Anthropology conference canceled panel suggesting sex is binary

The panel was going to be called “Let’s Talk About Sex Baby: Why Biological Sex Remains a Necessary Analytic Category in Anthropology” and it was set to be held at an annual conference in Toronto this November. The panel got a preliminary approval this summer but this week it was abruptly canceled. The American Anthropological Association (AAA) put out a statement titled “No Place For Transphobia in Anthropology: Session pulled from Annual Meeting program.”

The AAA and CASCA boards reached a decision to remove the session “Let’s Talk about Sex Baby: Why biological sex remains a necessary analytic category in anthropology” from the AAA/CASCA 2023 conference program. This decision was based on extensive consultation and was reached in the spirit of respect for our values, in order to ensure the safety and dignity of all of our members, as well as the scientific integrity of the program.

The first ethical principle in AAA’s Principles of Professional Responsibility is to “Do no harm.” The session was rejected because it relied on assumptions that run contrary to the settled science in our discipline, framed in ways that do harm to vulnerable members of our community. It commits 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.

Such efforts contradict scientific evidence, including the wealth of anthropological scholarship on gender and sex. Forensic anthropologists talk about using bones for “sex estimation,” not “sex identification,” a process that is probabilistic rather than clearly determinative, and that is easily influenced by cognitive bias on the part of the researcher. Around the world and throughout human history, there have always been people whose gender roles do not align neatly with their reproductive anatomy. There is no single biological standard by which all humans can be reliably sorted into a binary male/female sex classification. On the contrary, anthropologists and others have long shown sex and gender to be historically and geographically contextual, deeply entangled, and dynamically mutable categories.

The function of the “gender critical” scholarship advocated in this session, like the function of the “race science” of the late 19th and early 20th 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 panel was originally put together by Kathleen Lowrey from the University of Alberta. She and other panelists responded to the decision with a statement of their own. [emphasis added]

We are disappointed that the American Anthropological Association (AAA) and the Canadian Anthropology Society (CASCA) have chosen to forbid scholarly dialogue at the important joint
conference, themed “Transitions”, to be held in Toronto in November. Our panel, “Let’s Talk About Sex Baby: Why biological sex remains a necessary analytic category in anthropology”, was accepted on July 13th, 2023 after the submission “was reviewed by the AAA’s Section Program Chairs or by CASCA’s Scientific Committee/Comité Scientifique de la CASCA”. From the time of this acceptance until we received your letter dated September 25th, 2023, no one from the AAA or CASCA reached out to any of the panelists with concerns. Thus, it comes as a shock to all of us that the AAA and CASCA canceled the panel due to the false accusation 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.” Due to the serious nature of the allegation, we hope that, rather than maintaining secrecy, the AAA and CASCA will share with us and its membership documentation about the exact sources and nature of these complaints and the correspondence that led to this decision…

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”.

In sum, this doesn’t look like a scientific decision, it looks like a political one.

One of the people consulted by the AAA prior to canceling the panel was Professor Agustin Fuentes at Princeton. He and two other professors who were consulted wrote their own letter in support of the decision to cancel the panel:

• Implicit in the session abstract and several of the individual abstracts is the assumption that sex is a biological binary; a concept that is rejected by current biological anthropology and human biology, and highly disputed across contemporary biology…

As anthropologists who work in biological anthropology and human biology, we are aware that definitions of sex can be made using pelvic girdle shape, cranial dimensions, external genitalia, gonads, sex chromosomes, and more. Sex, as biological descriptor, is not binary using any of those definitions. People are born with non-binary genitalia every day – we tend to call people who fall into this group intersex. People are born with sex chromosomes that are not XX or XY but X, XXY, XXXY and more, every day. The same is true with gonads. What’s more, someone can have intersex genitalia but not intersex gonads, intersex chromosomes but not intersex genitalia. These bodily differences demonstrate the massive variation seen in sex physiology across vertebrate species. Looking beyond humans, we see three forms of the adult orangutan. Does this represent a sex binary? Significant percentages of many reptile species have intersex genitalia. Are we still trying to call sex a binary? The binary limits the kinds of questions we can ask and therefore limits the scope of our science.

As anthropologists it does make sense for them to attempt to study the full variation of human experience and it is true that people with chromosomal variations do exist, though the number of people with these variations is relatively small. In the case of XXY chromosomes, which is known as Klinefelter’s condition, it impacts between 1 in 500 and 1 in 1,000 males. Still, the existence of chromosomal variations does not threaten the existence of a clear sex binary in humans and other animals. The genetic machinery that creates this sex binary operates in a specific an predictable way 99.8% of the time but in some cases something goes wrong and you get XXY (Klinefelter’s). Klinefelter’s is not passed down through family lines because it’s essentially a random error in cell division.

And yet, everyone with Klinefelters is male. Probably half the people that have this condition never know it and simply live their lives as males. Others may be diagnosed at puberty and receive testosterone to counteract the impact of the condition (low testosterone production is a common outcome of Klinefelters). None of this changes the fact that the vast majority of humans and other species have a sex binary and those differences can be seen in their skeletons once they reach puberty.

It’s true there are three forms of adult orangutan but two of them are male and one is female. In fact, all of the so-called flanged males develop through the unflanged male stage. Does this represent a sex binary? Yes. There are still male orangutans and female orangutans. Some of the males are larger and more developed as a result of additional testosterone. Some of the males are smaller and less developed but they are still male and still mate with the females and produce offspring.

I’m not saying scientists should be in any way limited in what they study, only that ignoring the clear and obvious evidence that a sex binary exists in humans and other higher animals seems counter-productive. I get the impression it’s the sort of thing the anthropologists at this panel were going to argue if their speech hadn’t been canceled.