was not at all my intention. I will be more explicit in the future to avoid this misinterpretation.
- When I said "We must start our conversation from position of agnosticism" I meant we should be agnostic about whether removing Dawkins' title was a good or a bad move (i.e. one that will eventually prove to have caused more good or more harm in the medium/long-term). I didn't mean agnosticism about what it means to be trans.
- About trans people "responding with silence", I don't know what made you feel criticized, but I hope it wasn't me, because I never criticized any trans person for not engaging with Dawkins. I in fact assumed that for sure many trans people have probably tried to engage, and if anything after all these weeks I am increasingly disappointed with Dawkins, because he could have given a trans person a platform to discuss with him the questions he finds important, but he hasn't done that. I assume that if he tweeted "I invite a trans person to have a dialogue about trans identify", some trans person would for sure volunteer. I find it perfectly legitimate to wait before commenting on something. To be quite honest I felt a bit dirty for rushing this article as much as I did, but at the end of the day this is what writing means in this day and age, and I wanted to write it while it was still relevant, even if I had to sacrifice the quality of the article to some extent by not doing more homework. But again, I repeat, any implicit criticism that you may feel from my article is more about cis woke leftists who attack everybody who question their dogma with nothing but ad hominems.
- "There is not actually a moderate sweet spot that the trans person can hit that will satisfy the cis person". As far as I'm concerned you are very much hitting that spot. You are presenting arguments with no fallacies or ad hominems, that's really all I expect.
- "Cis Man is not instructed to study Stoicism nor to engage in deep personal reflection to help him address the interpersonal problems he has stirred up". I find this binary distinction between the mythical "Trans Person" and "Cis Man" very problematic but also very revealing. I wrote an article defending reason, moderation, and dialogue, and criticizing extremism, self-righteousness, and cancel culture. You read an article that defends cis people and criticizes trans people. That is not at all what I wanted to transmit. There are rational and moderate trans people and irrational extremist cis people. I tried my best to make this clear and honestly I don't know how I could have done this better. Reading what trans people have said and quoting them would have probably been a good start though, and I will be more careful about all this if I ever touch this subject again.
- "Why can't cis and trans people listen to each other *without* a mediator"? Again, I was talking about "extreme leftists" vs "rational moderates", not trans vs cis.
- "Exactly what feature does [Dawkins] have that makes cis people naturally identify with him". Again, I am not saying that cis people identify with him as opposed to trans people, they identify with him as opposed to identifying with the trans AND cis people who wanted to cancel him. And what features does he have? He may have said irrational things about trans people lately, but he has influenced a generation of atheists because of his rationality and his willingness to touch taboo topics without fear of backlash. Did he go too far with his taboo-breaking this time? Maybe. But I do think taboo-breaking is good sometimes.
- After reading this comment and your 7min article about Dolezal, my conclusion is that trans issues are really complicated. I am now wondering what's the minimum amount of homework a person should be expected to do before they are morally allowed to voice an opinion at all. It's a tricky problem. That's why I think we probably need an alternative pro-trans narrative that's as simple and easy to communicate as possible. The philosophical and argumentative gymnastics that you have to do to convince the average Joe to agree with the sentence "trans women really are women" is simply too much. I don't think most people can understand the arguments, even if they are sound.
