The Politics of Atheism, “New Atheism,” and Queer (Especially Transgender) Identity Are Messed Up

The first thing I’m going to say in this article is: if you are one of the people I’m criticizing, I really don’t want to hear your response. I don’t want to hear “atheism isn’t a belief, it’s a lack of belief.” I am an atheist, and for me, you’re right, it’s a lack of belief. My personal views align with what atheist culture generally calls “weak atheism,” or as I prefer to put it “the Han Solo in Episode IV point of view” — I’ve never seen any evidence of gods, demons, monsters, or anything supernatural, and most of my experience seems pretty explicable through other routes, so I don’t practice a religion and I don’t believe that it’s likely those that people practice are likely. What I completely lack, however, is a hostility to religion — and before you start telling me about how awful religion is to queer (specifically transgender) people like me, I’m going to ask you to take a seat, because I lived in College Station, Texas, the most conservative town per capita in the United States, and taught college classes there, at the most conservative non-military public educational institution in America. I know about religious folks being dicks to me because I’m a trans woman.

All that said: organized atheism is, if anything, worse for transgender people than organized, conservative religion. And organized, not-conservative religion is demonstrably more helpful than I’ve ever seen any group of atheists be for trans people. Note that I’m not referring to atheist individuals here; I’ve seen many transgender allies and trans people who are atheist and do great things for our community. But people who act in the name of atheism? Overwhelmingly believe in things like the sex-gender binary, and in the most simplistic manner possible: sex is “what’s between your legs,” or even more nonsensically, “sex is chromosomes,” as if they have a magical chromosome vision that matches up with whether someone is passing as their presented gender/sex. We haven’t even known about chromosomes for 100 years, guys.

When I moved to College Station, I wasn’t out as trans yet, but I was an atheist and I was a strong supporter of queer rights. I thought that given the importance of church culture in the place I was moving to, it would make sense for me to find a comparable community in atheism, so I joined a local atheist group. This was the first place that I encountered misogynist men in fedoras — I’m not stereotyping, there were multiple misogynist men in fedoras, one of whom was an extreme Ayn Rand fan who sold preying mantises for a living while collecting public benefits. The idea of transgender identity was debated within that group, and while to his credit, the group’s founder/leader stood up for trans people, the predominant belief was that for me, someone who a doctor marked as “M” on a sheet of paper at birth, could decide I was actually an “F,” was as irrational as believing that God created the world in seven days. Meanwhile, colleagues who actually did believe God created the world in seven days, while they may have ultimately disagreed with my “lifestyle,” at least kept their mouths shut about it — and many members of the Jewish, Muslim, and moderate and secular Christian communities supported me. I did receive harassment from Christians on a semi-regular basis after I transitioned, but I received no support, and plenty of further harassment, from organized atheism.

In order to understand why this is a social problem, and one that ultimately is going to go beyond the queer community and potentially cause severe harm to progressive politics, we have to look at the history of organized atheism. As organized atheists are fond of pointing out, people have been not believing in gods longer than they’ve been believing in gods. It’s a perfectly natural thing to not believe in gods. As the scientific method began to explain more and more things that God once seemed to be a pretty reasonable explanation for, philosophers of science started to get the idea that there needed to be formalized atheist practice akin to existing religious practice. On the face of it, this is a quite reasonable idea; at the time period I’m talking about (late 1800s, early 1900s), churches were massively central powers in their communities. In some places, like East Texas, they still are. Trying to build a secular equivalent seemed to make sense, but like so many utopian experiments, it has led mostly to pain.

The first philosophy that organized atheism spawned was known as positivism, or the idea that scientific knowledge could provide absolute certainty (and was the only kind of knowledge that could provide certainty). This has obvious, and quite unfortunate, implications for anyone who is neurodivergent, transgender people in particular. (Some trans people have jumped hardcore on the bandwagon of what I’d call trans-positivism, the idea that we can prove through brain science that those of us whose gender identities differ from our external sex characteristics have a “brain sex” that is “scientifically objective”; I dread research into this, because what if they scan my brain and it turns out I’m one of the ones who’s “really a man”? Ain’t gonna make my dysphoria go away.) Positivism was largely discredited when Godel’s Proof happened; to put it in simple terms, Godel (I think I’m missing an umlaut there; they’re hard to type, sorry) proved that no mathematical/logical system can be coherent without at least one arbitrary constant, or assumption. So science can tell us a lot about the world, but we do have to take some things on faith. Which, to again quiet the peanut gallery of ZOMG YOU’RE TRYING TO CONVERT US TO MAGIC SKY FAIRY RELIGION, no, magic sky fairies are generally a pretty poor assumption with which to ground empiricism, unless we start seeing actual pixie dust descend from the sky, in which case they probably become a quite excellent one.

H.P. Lovecraft, the racist douchenozzle who invented the genre of cosmic horror, understood this. He was an atheist, but to him, scientific rationalism wasn’t an epiphany that freed him from the constraints of oppression (partly because he was himself a white oppressor, but that wasn’t the only reason) but rather a realization that there was no fundamental meaning to anything. This is something modern atheists have fought against, far more than early atheists like Karl Popper, the quintessential positivist, who never made any claims that his research led to “meaning.” Today, we have demagogues like Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens who believe that somehow genes, evolutionary processes, and so forth can provide us with the same kinds of meaning that religious stories once provided others. This is bullshit, and I think the recent embrace by the symphonic metal band Nightwish of Dawkins and Hitchens can show exactly why.

Nightwish is a band that has always touched me deeply because their songs are about a longing for a better world, a different world; frequently, like many other bands in the progressive rock genre, they reference fantasy stories. One of their earliest songs, “Elvenpath,” was simply a celebration of awesome fantasy novels that Nightwish’s chief songwriter, Tuomas Holopainen, had read. Throughout Nightwish’s albums from 1997 to 2011, they frequently referenced Christian and Jewish stories alongside Tolkien, Steven King, and (sigh) Roland Emmerich (yes, they did a song about the movie Stargate). This allowed for a vivid imagery that I haven’t felt any other musical act has attained. Look at lyrics like these:

The dreamer and the wine
Poet without a rhyme
A widow writer torn apart by chains of Hell

One last perfect verse
It’s still the same old song
Oh Christ, how I hate what I have become

Take me home

This song, “The Poet and the Pendulum,” has deep personal significance to me. It continues the Christian references, with the character of Tuomas Holopainen appearing in the song to be crucified and reborn. It’s actually a metaphoric take on the band’s (unfortunately quite hostile) split with their original vocalist Tarja Turunen, but it delivers in a beautiful, mythic way which has allowed me, for instance, to use it as a metaphor for the death of my “male” identity and my transition into who I truly am. The song ends with:

“Today, in the year of our Lord, 2005
Tuomas was called from the cares of the world
He stopped crying at the end of each beautiful day.
The music he wrote had too long been without silence.
He was found naked and dead,
With a smile in his face, a pen and 1000 pages of erased text.”

Save me

Be still, my son
You`re home
Oh when did you become so cold?
The blade will keep on descending
All you need is to feel my love

Search for beauty, find your shore
Try to save them all, bleed no more
You have such oceans within
In the end, I will always love you

The beginning.

This is deeply spiritual but it’s not actually referencing anything outside of Mr. Holopainen’s head — it’s about his longing for beauty, his devastation at losing his lifetime friend and creative partner Tarja, and his feeling that the band, which was like a child they had together, couldn’t continue to exist in the form that it did. I’ve seen Nightwish perform this song live, alongside some of the newer music I’m about to complain about, and I saw Tuomas crying as he performed these pieces — I know that despite his newfound distaste for religious imagery and symbolism, he’s still touched by what he wrote here.

In 2014, Nightwish released Endless Forms Most Beautiful, an album whose title is a quotation from Darwin’s Origin of Species. I have no quarrel with Darwin — the dude was the right kind of scientist, who realized that he might be and probably was right about a lot of things, and welcomed future scientists’ contributions. It’s unfortunate that he’s become to many atheists a sort of dogma. Endless Forms Most Beautiful featured Richard Dawkins, a man who is essentially the Donald Trump of atheism, best known for his genius scientific research back in the ’70s or something, and then defending harassing women in elevators, hating Muslims, and really, really getting invested in jars of honey. A representative song from that album has lyrics like this:

Behold the crown of a heavenly spy
Forged in blood of those who defy
Kiss the ring, praise and sing
He loves you dwelling in fear and sin

Fear is a choice you embrace

Your only truth
Tribal poetry
Witchcraft filling your void
Lust for fantasy
Male necrocracy
Every child worthy of a better tale

Pick your author from à la carte fantasy
Filled with suffering and slavery
You live only for the days to come
Shoveling trash of the upper caste

Smiling mouth in a rotting head
Sucking dry the teat of the scared
A storytelling breed we are
A starving crew with show-off toys

“Pick your author from à la carte fantasy,” really? These lyrics are written by the same man who wrote a concept album about a capitalist duck. He picks on the Catholic/Orthodox faiths (I’m not sure if he’s primarily taking aim at the Pope or the Patriarch here, and I don’t think it really matters) and condemns the myths he’s referenced so beautifully in his older music as “tribal poetry.” Finally, as a man who frequently refers to himself as a “dead boy,” because of his persistent feeling that he lost something in childhood he can never get back, and who is the leader of a female-fronted band who has fired two of the women who sang his lyrics, to take Christopher Hitchens’ condemnation of “male necrocracy” — that is, the worship of dead men — seriously in his lyrics is the utmost in hypocrisy.

To be clear, I have great respect for Nightwish and remain a massive fangirl of theirs and of Mr. Holopainen’s. But I think what Nightwish and Holopainen have bought into is symptomatic of why I trust Christians more than I trust atheists, and Jews and Muslims far more than either — because fundamentally, atheist rhetoric under the leadership of Dawkins and Hitchens (now a male necrocrat) has become a worship of white, cisgender male privilege and the power that they believe science can give them. It doesn’t matter that many evolutionary scientists have found better models of evolution than the ones Dawkins and Hitchens proposed, and that these models have different ideological implications (Dawkins’ “selfish gene” hypothesis is flat out wrong, as is his formulation of the concept of the “meme”) — atheists cling to these “a la carte fantasies” just like the religious folks they so intensely believe themselves superior to.

If you’re an atheist, I want to trust you, because I am one too. But after dozens of you have told me that my gender identity is fake, have formed an integral role in creating #GamerGate and harassing numerous friends of mine, and Christians, Jews, and Muslims have been at the forefront of defending the oppressed, I find it hard. I want atheism to be better, but we need an end to the Church of Dawkins and Hitchens, and we need it soon.