Lawrence Krauss, Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker and other anti-trans influencers personally benefited from a right-wing academic social group backed by infamous human trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, sometimes meeting at his island.

Lawrence Krauss, Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker and other anti-trans influencers personally benefited from a right-wing academic social group backed by infamous human trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, sometimes meeting at his island.

  • dandelion (she/her)@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    17·
    20 hours ago

    this video is related and was pretty good: https://skepchick.org/2026/02/epstein-files-reveal-how-pathetic-richard-dawkins-other-men-are/

    […] back in 2011 I criticized physicist Lawrence Krauss for defending his “friend” Jeffrey Epstein, years after Epstein was revealed to be a pedophile running a sex trafficking ring. Unbeknownst to me at the time, Krauss immediately forwarded my critical emails to Epstein, and they whined about what a mean bitch I was. And then in 2016, Krauss emailed quite a bit with Epstein to get his advice on how to deal with Buzzfeed reporters who were investigating Krauss’s long history of women reporting that he sexually harassed and even assaulted them, because of course he did! Epstein was able to evade justice for years after it was well known he was running an international pedophile ring, so surely he would know how to help Krauss wriggle out of some relatively tame attempted rape accusations, right?

    But in 2011, a few months after my post about Lawrence Krauss defending Jeffrey Epstein, I was on a panel in Ireland with Richard Dawkins called “Communicating Atheism,” in which I talked about some of the crazy, misogynistic hatred I get by being a female atheist in the public eye.

    A few days later on July 2nd, Dawkins posted a comment on PZ Myers’ blog mocking me for complaining about the treatment I get, comparing me to a fictional “Muslima” who isn’t allowed to drive and gets beaten by her husband. Misogynistic AND racist! Fun.

    Unbeknownst to me, the day prior, July 4th 2011, Richard Dawkins reached out to John Brockman with a question. Brockman was a powerful New York literary agent who ran Edge.org, which was bankrolled by Jeffrey Epstein. Brockman served as a connection between Epstein and all the various scientists and public intellectuals Epstein wanted to meet, and so his name shows up a LOT in these files. Here’s what Brockman looks like, in a photo taken of him along with Steven Pinker, Daniel C. Dennett, Katinka Matson, and, oh, Richard Dawkins from one time they flew on Jeffrey Epstein’s plane together.

    Brockman, naturally, immediately forwarded the letter to Jeffrey Epstein, which is how I can now read it. What interesting timing! Three months after Lawrence Krauss alerted Jeffrey Epstein to my evil machinations, Dawkins has decided to seek out information so that he might debunk my reporting that Epstein is a pedophile, just a few days after he posted an incredibly racist and sexist comment and was getting dragged for it. And before I had even commented on it!

    Dawkins is mentioned in a lot of other files, but it’s all things like Epstein talking about hanging out with him and Krauss talking about getting him to the island, but obviously we already knew Dawkins knew and hung out with Epstein because there are photos. These guys didn’t care about leaving evidence because, as I mentioned in the previous video, they thought raping little girls was a normal thing that rich men are just allowed to do. And they were right, in a way.

    • Silic0n_Alph4@lemmy.world
      1·
      16 hours ago

      Oh my god… or lack thereof.

      I was reading a lot of atheist blogs way back when, trying to figure it all out, when the elevator incident brought the whole thing crashing down. I wasn’t interested in following the mud-slinging so left those blogs behind.

      Now it turns out that fucking Epstein was involved??? Unbelievable. Is there anything that man didn’t ruin?

  • osanna@thebrainbin.org
    34·
    1 day ago

    wait, richard dawkins is antitrans? that’s disappointing :/

    ETA: I read the rest. dawkins went on the lolita island? Sigh.

    • Ada@lemmy.blahaj.zoneM
      6·
      17 hours ago

      Dawkins has been openly racist and islamophobic (not simply “outspoken atheist”, but explicitly islamophobic) for a very long time now. Being transphobic is part of that package :\

      • dylanmorgan@slrpnk.net
        6·
        16 hours ago

        Funny how bigots are rarely just bigoted about one thing, isn’t it?

    • Deacon@lemmy.world
      25·
      1 day ago

      Dawkins has been more of a liability than anything lately anyway. I’m not surprised. He’s a self professed “cultural Christian” which is to me the worst of all worlds.

      It is essentially the position that “I’m a bigot even though no sky daddy is telling me to be.

      Now if Hitch were there…I would be bereft.

    • JennyLaFae@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      9·
      18 hours ago

      I’m non-binary because of this kind of shit.

      A woman is who she says she is because we believe people when they tell us who they are. Period.

      Respect for my gender isn’t dependent on my performance of your cultural litmus test.

    • dandelion (she/her)@lemmy.blahaj.zone
      19·
      17 hours ago

      I think you run into problems with this when we know now that gender identity is biological and genetic - there is at least a biological and fixed component to gender, such that you can’t just take a cis man and make them into a woman (as David Reimer’s case proved: after a botched circumcision he was surgically made into a girl and then raised from birth as a girl, but despite that he had a persistent male gender identity and eventually transitioned to male as a teenager). This is why conversion therapy doesn’t work, you can’t change someone’s gender identity (or their “subconscious sex”).

      When you start to think of someone’s gender based primarily on gender identity, we can see a way of viewing someone as a woman who doesn’t appear enough as a woman to be accepted socially as a woman - i.e. who appears to be a man and lives socially as a man, but who “on the inside” is a woman.

      This is the case with trans people, where their gender identity conflicts with biological and social components of their sex and gender. (This is also the case with some intersex individuals, who for various reasons might similarly struggle; a large percentage of intersex people are also trans.)

      Medical transition might lead to that person having a body more aligned with their gender identity, and might lead them to be accepted socially as their gender, but when we are talking about personal identity and questions of whether someone is innately a woman, the science is pretty clear that the identity is more about their brain than the rest of their body, and ever since there were autopsies of the brains of trans women that found they have structures correlated with gender identity that match cis female brains and not cis male brains, the evidence has pointed to accepting that trans women are a kind of woman (at least on the inside) even if they don’t transition medically or socially.

      When we say trans women are women, we mean they have a female gender identity, and in that sense they are women regardless of the body or social role they inhabit.

      Furthermore, these anti-trans individuals promote debunked pseudo-science theories about trans people, they are not just evil but they also hold little regard for truth or science.

      Steven Pinker even wrote a blurb for Michael Bailey’s The Man Who Would Be Queen which promotes the debunked theory of autogynephilia (the false belief that trans women are just men who transition to live as women for erotic pleasure).

      Here are a list of articles that go into the details of why this theory is wrong:

      https://juliaserano.substack.com/p/autogynephilia-junk-science-and-pseudoscience

      If you’ve never heard of autogynephilia or are unfamiliar with the debates, a good starting place is here.

      Here are some decent overviews on the science of sex & gender in video format:

      If you feel like reading actual studies and technical documentation on this topic, here are some relevant citations:

      citations here
        • dandelion (she/her)@lemmy.blahaj.zone
          8·
          19 hours ago

          Just to raise awareness, “transgenderism” is generally considered a phrase to avoid, it’s a term cultivated and used by the anti-trans movement to try to present transness as a political ideology (and to deny the kind of biological reality of gender dysphoria).

          (I know the term does have a longer history than just the anti-trans use, I would google Julia Serano’s 2015 article “Regarding Trans* and Transgenderism” for more about the history, but at this point the trans community has abandoned the term and now the term is considered anti-trans.)

          My point is very fine: to claim “I am transgender” is not the proximate cause of transgenderism. “I am transgender/I am a woman” is an observation of a fact that, as you pointed out, has been scientifically shown to be genetic.

          We started with your claim that saying “I am a woman” doesn’t make you a woman (because your definition of a woman was as someone who lives and is accepted as a woman by social consensus).

          We don’t have to think that identity claims are the cause of someone’s gender identity to accept someone’s identity claim given our evidence about gender identity. Ultimately we don’t have any independent way to verify someone’s gender identity, so our only knowledge is through how someone self-identifies. In a real sense we accept someone’s gender identity is what it is because they say it is so. I don’t think the distinction you are making is the point of anti-trans people like Dawkins, who insist trans people are palpably not who they say they are - instead these people insist that the body (not the brain) is the source of someone’s gender, and when there is a conflict between their “brain sex” (gender identity) and the body, they seem to think the person’s gender and sex is “really” their body’s sex, not their brain’s sex. I think this view only makes sense if you don’t think about the evidence we have about personal identity and the brain, and so it relies on staying ignorant about brain sex and only considering superficial aspects like someone’s body to determine gender.

          I think the way you define woman, as a female gender identity regardless of body or social role, is more narrow and sophisticated than mine or the common person’s definition. We need a seperate word for this to avoid confusion.

          I don’t think we need a separate word, if anything it benefits the acceptance of trans & intersex people to root gender in gender identity rather than in perceived bodies or adherence to social norms. That is to say, trans women really are women, and there is no real problem to solve here.

          We already seem capable of distinguishing between “kinds of women” - i.e. women as a socially recognized role vs women as an innate gender identity, and being able to get people to understand this aspect of biology better will hopefully reduce unnecessary stigma that is motivated by ignorance and bigotry.

          That said, I am sympathetic to the intuition that there is some tension when we see someone who says they are a woman but who appears as a man in every way - I’m not sure what to do about this, in some sense that tension is the result of that woman being denied proper access to care that would resulted in her appearing more as a woman (e.g. puberty blockers and HRT to avoid going through the wrong puberty). So in some sense, I think better access to care and providing means of social and medical transition is the best way to solve this - usually women want to be women in their bodies and social role as well, and we should facilitate that by increasing awareness of transness and ensuring people who are trans realize they are and then get access to care before puberty.

          Even in that ideal world, this approach doesn’t really address people who have gender identities that fall outside the binary (and thus their gender is not going to be male or female), or people whose bodies are so altered for various reasons (like non-consensual surgeries performed on intersex babies) that even with transition they struggle to “fit” in a binary identity - but I tend to think acceptance is a better alternative to coming up with a different word to exclude them from being accepted as their gender identity.

            • dandelion (she/her)@lemmy.blahaj.zone
              8·
              17 hours ago

              I’m not sure what your question is … are you saying how credible should we take a 60 year old man claiming to be a 7 year old girl?

              I hope you can see how divorced this is from the context of discussing trans identity, since the man doesn’t claim to be a 60 year old woman, but instead believes himself to be a 7 year old girl (assuming he wasn’t just joking because he’s wearing the outfit for a different reason, like a birthday party).

              If he really believes this, it is more likely a result of psychosis than something like gender identity, so it’s unrelated to the present topic.

              Trans people are not psychotic, their gender identity is not a delusion or the result of a psychiatric condition, it is a developmental neuro-endocrine disorder that results in incongruence between the way the brain develops and the way the rest of the body develops.