I again commend and appreciate the time and trouble you put in to responding to me. To save us both from undue burden, I won't reply point-by-point again as this is already overly long. Furthermore, I have tried to write my reply so as to leave relatively little that impels a response, to try to help you safeguard your time. (And me safeguard mine, should you reply.)

Unfortunately, for the most part, I did not find your responses particularly enlightening, for the same style of reasons that I didn't find the first explanation compelling. It wasn't terrible; the arguments have some additional merit behind them, but personally I did not find most of them enough to be persuasive. I have reasons, of course. But I am doubtful that going through another round will change this: you will still likely not agree with many of my points, and I won't with yours, and who knows how long it would take to unpack the differing assumptions that make us seem uncompelling to one another. I am content to leave you with the last word in most areas where we have expressed disagreement, and let any readers decide how compelling they find the points.

Since last time I focused only on things that I thought were done poorly, I'll change things up and this time comment mostly on what I thought you did well.

There is just one bit of hopefully inadvertent apparent intellectual dishonesty that is so blatant that I cannot in good conscience let it slide.

You claimed in your reply to me: My article does not vilify Dawkins. I described his tweet as “rude,” “bad,” and “bullying,” and I gave reasons. I criticized his words; that is not the same as “vilifying” him.

But in your original article you said: Trans people know that J. K. Rowling and Richard Dawkins are trolling us and spreading misinformation. [...] Using a large platform to say willfully ignorant and unempathetic things amounts to disinformation: intentional misinformation. It’s lying on a grand scale to cause maximum possible harm.

You make a direct charge of lying with intent to cause maximum possible harm. In what possible interpretation is that not vilification? Who other than a villain would lie on a grand scale to cause maximum possible harm? Especially when you add, at the end, "Please Remember / Trans People Are Trying to Survive"--okay, got it, I'm remembering that the stakes are survival, and I'm thinking about someone lying on a grand scale to cause maximum possible harm.

If the charge is true then maybe the vilification is deserved, but to flat-out deny the vilification is not remotely credible.

But, people make mistakes and forget what they wrote. Maybe that's all that happened. But if so, it's a doozy of a mistake.

Anyway: something done well.

Your response regarding Dawkins' meaning of "identify as" was excellent: I am now convinced that your interpretation is most likely correct.

You admit the possibility of Dawkins meaning only outward presentation, not internal feeling: I really don’t know what Dawkins thought he meant by that verb, and if you forced me to decide I’d have to flip a coin, and my coin-flip ultimately doesn’t matter.

You further emphasize the specific problem of lack of clarity by saying: I wrote that “many people would want to correct him” on this point.

And that's hard to argue against, since indeed, you did correct him on this point. (You didn't specifically call attention to yourself and others in your reply--that would have really nailed it--but I can figure that part out myself, as I hope most readers can.)

You then make the pertinent and reasonable point that the ambiguity is possible and that the ambiguity itself is bad: He made an ambiguous statement to a large audience; many of them would want to correct him; that is something wrong with his tweet.

It is, indeed, bad to send an ambiguous tweet when one reasonable interpretation is offensive. Especially when one ought to know of both interpretations. So this is an effective counter to my claim that the interpretation should be obvious. I was mistaken (and should have noticed at the time): if it was obvious enough then it would have been obvious to, say, you, and it clearly was not.

Even better, you follow up with further evidence that the phrasing reflects a denial that there are internal feelings (meaning that Dawkins wouldn't think there is ambiguity because there is nothing to be ambiguous about--a view that in itself is problematic), based on the link to the sex-based rights document.

The reasoning you use is very weak: a single pair of sentences in a long document that specifically reference state at birth--this could be easily overlooked by Dawkins or anyone else, and furthermore does not entail that older (e.g. at the time of robust self-awareness, or when sexually mature) individuals do not have strong involuntary (i.e. "not chosen") inner feelings about their identity that result from their development up until that point.

However, the document is absolutely filled with references to "men who claim to have female ‘gender identities’", no affirmation of gender dysphoria as a real phenomenon, and therefore it strongly implies that there is nothing deeper than a claim: it is a choice to make this claim, not a reflection of a biological (involuntary cognitive) reality. You cannot peruse the document deeply enough to understand whether it's worth supporting without noticing this. Given that Dawkins is not shy with his criticism of parts of things he finds wrong, his silence is suggestive, and his call to support the document is more strongly suggestive, that he agrees that there is nothing of import aside from "claims".

So your point is much strengthened: although the confirmatory evidence came later, your initial suspicion seems reasonably likely.

Further, the endorsement of a document like this--really an ideologically polarized manifesto--speaks especially poorly of Dawkins' interest in the facts of the matter. In terms of showing a pattern, this really adds to it. It's possible that Dawkins is leaning this way because he's received a high fraction of highly emotional responses and a very low fraction of reasoned evidential responses and this has triggered his religious ideology detectors...but that too is an error, and not one that is particularly forgivable.

If all of your responses were like this, I would have been more convinced. Nonetheless, this is an important one, and I agree--you seem to have been on the right track, and I seem not to have been, on this one. (This has some bearing on some of the others, but let's not go through all that.)

Anyway, to clarify, since you explicitly asked: His tweets about transgender people are specifically insensitive toward transgender people. Can we agree on that?

I quote myself from last time as part of my answer to D.1: "The charge that Dawkins is not being sensitive in the way that people who champion LGBTQ+ rights tend to be is true." And from D.2: "It is fantastically insensitive."

And add: yes, I agree that it's a pattern. (For calibration, however, note that he is much harsher than merely insensitive with people he is highly confident in his disagreement with, like supporters of homeopathy.)

Anyway, my take-home points last time were meant to be:

(1) When engaging with New Atheist types, or anyone who has as part of their brand a devotion to evidence, the best way to counter things they say is with evidence. Every time. When talking to them, when talking about them, when talking about talking about them. Go for the evidence. When evidence is the currency, build up your bank account; if they refuse to accept it (and it's actually good evidence), they look like hypocritical fools.

(2) When engaging with New Atheist types, or anyone who has as a part of their brand a devotion to rational argumentation, go out of your way to not appear to vilify them, call them trolls, analyze their motives, whatever, in place of rational argumentation. (Feel free to throw it in with the argument against their position, but not as a substitute.) It is a logical fallacy ("ad hominem"), and suggests (but does not prove, obviously--to think it did would also be a fallacy) that you need to use social pressure due to a lack of adequate arguments (that they explicitly say they're open to).

(3) Even in a long format like your original story, focusing more heavily on the strongest points and leaving out weaker ones is a better way to convince people who are responsive to argument. (I tried to illustrate some individual weaknesses, but you seem to disagree; nonetheless, I maintain that focusing on strong arguments is an efficient use of effort.)

I apologize for any hostility I conveyed in my previous answer. I am surprised, because in most venues the language I have used would be considered innocuous, but of course "act surprised" was an unnecessary characterization (and inaccurate since at no point did you actually express surprise but rather took offense at Dawkins' attitude, which is a different thing: you can expect an attitude and nonetheless be offended when confronted with it).

I have tried harder to avoid any similar mistake this time, save for the one issue where strenuous objection is warranted--I am not confident that I know simultaneously how to convey strenuous objection and avoid any appearance of hostility.

Thank you again for taking the time to write a long response. I hope my reply will not consume too much of your time. However, I reject your claim that I thought it was your ethical responsibility to waste a Sunday. I said nothing of the sort. You posted a line of argumentation in a public venue, and called my attention to it twice when I left short comments elsewhere. That I chose to engage should not be cause for criticism (or shock), and you had a variety of other options besides writing a lengthy rebuttal if you did not wish to spend the time--including, for instance, asking me to eat my own dog food (me: you would do much better focusing on a few strong arguments) and pare down the lengthy response to a couple of key strongest points, if you felt compelled to reply in full, but wanted a more reasonable burden.

Finally, I want to clarify that the reason I am choosing to engage is precisely because I am worried about the prospects for trans people and others given how the public dialog is currently going. The best hope, it seems to me, is to embrace a culture of robust dialog with good arguments instead of one of insensitivity, ignorance, and hate. For that to work, the arguments need to be good, need to be the first not the last line of defense, and need to be focused where they are most needed. People like Dawkins are, I think, natural allies in such an approach, but trans rights would likely not be as expansive as some trans activists would envision, at least initially, because it's hard to build compelling arguments and for some things evidence would need to be gathered.