August 2, 2023

Twitter has fallen. What's next for transgender debate and news sharing?


Since he took over Twitter Elon Musk has shown himself completely unable to preserve the social platform as an open and inclusive arena for information sharing and discussion. We look for alternatives.

By opening the door to trolls and embracing extremist bigots he has turned a platform that was already struggling with hate into a battlefield.

Now he has destroyed the only valuable thing left of twitter: Its extremely strong brand. We know of a lot of people who feel sick when seeing the new black and white X logo. It represents all that Musk stand for and all that has been lost during this process.

Elon Musk is a transphobe who is actively deadnaming his estranged transgender daughter. He recently declared that the term "cis" is a slur. No wonder that so many trans and queer people are moving away from twitter right now. 

The fact that some remain, though, tells us how important this platform has been for trans and gender variant people from all over the world. Some of the best trans activists, journalists, artists and scientist have shared their ideas on Twitter.

We have prepared ourselves for the fall of Twitter for quite some time now, and share transgender news and resources on these platforms:

We will continue sharing news and articles on eX-Twitter for the time being. Threads is not available in Europe and, yes, we are too old for TikTok!

As you can see, we are hedging our bets,  waiting to see what platform will become the new big arena for transgender discussions and news curation. The problem is that it takes a lot of time to build a following on any such platform, and it is very hard to track down your old followers on the new. We will do what we can, though.

Image: A team of three sculptors spent over two months creating the homage to the famous Norwegian Blue after the dead parrot was voted the nation’s favorite Monty Python sketch in a survey by the British Channel Gold in 2014. Photo by David Parry/PA.

UPDATE: Thanks to Julia for an invite to Bluesky!

August 1, 2023

Why is it so hard for a scientist like Richard Dawkins to understand the difference between sex and gender?

Richard Dawkins find it hard to grasp the difference between gender and biological sex, reducing gender identity to a matter of procreation in the process. No wonder he is loved by transphobic TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists).

Richard Dawkins is now actively helping anti-trans activists. How can such a renowned scientist end up in such a bad place?

Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker and Ray Blanchard all belong to what I would call a school of traditional gender role thinking masquerading as science based facts. 

If  you go through their arguments it soon becomes clear that the statement "gender is biological sex" is simply a rephrasing of the sentence "biological sex is biological sex and biological sex," which explains nothing. But this is clearly about reproduction. Gender is reduced to sperm and eggs. They cannot grasp reality of the concept of gender as something related to, but still different from, biological sex. 

Dawkins discusses trans people with a gender critical TERF

In the video below, where Dawkins discusses transgender identities with Helen Joyce,  Dawkins find it "distinctly weird that people can simply declare that 'I am a woman, though I have a penis'". He sees this as "a strange distortion of language."