Two of the largest anthropology groups in the world have canceled an event where they were to discuss the identification of a subject’s sex based on his or her skeletal remains due to concerns about “transphobia.”
The cancellation of the panel discussion has some anthropologists calling out the politicization of their field of study, Fox News reported.
Skeletal remains have always been used by modern scientists to determine a deceased person’s sex.
As the Smithsonian notes, males “tend to have larger, more robust bones and joint surfaces,” while the female pelvis has “distinct features adapted for childbearing.”
But such notions are now verboten in the field of anthropology.
The American Anthropological Association and the Canadian Anthropology Society (CASCA) had planned a joint forum on “sex identification” for an upcoming conference, but the event was nixed, Fox reported.
The groups offered no explanation for the decision in a letter to the scientists who were to speak on the panel.
“We write to inform you that at the request of numerous members the respective executive boards of AAA and CASCA reviewed the panel submission ‘Why biological sex remains a necessary analytic category in anthropology’ and reached a decision to remove the session,” the groups stated in the letter.
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The scientists called the decision “anti-science” in a joint response.
“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,” they wrote in their own letter.
“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.’”
When pressed on the decision to cancel the forum by Fox News, the AAA issued the following response:
“There is no place for transphobia in anthropology.”
“The session was rejected because it [was] 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.”
The AAA also cast doubt on the science of using skeletal remains to identify sex, calling such determinations merely an “estimation.”
“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,” the AAA concluded.
Elizabeth Weiss, an anthropology professor at San José State University who had been slated to take part in the panel discussion, told Fox that her line of work has been overrun by activists.
“Just as we’re getting better and better at identifying what is male and what is a female [from] the skeletal record, we are getting more and more attacked for knowing how to do this,” she said.
“Truth is not necessarily considered an objective goal and the victims’ narrative is more important than facts. Who tells the story is more important than the data, which we obviously know is not true.
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