The war against real science continues at woke institutions.In Toronto, anthropologists slated to give a talk about the importance of biological sex at an anthropology conference have been canceled. Conference organizers assert the reason for this act is the “harm” it could allegedly cause the Trans and LGBTQI community.
An oral presentation, titled ‘Let’s Talk About Sex, Baby: Why biological sex remains a necessary analytic category in anthropology’, had been accepted by the American Anthropological Association (AAA) and the Canadian Anthropology Society (CASCA) as a panel at its annual conference in Toronto, Canada, in November.However, the anthropologists giving the talk have shared a joint letter they received from the AAA and the CASCA saying their panel – which consisted of six women – had been pulled after an “extensive consultation”.The six women say the content of talks would actually have been gender-affirming. They claim their panel was pulled because AAA/CASCA now thinks that using words like male and female, or man and woman, will “imperil the safety of the LGBTQI community”.
As a fan of Egyptology who has read hundreds of articles on the analysis done about mummies, this act is as stunning as it is stupid. One of the core aspects of assessing a skeleton has always been to look at the pelvic bones to discern whether the individual being studied was male or female.
The professor who organized the panel is angry at the smears about the content that would have been offered and the organization’s excuses.
Ihe AAA/CASCA decision was a “shock,” according to an open letter written by Kathleen Lowrey, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Alberta who organized the panel, and her co-panelists. In the letter, they said none of the panelists had heard from AAA or CASCA with any concerns about the panel until the letter notifying them of the decision to cancel the event.They defended the content of the panel against what they said was the “false accusation” the ideas were harmful. The letter concluded:
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”.
Evolutionary biologist Colin Wright has refuted the entire fiction of non-binary sex in his outstanding Substack column, Debunking Pseudoscience: ‘Multimodal Models of Animal Sex.’ He noted what other topics were approved for the conference in his latest Substack column.
Accepted on July 13 without contention, the “Let’s Talk About Sex” panel was to be featured alongside other panels and talks exploring various anthropological topics, alongside more politically-oriented talks titled “Trans Latinx Methodologies,” “Exploring Activist Anthropology,” and “Reimagining Anthropology as Restorative Justice.”
Will the last real scientist working at an American institution of higher learning please turn off the light?
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