The reason this particular incident hit home for me is that I had, a couple years earlier, made a large effort to network in-person with an international group of humanists and atheists. I had assumed that a secular group would be trans-inclusive or at least not outright transphobic. It hadn’t occurred to me to gauge the community sentiment.
Upon Dawkins’s tweet and the subsequent debate over the revocation of his award, I was sorely disappointed that some of my new acquaintances and colleagues explicitly defended his overtly transphobic comment.
To be clear, I wasn’t any more annoyed by Dawkins’s transphobic tweet itself than I am by any other of the millions of transphobic tweets that are made every day. I didn’t care whether Dawkins lost an award or not; I didn’t care which atheist organizations did or didn’t cut ties with him over what I believed was a single comment. I wasn’t upset merely because a famous atheist showed his ass.