Let’s Not Talk About Sex
Let’s Not Talk About Sex
When Anthropology Denies Reality
In anthropologist Margaret Mead’s travels—whether to study native tribes of Nebraska or Papua New Guinea—she discovered something fundamental about sex and gender: males and females behaved differently in different cultures. Sex was a constant but gender—ideas of masculinity and femininity—not so much. Mundugumor women were as violent as the men. Tchambuli women dominated; the men remained passive and gentle. Thus presentism—imposing one’s own geographically-, culturally-, and temporally-informed worldview onto other societies—had no place if anthropologists were to tell the complex story of human existence, and of how men and women lived in different places and times.
This issue may have been discussed at a panel called “Let’s Talk about Sex Baby: Why biological sex remains a necessary analytic category in anthropology.” It was to be held at the American Anthropological Association (AAA) and the Canadian Anthropology Society (CASCA)’s November, 2023 conference. The gathering’s theme: “Transitions.”
“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,” the panel description read. People may not be binary, they allowed, but skeletons are. While not everyone in the field needed to talk about sex, “some absolutely do.”
The panelists—an international group of socio-cultural anthropologists, archaeologists, and biological anthropologists—would explain why: everything from examining infanticide in ancient cultures to “materialist and sex-based understandings of power and inequality.” It was fine to study gender, they asserted—as long as it didn’t erase sex.
On September 25th, two months after the panel had been reviewed and accepted, the presenters received a two-paragraph letter announcing its cancellation. 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,” AAA’s and CASCA’s statement read. The decision had been reached “in the spirit of respect for our values, the safety and dignity of our members, and the scientific integrity of the program.” (The Heterodox Academy will now host the cancelled panel on Nov. 8.)
According to the panelists, no one had reached out to them, to outline concerns, request changes, or explain how arguing in support of maintaining sex as a category of study would make other members unsafe. (The AAA would not provide a representative for me to speak to. Those who signed the open letter wouldn’t grant me an interview.)
In a longer statement titled “No Place for Transphobia in Anthropology,” AAA and CASCA asserted that panelists contradicted “settled science”—that is, it’s apparently settled that sex is not binary, despite the fact many scientists insist that it is, and, well, every human is the product of a male and female coming together (even if via a test tube). The associations asserted that panelists had committed “one of the cardinal sins of scholarship” by assuming the truth they aimed to prove: “that sex and gender are simplistically binary, and that this is a fact with meaningful implications for the discipline.” In actuality, sex and gender were “historically and geographically contextual, deeply entangled, and dynamically mutable categories.” To discuss sex this way conjured past “race science,” they claimed, apparently intuiting that the goal of the panel was to oppress and silence under the guise of academic freedom, rather than to investigate and debate.
Like so many fields, from medicine to psychology, anthropology and archeology have been questioned by a young cohort, aiming to hold them accountable for past errors, including presentism and ethnocentrism, and to create a more diverse and inclusive discipline.
Or, seen through another lens, they’ve abandoned scientific rigor in the name of identity politics. Elizabeth Weiss, a physical anthropologist at San Jose State University and one of the panel members, called the deplatforming “another triumph of wokeism over science.”
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By some metrics, those agitating for change have been successful—not just at getting panels canceled but in getting the field to abandon the distinctions between sex and gender—a distinction these disciplines once helped to create and understand. The Society for American Anthropology has facilitated the creation of a number of interest groups, including one for women and one for those focused on repatriating remains—as opposed to studying them.