Open Invitation to Stephen Woodford (Rationality Rules)
Stephen Woodford has a popular YouTube channel called Rationality Rules, advertised as a place to “debunk and refute predominately religious and supernatural arguments.” In August, Woodford invited science teacher Forrest Valkai to his channel to critique Richard Dawkins’ comments regarding gender ideology. One of the critiques came from a conversation I had with Richard. As soon as I heard this, I immediately invited Woodford to have a discussion about the topic.
In September, I interviewed evolutionary biologist
and we directly addressed Woodford and Valkai’s analysis of Dawkins’ comments. In October, Woodford created two videos (here & here) responding to our analysis. He invited Colin and me to join him for a conversation.I have reached out multiple times to Woodford to schedule a discussion. In fact, someone from my team invited him to a conversation as far back as May. Woodford responded to one message in October, but we haven’t heard from him since.
While there is clearly an interest to see a direct conversation between Wright and Woodford, I am puzzled as to why Woodford would ask for a conversation and then ignore us after repeated attempts to contact him across multiple platforms. Consequently, here is, yet again, another invitation.
Followup: I will be sitting down with Stephen and Colin soon!
If any of these people had a tenable defense of their ideas, they'd have presented it. Instead, they often use emotionally coercive tactics that harm the people they force them on, and don't achieve sustainable progress in the process. I suspect many people look at the trajectory of the advancement of LGBT rights and hedge their bets that trans rights will win big like gay rights (justifiably) did, and like the idea of being able to claim some degree of responsibility for having advanced the movement. Of course, that's not compassion. It's self interest in a compassion kimono and seems to come with large societal costs and its progress unlikely sustainable.
I listened to Wilfred Reilly's podcast with Phil Illy, a man who has transitioned but doesn't claim it made him a woman and who also does research on auto-heterosexuality (autogynophilia). I'd really like to hear him discuss ideas with someone from the TRA community. Pete, your podcast with Debbie Hayton was also really good. She'd also make an excellent addition to the conversation.
I can't help but wonder how much more prevalent non-trans TRAs are than trans-identified people participating in activism. My uneducated guess is that it's an order of magnitude or greater, but I've been wrong plenty of times before. I hope Stephen reaffirms his desire to discuss the issue and you all have a productive convo because that's what I think will lead to sustainable societal progress.