By: Jerry A. Coyne
Published: Mar 30, 2025
As an evolutionary biologist, I joined the Freedom From Religion Foundation because I supported its work guarding the wall of separation between religion and government, educating the public about how to be moral without faith, and, most important, upholding science and rationality over dogma and superstition. I served on an FFRF advisory board, and the foundation gave me its annual “The Emperor Has No Clothes” award in 2011.
I resigned because the foundation has abandoned science. Two other board members, Steven Pinker and Richard Dawkins, joined me.
The trouble began in November, when the organization published an essay on its website denying the basic biological fact that all animals, including humans, have only two sexes. The FFRF piece, titled “What is a woman?,” concluded by begging the question: “A woman is whoever she says she is.”
I wrote a rebuttal, “Biology is not bigotry,” which FFRF published in late December. But the woke care more about “progressive” ideology than scientific facts, and within a day the FFRF took down my article and issued a statement asserting the publication of my piece was an “error of judgment,” that it “does not reflect our values or principles,” that it had caused “distress,” and that the FFRF stands “firmly with the LGBTQIA-plus community.” Then, after Mr. Dawkins, Mr. Pinker and I left the advisory board, FFRF dissolved the entire board.
In many ways, transgender ideology is no different from the religious dogma the FFRF was founded to oppose. It insists on doctrines that are palpably untrue (“trans women are women”), engages in circular reasoning (“a woman is whoever she says she is”) and affirms mind/body dualism (“your self-concept is more real than your actual sex”).
It also makes anathema of heresy and blasphemy (tarring of dissenters as “transphobes”), attempts to silence critics who raise valid counter arguments, seeks to proselytize children in schools and excommunicates critics (J.K. Rowling is the best-known example). Like religious fundamentalists, proponents of these views have a fierce conviction that they’re morally correct and know what’s best for you and society. To disagree is to be immoral—sinful, you might say.
The FFRF’s road to quasireligious views was a long one, paved by secular philosophers and the movements they spawned. It includes the Gnostic view that one’s true identity goes well beyond the physical body. As a Catholic website comparing Gnosticism with transgenderism notes, “The underlying concept is the same, that who we ‘really’ are is not our bodies, but rather some sort of interior ‘ego,’ or ‘I’ that constitutes our true self. It is incumbent that the body must conform to that true self.”
Some forms of feminism have made a contribution, with constructivists like Judith Butler arguing that sex is a social construct, not “a bodily given on which the construct of gender is artificially imposed, but . . . a cultural norm which governs the materialization of bodies.” This is a denial of evolution.
Existentialism has contributed the idea of self-definition, and postmodernism the notion that there is no objective truth, only struggles over power. Critical theory puts forth the view of a hierarchy of victimhood, in which “trans” people hold a position near the top.
This is why I titled my critique of these views “Biology is not bigotry.” The definition, development and recognition of biological sex is a scientific issue, while the rights of gender variants is an ethical one. There is nothing in biology that supports stigmatizing gender nonconformists, so it’s wrong to force people to choose between trans rights and scientific reality.
The FFRF has not only abandoned science but suppressed discussion and argument about its decision. Given the organization’s embrace of quasireligious and unscientific dogma, I’m proud to proclaim myself a heretic.
