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.
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This is an excellent post.
I doubt the administrators who made this decision will ever be able to fully recognize just how utterly inept they acted, overriding their own programming committee and then somehow managing to sound imperious while pearl-clutching. They actually invoke “dignity” as a rationale, you can’t make this stuff up.
As administrators of a professional society, the last thing you want to do is cause your members to ask “why do we have these positions anyway?”
I’m sorry, but I’m skeptical. This article claims that one member of the cancelled panel is a ‘lesbian’, but is she really a lesbian if she rejects engaging in sexual acts with persons who were born male but who identify as female?
Best self-own I’ve seen in years.
Perhaps a useful read for you. See the third section on “reversal theory.”
http://jim.shamlin.com/study/books/2564/03.html
Sex is fluid. A lesbian ceases to be a lesbian the moment her partner switches from female to male.
This is parody, yes?
It depends
It’s relative.
What you’re saying doesn’t make sense. If the lesbian is a trans-woman and her partner switches from female to male then that would mean she was a lesbian and now a bisexual. Make sense?
The anthropologist claims to be a lesbian and that is sufficient for me. Why did you even bother to make a remark about her sexual preferences?
I think this one went over some heads, but explaining it would ruin it’s simplicity. It’s there for people though
Why are you assuming the lesbian is not a trans-woman?
Paul Rain, at least you said “born male” instead of ‘assigned male at birth,” one of the more medieval incantations I’ve encountered in my long life (as if some hospital bureaucrat rather than an egg and sperm did the trick). The lingo and rules of trans radicalism really do call for the skills of anthropologists to explain. In any case, as a hetero male, I “reject engaging in sexual acts” with all hetero females except my wife. Odd, I realize, but there you have it.
The terminology originated in intersex communities. I’ve known multiple people—and engaged in sexual acts with one person—who were/was born neither male nor female, but were/was assigned one or the other at birth.
And which condition did they have?
Dreger is not a competent or credible scholar, and RW is playing into the hands of the intolerant right by giving her this platform.
I’m surprised that Retraction Watch accepted this defamatory comment.
But I’m puzzled as to how the AAA and CASCA expect their members to conduct research into the interaction between biological sex and cultural gender presentation if they deny the category of biological sex: especially if the groups under study are still so old-fashioned as to believe in it.
They’re echoing the thoughts of many on this over at the anthro subreddit. Character and credibility attacks are an unfortunate tactic humans have learned from evangelical/fundamentalist religions to protect their ideology, along with shunning/ostracizing. Nobody wants to be voted off the island, and if they do they’re made an example of.
Arguably, we unfortunately don’t have great fail-safes within science once we started deciding what was *right* and that even discussing some topics caused “harm.” If you look at the wrong research, you are doing harm. If you ask the wrong questions, you are doing harm.
At that point it’s just a matter of how bad we let it get for others under the cloak of credentials.
This is ugly, gross, and ignorant calumny, besmirching a noted scholar on the very topic at hand. She has written books on the historical treatment of intersex persons as well has having serviced as an intersex right activist. Further, she has researched misdeeds by the American Anthropological Association before, so she is eminently qualified to speak on this matter.
I’ve known Dr. Dreger for decades, first through her work in intersex and then on her work to uncover misdeeds by member of my own community of transsexuals. Her work expertise in dealing with bad faith dealings in academia is exactly what Retraction Watch needs.
https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/2015/03/22/flipping-the-bird/
Dreger’s book “Galileo’s Middle Finger” is excellent. Equally excellent has been her journalistic career here in East Lansing seeking to get the extremely secretive city government and school board to open up and explain their odd and often very bizarre behavior. All in the true tradition of TR’s muckrakers. Her piece here is consistent with her other achievements.
Jonathan Dresner’s remark is ludicrous. However, I hope Alice Dreger notes that Dresner makes a sweeping and nonsensical swipe at what he calls the “intolerant right” somewhat similar to what her own article does toward its very end. I suppose there are those on the right who back censorship, though I do not see very much of that on the right as compared with the left. I do question the placement of that aside at the heart of the headline for this piece. I think it detracts from the otherwise appropriate focus on the outrageous but all too TYPICAL academic speech suppression and cancellation going on in academia and so many other parts of our society now.
I saw several references to this incident on the conservative web sites I read, not one of whom even hinted at this as a justification for censorship. So as excellent as Dreger’s article is, on this point I think it is a throwaway line to reasure lefties but without much merit. Anyway, and in spite of this, kudoes to Alice Dreger for her guts and insight.
“Dreger is not a competent or credible scholar,”
SMH
Who are you, exactly? And who are you to pass judgement on who is a scholar?
I especially dislike this para:
“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. ”
There were some dog whistles in there, and the fact that they are repeated kind of sounds like Dreger is drinking the cool-aid, so to speak. And I know she isn’t. I would have appreciated this sounding less mouthpiece-like.
The reality is that since it’s cancelled, we won’t really know what these talks are about – are they about truth, or are the same tired TERF canards that bore me to tears? I think it should have gone ahead – I’m just not convinced it would have been “generally” feminist as Dreger – or perhaps they – claim.
Anon for obvious reasons but this piece should’ve never have made it onto Retraction Watch.
Trans people are some of the most marginalised in society today and all this post has done is parrot anti trans talking points that puts them in further danger.
All this panel would’ve done is reuse talking points very similar to the ones that were used for anti-gay propaganda in the past just recycled to fit the current anti-trans panic that is causing abject misery around the world for many of my friends and their allies.
The platforming of this “opinion piece” is a disgrace and should be struck from the RW record as soon as possible. Please stop legitimising hate and get on the right side of history here before time does it for you.
As a transsexual and a long time transsexual right activist (e.g. co-founded the ACLU Transsexual Right Committee in 1980 among many other works) I fully support Dr. Dreger’s comments here. We don’t know what the panel would have talked about. And if it was rehashed transphobic BS, we could then respond appropriately with the science to rebut those false statements.
But we can’t act as though we (the transsexual science community) are frail flowers who must be protected from an and all possible misstatements about us. We are intelligent adults who can defend ourselves.
Given your credentials and a transsexual yourself, I’m curious how you “define” a male transsexual and a female transsexual. For example, what one versus the other would mean if they were each listed (among other options, of course) on a health form. Thank you!
“Trans people are some of the most marginalised in society today and all this post has done is parrot anti trans talking points that puts them in further danger.”
What evidence do you have to support this claim?
I keep seeing people repeat that the panel is attacking trans people. This panel is about two things only: The validity of biological sex as a measure in anthropological studies, and the academic validity of using the current framework of gender (which we have defined to be an expression of personality and social role) as a measure instead. Nobody is attacking trans people, nobody is debating whether they should exist or have rights. Nobody is even talking about trans people, except the people coming here in the comments to moral-panic about this panel.
I totally agree with you too. Thanks for your clear words.
I totally agree with you. I actually think a panel on this topic could be interesting, but it would have to be done sensitively (ie, not by admitted TERFs).
What makes someone a TERF?
Can you please eleborate, Renee? What dog whistles did you hear?
What are the same tired TERF canards that bore me to tears? It is not enough to vaguely accuse, you must show.
“Dogwhistling, sounds like a mouthpiece, TERFy”…This entire comment basically amounts to “this article used socially unacceptable phrasing”. Is there an actual part of this paragraph that attacks trans people in any way? No.
Very glad Retraction Watch has posted an article about this panel cancellation and now has given space for Alice Dreger to weigh in. Having read her work and followed her career, I was hoping she would come forward to comment on this egregious act of censorship. Her analysis does not disappoint; it is measured and sensitive and yet blunt where it needs to be. That concluding line says it all.
It’s very troubling that the leadership of these two professional associations have chosen to allow political motives to override the commitment to scholarly inquiry and exchange. Regardless of where one stands on the sex/gender identity debate, surely we should be able to agree on basic norms of academic engagement. I hope those members of the associations who disagree will find productive ways to communicate their dissent.
That some commenters here have already attacked Dreger personally and called for her piece to be censored, rather than engaging with the substance of her argument, only lends further credence to her analysis.
I think Alice Dreger is both much smarter and braver than me. I enjoyed her book immensely.
I’m glad she chose to speak out here and in the face of some of the comments here.
One thing I can’t quite suss out is her, apparent, confusion about the two sexes. Despite being an advocate for intersex (something that she herself has acknowledged is a political term rather than a scientific one) rights, she doesn’t believe sex is binary:
Could she answer, in some appropriate forum, if is isn’t the case that overwhelming majority of conditions that have been described as “intersex”, naturally, *sex specific*? Isn’t the practice of “sex assignment” of, e.g, CAH females as males or PAIS males as females a clear instance adversarial deception towards children?
A small set of conditions (perhaps: XX male syndrome, complete gonadal dysgenesis, CAIS, lateral ovotesticular disorder and complete gonadal dysgenesis) does require some very careful thinking by most people…but each of those can be resolved in terms of the two sexes?
Sex in humans isn’t binary, it’s bimodal as is obvious from looking at any graph of the distribution of sexual characteristics; of course there are two major poles but there are also a lot of people who don’t match any descriptor of those poles.
Why would you make such a silly fib?
If you embed individuals in some high dimensional space made of things like height, serum testosterone, bone density, philtrum length etc. you can still factor it by the dichotomous variable we call “sex” even though you’ll see clear bimodality. The variance within the male and female groups does not make being male or female
But who has specified this high dimensional representation you suggest? Which dimensions are continuous, ordinal or categorical? What are the parameters of the distribution and their uncertainties? Are there sex units that we measure people in?
The variance within the male and female groups does not make being male or female does not mean male and female are modes of a continuous distribution.
Why not? If the variation doesn’t drop down to zero, which it doesn’t for many sexual characteristics what is it other than a continuous distribution?
As I said there are two clear poles, but I will expand that – on most measurements there is no descent to zero between the poles, there are people for whom ‘normal’ is neither pole. Are you seriously accusing me of lying regarding something so basic?
Can you point me to a dataset with the sampling methodology for this dataset that you refer to? What statistical test was used to show bimodality? What are the precise coordinates of the two modes? What criteria was used to include the different dimensions? What distance metric is used to measure the distance to either/both modes?
Why can’t we see any sign of this type of thinking in, say, the world’s largest collection of clinical trials?
https://clinicaltrials.gov/
Under eligibility criteria there is no continuous slider to select ‘sex, just what everyone expects: ‘male’ and ‘female’.
Why do studies on the evolution of sex use phrases like “two sexes”?
“Gamete competition, gamete limitation, and the evolution of the two sexes”
https://academic.oup.com/molehr/article/20/12/1161/1062990
Here is a US government agency talking about the importance of sex in scientific research, no mention of the high dimensional distribution you seem to refer to:
https://orwh.od.nih.gov/e-learning/sex-as-biological-variable-primer
According to your belief, Jazzlet, that sex is bimodal, is there a continuum between the gametes sex and egg? If the gametes are binary, sex must also be binary.
I assume “sex” is a variable and “sexual characteristics” are variables. I assume the sexual characteristics are associated with the variable sex. I do not seen how the distributions of the sexual characteristics are necessarily informative concerning the distribution of the variable sex.
Bimodal – what a great way to describe sex in humans. About what percent of the people do you think don’t match any descriptor of those poles? Just a rough ballpark please. Thank you!
The principle that making a theoretical argument causes harm to others, and therefore should be blocked or banned, is bad for all of us. Those who invoke that principle should think about how it could be used against their own ideas, or anyone’s. I really wish that our institutions could find the clarity and courage to reject the idea that stating an idea – especially in a forum where people opt in or out of listening – causes harm or threatens safety.
(Just to be clear, an idea can be potentially harmful; the act of stating it cannot.)
You are assuming those people (who invoke the principle) are making a good-faith mistake. They don’t care – they are the same ones who enforced Lysenkoism and other ideological dogmas (this is not the first historical instance of similar phenomena). Today’s institutional space is thoroughly corrupted by the prescriptive dominating the descriptive. The truth eventually emerges and Blanchard will be vindicated.
Thank you RW for the excellent article.
That science is being progressively eroded, corrupted by this new post-modern moralism that accepts no dissent, puts “doing good” (according to some particular, twisted metric) ahead of inquiry, and usurps words of their meaning, is well known. To see professional associations and a major scientific meeting caving in to a particular lobby is, notwithstanding, momentous.
I’m glad that at least anthropologists don’t take care of living people. The intolerant who “unanimously” cancelled the panel (imagine the peer pressure and the herd mentality among the organizers) may think that XO, XXY, XXXY, XYY, XYYY are part of normal variation, but they are wrong. Evolutionarily wrong in fact. Wrong on their own turf. Do not confuse physiology with pathology. Otherwise, by the same token, we may as well decide to identify cancer cells as part of the “normal variation of cell biology”. Then, why treat cancer? It’s normal after all.
Please continue taking care of long dead skeletons. Clearly you cannot do anything better.
Only some of the sex chromosome aneuploidies plausibly benefit from certain treatments (e.g., hormone replacement in the case of gonadal dysfunction), others need no treatment at all. It it silly to stigmatize such individuals as your post seems to do with “evolutionarily wrong”. All of these aneuploidies are easily and accurately described as either males or females.
Who is speaking of stigmatizing anyone? Who walks around with their chromosomal status tattooed to their forehead? These aneuploidies are ostensible only in some syndromes, not others. But like you said, these persons can often be described straightforwardly as males or females, which underscores again that sex in humans in binary. And in any case, lack of treatment or impossibility to treat a pathological condition does not make it physiological.
I was clear about what was stigmatizing when you used “evolutionary wrong”. There is no right or wrong in evolution, and it is easy to see how describing someone as “evolutionary wrong” is stigmatizing.
“And in any case, lack of treatment or impossibility to treat a pathological condition does not make it physiological.”
Yes, but not all of these conditions should be considered pathological. E.g., XXX and XYY aneuplodies may not present any symptoms.
To clarify here as my response ended up appearing further down… I meant the anthropologists who signed the support letter are evolutionarily wrong, not the persons affected by various types of aneuploidy.
The herd mentality is especially insidious in anthropology because unlike other disciplines, anthropologists can’t easily wander off into interdisciplinary fields or even industry. Anthropologists are purists, so once you’ve dipped your toes into interdisciplinarity, you count as ‘polluted’ and can forget about getting hired in an anthro department. Those who have done their entire training in anthro and then worked in the discipline their entire career also have pretty slim chances of getting hired outside of it, let alone in industry. In other words – these people are stuck, and for better or worse have to toe the party line or face economic ruin. It makes for one of the most toxic, authoritarian and conformist environments I have ever had the misfortune of being part of. I thank my past self every day for having had the good sense to get a professional undergrad degree that allowed me to escape.
Yes, it’s unfortunate that most people are not aware that humans with 0X, XXY, XXYY, etc. sex chromosomes have an increased risk of developmental delays, infertility, and comorbidities such as muscle weakness (ICD-10 code 62.81).
I’m not in the field nor an expert in the topic, but I think academic conferences should be for the free exchange of ideas, no matter how outside the mainstream they may be. It’s those who think outside the box that lead to the biggest innovations.
Besides, I’m sure a bunch of PhD’s are intelligent enough to handle differing viewpoints without being “harmed” (term used in the letter).
I agree. So, an overarching question which should be asked (and hopefully answered) is – WHY are so many academic conferences that are associated with the noun sex being cancelled?
Oh, big misunderstanding here. I didn’t say that the individuals themselves are “evolutionarily wrong”. I said that the anthropologists (who wrote the AAA support letter) are wrong on their evolutionary understanding. Those signatories are wrong on their own turf.
They wrote this: “…that sex is a biological binary; a concept that is rejected by current biological anthropology and human biology…” That is wrong in many ways, including evolution.
Of course, we can play with words — force a societal redefinition of words by coercing and shaming colleagues such that words now accommodate whatever most vocal activist groups want to say or not to say. Let’s redefine “sex” to mean some kind of “spectrum”. Sure, but that still doesn’t change that it’s binary. Some other word will end up being created for that necessary meaning. Just like if we redefine “woman” to mean anyone who claims to be a woman, we will need a new word for real woman.
That’s a language game. It has nothing to do with anthropology. It has nothing to do with understanding of how evolution operated and the fact that sex is binary, even if there are asymptomatic pathological cases.
I think RT, for the sake of keeping the best position against fraudulent science, should steer away from these discussions.
These issues are too polarizing, and RT will, in the best case, be followed by more people who are passionate about these matters. This seems to me, it could steer the perception of the editorial line heavily, and make RT not able to reach people with no or moderate views on this. This would hurt RT reach and mission, I think.
I don’t really follow your line of reasoning. The nature of analyzing scientific misconduct means studying polarizing fields; People seeking validation of their views of the world are probably more likely to do bad science than those whose worldview isn’t dependent on their research. RW articles regarding climate science see similarly large and polarized comment sections; should they stop talking about that too?
I’m startled and displeased to see RW suddenly decide to act as a mouthpiece for TERF nonsense with only a vague relationship to the site’s purported purpose.
Please reconsider who you give a platform to in the future.
Can you explain what “TERF nonsense” is?
“Hey guys, maybe biological sex affects how people in society are treated and it should therefore be accounted for in anthropology”
How dare RW publish this TERF nonsense!
RW has my respect and gratitude for posting this.
As a non-anthropologist, I have a serious question. What is being enforced is prohibition of biological sex as a explicit research category. That is what this conference is doing. What about issues like female infanticide? What about historic abandonment of female babies? What about abortion a female fetuses? These are things an anthropologist might study. I bring up these issues because, it shows the stakes. In some countries currently there is a skewed sex ratio and millions of missing females. Females face these types of risks because of biological sex. If you prohibit study of these issues (for any reason, including because mention of biological sex is traumatizing to trans people), you are contributing to a murderous practice. Because of this consequence and others, I feel the elimination of biological sex as a category of study is not only mistaken, but actually evil.
I think this was answered below — nobody is saying that you can’t study these things.
I’m not an anthropologist, but I’m getting the impression that the original panel was not needed — that it was addressing a non-problem — or rather, trying to claim there was a problem when there really is not. At an astronomy conference, do we need a panel on “it’s OK to claim the Earth is round” ?
Oh, so you think there aren’t any real threats to scientific integrity when discussing sex. Is that right?
@Pat, you are ignoring the grounds on which the panel was rejected. The AAA and CASCA initially accepted the panel and then rejected not, as your analogy has it, because it was equivalent to saying something trivially obvious like ‘the Earth is round’. Rather because they thought it might potenitally offended the feelings of a very vocal minority.
Your analogy would be closer to the truth if you amended it to read: ‘Astronomy conference rejects panel claiming the Earth is round because this fact is distressing to Flat-Earthers’. The stance of the AAA and CASCA has nothing to do with the necessity of the panel (after all, they initially accepted it) and everything to do with current gender ideology. It is the capitalution of reason to feelings that has rational people up in arms.
“Rather because they thought it might potenitally offended the feelings of a very vocal minority.”
Exactly. And that minority makes claims that are just as absurd as that the Earth is flat. However, differently than flat-earthers, these noisy activists dominate the public discourse, bully and shame anyone who disagrees with them, pose themselves as victims of an “intolerant society”, and say that if we don’t change our vocabulary and don’t accept men in women spaces, then they will commit suicide (!). They use flawed studies and statistics to bolster the claim of higher suicide rates, never mentioning that those who commit suicide have a range of other comorbid psychiatric conditions on top of their body image and gender issues.
To retain the analogy, the AAA & CASCA accepted a panel on “The Earth is round” but then retracted to avoid offending flat-earthers. Further, they implied that those who know the Earth is round are somehow “disrespectful of values” and could cause “harm”, that such views are “unsafe” and affect the “dignity” of “vulnerable” members. That their views lack “scientific integrity”. The went as far to imply that such views are “unethical”. They are “flatearthophobic” views.
https://americananthro.org/news/no-place-for-transphobia-in-anthropology-session-pulled-from-annual-meeting-program/
When things like this happens, I fully understand the mistrust from the public on the scientific institutions and advice that scientists provide. How can a random person believe things such as climate change or vaccines or whatever if those same scientists peddle this non-sense about spectrum of sex and a myriad of genders?
The notion that this is a “right-wing” problem is completely ludicrous. This is a bunch of leftist anthropologists (but I repeat myself) cancelling another bunch of leftists. The conservatives, the right-wingers, have nothing to do with this left-wing circular firing squad.
Why are the women anthropologists part of the “firing squad”? Who are they aiming at?
I should clarify to mean the women anthropologists whose talk has been cancelled
Based on the people the comments section of this post has attracted I think it’s safe to say this panel would also have been a terf circle jerk.
What makes something a “terf circle jerk”?
there doesn’t need to be a panel on ‘Why biological sex remains a necessary analytic category in anthropology’ there is no shortage of anthropological research around biological sex, no one is demanding a stop to anthropological research around biological sex.
Much like this comments section, I fear that the panel and the discussions it would invite would devolve into alarmists acting like there is a ‘prohibition of biological sex’ happening simply because trans people exist and are asking to be represented.
Where does the quote ‘prohibition of biological sex’ come from? I don’t see that phrase in the link to panel.
The panel was canceled because it wished to discuss the validity of biological sex as an analytical category. In the UK there is health data and criminal data, which is no longer collected, using biological sex, but rather gender. These issues have real world consequences, however, distressing that may be to engage with. Distress and anxiety should not cause cancellation of an academic panel, when the subject has real world import.
Gender determines our roles in present and past societies. This is the point of the discussion, not if you support or not trans rights or if you have sex with your wife, as someone said in the comments.
This piece flirts with radfem propaganda.
History always have sides. For those wondering which side you are, see the comments supporting Dreger’s work and If their content reflect the thoughts of someone that support trans rights.
Sex, religion, family, personality, appearance, health, wealth…what doesn’t affect how others treat us in society? What is does “gender” mean? Does it matter more or less than those things?
Consider this statement “You might think these topics are far enough left to pass muster in academe.” That a matter of fact statement such as this can be made underscores the broken condition of academia and the complacency that has allowed our institutions of higher learning to, yet again, be corrupted.
The real irony is people like her have for years and years countenanced this same sort of intellectual wankery that she now finds so unreasonable. And now when the first of her chickens has come home to roost she still doesn’t seem to grasp that being bias in all the right ways would inevitably lead to her being censored as well.
People who are malformed due to disorders of sex development do not constitute a another sex. Sex is determined by biological factors. Sex differentiation and development occurs through complex processes, at different times and involves various hormones and genes, etc., but the outcome is entirely the result of biological processes. The fact that biological disorders can interfere with and disrupt the development of sex only emphasise its biological nature. Pharmaceutical or surgical interventions cannot alter sex they are merely attempts to conceal it (usually not very successfully).
Societal constructs are subject to society and not dependent on biological processes. Compromising education and scientific integrity for the sake of the whims and sensibilities of the discontented and insecure elements of society will only harm everyone in the end. She is reaping what she has sow.
Y Gwir Yn Erbyn Y Byd
Deeply disappointed in RW for platforming this breathtakingly transphobic piece and letting the comments devolve into a particularly vile train wreck. I would be interested in reporting on how a retracted conference talk affects the scientific record in ways similar to retracted papers. Aside from the hate speech, this doesn’t seem like the correct forum for this op-ed.
Gender-critical panelists mean transphobic panelists, full stop. Dreger talks about how many cultures recognize third genders, but gender-critical panelists by definition do not recognize third genders or trans people of any description. How can they possibly be anthropologists adequately studying the intersection of sex and gender without acknowledging and understanding the views of the cultures they are studying? This seems to me, as it did to the association presidents, like a cardinal error. No one is asking her for full-throated support of her trans colleagues, but refraining from hate speech against them might be a better professional move.
Dreger isn’t being censored, nor are her relevant Canadian or American free speech rights being infringed upon. She is not guaranteed a platform by her professional association, and is free to state her views and have scholarly discussions anywhere else. I assume she signed a code of ethical conduct preventing harassment toward her colleagues on the basis of gender and sexual orientation she simply did not read and her outrage over being prevented from doing hate speech at her colleagues is baffling.
“Gender-critical panelists mean transphobic panelists, full stop.”
Why should people believe this claim of yours? What makes such people “transphobic”?
If you have to suppress other arguments in order for your own argument to prevail, your argument probably sucks.