Major North American anthropology groups have canceled a discussion centered on the importance of biological sex in anthropology, claiming that the talk harmed people identifying as LGBT.
The discussion included a panel of experts who were going to talk about “why in their work gender is not helpful and only sex will do.” The presentations aimed to discuss why “sex identification—whether an individual was male or female—using the skeleton is one of the most fundamental components in bioarchaeology and forensic anthropology.”
“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,” the letter stated.
‘Anti-Science Response’
In their letter, the panelists asked the two organizations to share the nature of the complaints that led them to cancel the session.“We are puzzled at the AAA/CASCA adopting as its own official stance that to support the continued use of biological sex categories (e.g., male and female; man and woman) is to imperil the safety of the LGBTQI community,” they wrote.
The letter said that the panel itself is composed of a diverse group of women, including a lesbian, and is “concerned about the erasure of women.”
For instance, an abstract from one of the panelists focuses on the issue of “counting men who identify as trans” as women in the tech industry rather than having more women in the field.
“Your suggestion that our panel would somehow compromise ‘the scientific integrity of the [program]’ 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,” the panelists wrote.
The letter also raised concerns about the AAA and CASCA deciding to conduct a “major review” of the processes involved in vetting sessions.
Sex Identification Versus Estimation
On Sept. 28, the AAA released a statement against the now-canceled discussion, accusing it of transphobia and marginalizing LGBT.“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 AAA statement reads.
The organization accused the panel of committing a “cardinal” sin by proposing that sex and gender are “simplistically binary.”
AAA claimed that forensic anthropologists talk only about the “sex estimation” of bones and not “sex identification.”
“No single biological standard” exists according to which human beings can be grouped into the male/female binary classification,” it stated.
The AAA didn’t respond to a request for comment by press time.
For instance, male skeletons have more cranial features and robust muscle attachment sites. Female skeletons are smaller in overall size and more gracile.
