In case you didn’t get the memo, the presidents of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) and the Canadian Anthropology Society (CASCA) want you to stop talking about sex already. 

Or at least they want anthropologists to stop. 

Ellie Kincaid reported last week for Retraction Watch that a panel presentation entitled “Let’s Talk About Sex, Baby: Why biological sex remains a necessary analytic category in anthropology” had been scheduled for November’s joint AAA-CASCA meeting in Toronto. The conference session had been approved by the programming committee. 

But then AAA President Ramona Pérez and CASCA president Monica Heller decided “safety and dignity” were threatened by anthropologists who think biological sex is still a category worth considering. Overriding the programming committee, the two leaders canceled the panel.

Just to be clear, gender is okay with the presidents. It’s talking about biological sex as if it matters to human experience that is a strict no-no. It’s particularly not okay if panelists are “gender critical,” i.e., scholars who think females are being harmed in the move to talking only about gender constructs and not in terms of biological sex. 

The panelists had intended to talk about sex identification in skeletons, coeducation, tech-centric pornography, and misogyny using a generally feminist perspective to think about harm to females. You might think these topics are far enough left to pass muster in academe. 

But a statement put out by the AAA and CASCA accuses the panel of committing “one of the cardinal sins of scholarship – it assumes the truth of the proposition that it sets out to prove, namely, that sex and gender are simplistically binary, and that this is a fact with meaningful implications for the discipline.”

“Cardinal sin” is an appropriate choice of language here, because Pérez and Heller are working from dogma so heavy it is worthy of the Vatican. They act as if anytime someone considers the categories of male and female as worthy of study, they must be denying the existence of trans, gender nonbinary, and intersex people. That’s just silly. That’s like saying you can’t compare tangerines and grapefruits because tangelos also exist.

It’s entirely possible – indeed, reasonable – to consider the categories of male and female in science and other forms of scholarship, and doing so does not require denying that not everyone fits those categories. (I say this as someone whose scholarship and activism centered on intersex for decades as a person who has advocated for trans rights.) Indeed, the canceled panelists alluded to the existence of people who don’t fit those categories in the abstracts. 

At the (alleged) risk of endangering safety and dignity, I’m going to say it: The great majority of humans come biologically in one of two forms, male and female. While it’s worth cautioning against simplistic thinking that assumes gendered behaviors and attributes are always biologically inborn and not culturally learned, you can also learn a lot by thinking in terms of categories of sex, especially if you look at the places where genders don’t easily map to sex.

Consider, for example, anthropological research that has focused on cultures that include third-gender categories. Anthropologists have documented how a number of traditional cultures around the world provide designated names and pathways for male children who behave in ways identified as feminine. These children are shifted into categories that allow them to live like girls and then like women. (A few cultures also have the opposite, i.e., categories for females who take on masculine cultural roles.)

One might simply think of these categories as “transgender,” but as researchers have documented, there’s definitely a sexed element to all this. Third-gender males in these cultures are recognized as being androphilic (sexually attracted to masculine males), and traditionally no sex-changing interventions have been employed. This is about gender, yes, but it’s also about sex.

Anthropologists have also traced out what two cultures – one in the Dominican Republic and one in Papua New Guinea – have done to deal with an intersex condition that is relatively common in those populations. The condition, 5-Alpha-Reductase Deficiency, results in a child born looking female but later naturally undergoing a masculinizing puberty. 

Watching what cultures do to preserve gendered (and especially heterosexist) beliefs in the face of recognized sexual minorities helps us understand how humans try to manage sex, including through gendered constructs.

I suppose Presidents Pérez and Heller might allow presentations on what look to them like trans and intersex people; their letter earnestly claims to be defending “members represented by the Trans and LGBTQI of the anthropological community as well as the community at large.” 

But policing what scholars can say and think about sex and gender is no way to help minority sex, gender, and sexual-orientation populations. That policing will always end up harming some of them. (The letter objecting to the canceling notes that one member of the committee-approved panel is lesbian.) 

Moreover, this kind of attempt at silencing feeds the right’s portrayal of academics as hopelessly partisan and the right’s belief that political censorship is fair game.

This is all terribly ironic, too, because historically anthropology was one of the disciplines that taught us sex and gender are not the same thing. Human cultures have created so many different gender-masks for sex, what we learn by allowing free inquiry is just that: that gender (and therefore sex, too) can be a many-splendored thing. 

More irony: the decision by Pérez and Heller silenced women who were making a group argument against the silencing of women. If the presidents want to fight against the core claim of gender-critical scholars – that defense of trans rights is accruing harm to women – can’t they see they’ve just proven the point?

Alice Dreger is the author of Galileo’s Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and One Scholar’s Search for Justice (Penguin Press, 2015), named an Editors’ Choice by the New York Times. She is currently working on a book about local news and human nature.

Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our work, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, add us to your RSS reader, or subscribe to our daily digest. If you find a retraction that’s not in our database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at team@retractionwatch.com.

window.dojoRequire([“mojo/signup-forms/Loader”], function(L) { L.start({“baseUrl”:”mc.us12.list-manage.com”,”uuid”:”4f35c1f2e9acc58eee0811e78″,”lid”:”a15d7de264″,”uniqueMethods”:true}) })

Two anthropology organizations co-hosting a conference this fall have removed from the program a panel presentation entitled “Let’s Talk About Sex, Baby: Why biological sex remains a necessary analytic category in anthropology.” 

The panel had been slated for the joint annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) and Canadian Anthropology Society (CASCA), to be held in Toronto in November. 

In a letter informing the panelists of the decision, Ramona Pérez and Monica Heller, presidents of the AAA and CASCA, respectively, wrote that the executive boards of the two groups had reviewed the submission “at the request of numerous members” and decided to remove it from the conference program. They wrote: 

This decision was based on extensive consultation and was reached in the spirit of respect for our values, the safety and dignity of our members, and the scientific integrity of the program(me). The reason the session deserved further scrutiny was that the ideas were advanced in such a way as to cause harm to members represented by the Trans and LGBTQI of the anthropological community as well as the community at large.

While there were those who disagree with this decision, we would hope they know their voice was heard and was very much a part of the conversation. It is our hope that we continue to work together so that we become stronger and more unified within each of our associations. Going forward, we will undertake a major review of the processes associated with vetting sessions at our annual meetings and will include our leadership in that discussion.

Pérez and Heller did not respond directly to our request for comment, but forwarded our message to an association spokesperson, who sent us a statement titled “No Place For Transphobia in Anthropology.” The association writes, in part:

The function of the “gender critical” scholarship advocated in this session, like the function of the “race science” of the late 19 th and early 20 th centuries, is to advance a “scientific” reason to question the humanity of already marginalized groups of people, in this case, those who exist outside a strict and narrow sex / gender binary.

The AAA/CASCA decision was a “shock,” according to an open letter written by Kathleen Lowrey, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Alberta who organized the panel, and her co-panelists. In the letter, they said none of the panelists had heard from AAA or CASCA with any concerns about the panel until the letter notifying them of the decision to cancel the event. 

They defended the content of the panel against what they said was the “false accusation” the ideas were harmful. The letter concluded: 

Your suggestion that our panel would somehow compromise “…the scientific integrity of the programme” seems to us particularly egregious, as the decision to anathematize our panel looks very much like an anti-science response to a politicized lobbying campaign. Had our panel been allowed to go forward, we can assure you that lively contestation would have been welcomed by the panelists and may even have occurred between us, as our own political commitments are diverse. Instead, your letter expresses the alarming hope that the AAA and CASCA will become “more unified within each of our associations” to avoid future debates. Most disturbingly, following other organizations, such as the Society for American Archaeology, the AAA and CASCA have promised that “Going forward, we will undertake a major review of the processes associated with vetting sessions at our annual meetings and will include our leadership in that discussion.” Anthropologists around the world will quite rightly find chilling this declaration of war on dissent and on scholarly controversy. It is a profound betrayal of the AAA’s principle of “advancing human understanding and applying this understanding to the world’s most pressing problems”.

Lowrey’s directory page at the University of Alberta states the institution “has reacted punitively to my outspoken criticisms of trans activism and gender ideology.” In 2020, Lowrey was removed from an administrative role as associate chair of undergraduate programs for the department of anthropology, which she attributed to her views. 

Lowrey told us that several of the panelists had “spent quite a lot of money on travel arrangements, as the panel was accepted in July, and we were all stunned to receive the letter “removing” us on Monday.”

She said she was not aware of another instance when AAA or CASCA had removed a panel  from the meeting. 

Lowrey told us the implications of the cancellation were “quite unsettling”: 

The AAA is the largest professional association of anthropologists in the world, and the joint conference with CASCA (which happens every third year, I believe) is the Big Kahuna of anthropology conferences.  I organized the panel in order to bring together two kinds of anthropologists concerned with the replacement of biological sex by “gender”:  one the one hand, scholars like Elizabeth Weiss and Carole Hooven who have an interest in human evolution (for which sexual reproduction is a relevant process!) and on the other, scholars like Silvia Carrasco, Michele Sirois, and Kathleen Richardson who have an interest in feminist issues (for which sex based oppression is a relevant process!).  I have interests in both domains, and thought it would be great to bring together scholars concerned for very different reasons with sex as a category of anthropological analysis in order to see where our concerns overlap and where they diverge.

I truly do not understand why anyone who disagrees with any of this wouldn’t simply turn up to the panel and engage us in discussion. That’s what conferences are for.  I would be sincerely interested to hear AAA and CASCA representatives elaborate on why they think talking about biological sex is threatening and harmful to trans identified people or to what they term the “LGBTQI” community.

The panel description contained this summary: 

While it has become increasingly common in anthropology and public life to substitute ‘sex’ with ‘gender’, there are multiple domains of research in which biological sex remains irreplaceably relevant to anthropological analysis. Contesting the transition from sex to gender in anthropological scholarship deserves much more critical consideration than it has hitherto received in major diciplinary [sic] fora like AAA / CASCA. This diverse international panel brings together scholars from socio-cultural anthropology, archaeology, and biological anthropology who describe why in their work gender is not helpful and only sex will do. This is particularly the case when the work is concerned with equity and the deep analysis of power, and which has as an aim the achievement of genuine inclusivity. With research foci from hominin evolution to contemporary artificial intelligence, from the anthropology of education to the debates within contemporary feminism about surrogacy, panelists make the case that while not all anthropologists need to talk about sex, baby, some absolutely do.

Lowrey added: 

The rise in anthropology of multiple schools of thought that cannot withstand any scrutiny, any challenge, or even sustained contentious inquiry, is a growing disaster for the entire discipline.  I feel like I’m trying to shout that the bridge is out ahead and no one is listening.  It’s very frustrating.

Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our work, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, add us to your RSS reader, or subscribe to our daily digest. If you find a retraction that’s not in our database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at team@retractionwatch.com.