Based on extensive consultation
Yesterday it was the cancellation letter, today it’s the defense of the cancellation letter. The American Anthropological Association issues A Statement…one which we could probably all write for them.
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.
What’s “in the spirit of respect for our values”? What does it add to “via respect for our values”?
The first ethical principle in AAA’s Principles of Professional Responsibility is to “Do no harm.”
They’re failing. They’re doing harm – lots of it.
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.
Nonsense. That’s like saying it does harm to a child to say it’s fine to pretend to fly but not fine to jump off the roof. It’s not harm to say that fantasies are fantasies. (There are times when it’s pointlessly cruel, but the circumstances of those times are very limited.)
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.
“Simplistically binary” – that’s a good one. It’s so much more complex and sophisticated to say that people are a little bit of every sex [or gender] you can think of.
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.
But that’s bones. It’s not every form of sex identification there is, it’s specifically bones. It could be that bones are not as unmistakably sexed as other body parts.
There is no single biological standard by which all humans can be reliably sorted into a binary male/female sex classification.
I’m seeing biologists rolling their eyes and saying “Yeah there is: gametes.”
So sex, there sure as hell is a binary (yeah Intersex is complicated, but then that is also a cluster of rare disorders, not the norm). Gender, sure, that’s not a binary, but the more people try to describe and define it, the more amphoral and non-sensical it becomes.
Anyway, for anthropologists, and social scientists in general, surely there is some really meaty and interesting work to be done looking at the roles people perform in their societies vs the sex they have? If you’re not prepared to acknowledge the concept of sex as a valid category, you’re going to miss out on lots of potentially very interesting research.
How did this subject reduce the safety and dignity of any members? It seems to me the only ‘danger’ posed was that some ideologues would hear information that undermines their position on the matter of trans accommodation.
Oh. Reading on, I see that’s exactly what they meant. Goddamn craven leadership.
Sure, but when it comes to sex, what’s the harm in pointing out there is only a choice of two conclusions that can be reached?
I just learned something interesting:
We’re not mushrooms.
https://malmesbury.substack.com/p/the-talk-a-brief-explainer-of-sexual
Well, PZ has weighed in, because of course he has.
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2023/09/27/dont-waste-our-time-with-kathleen-stocks-hateful-agenda/#comments
I actually thought at first that some aspect of this latest cancellation had unexpectedly woken [sic] the old PZ and he’d come out swinging in defence of facts over ideology. His post is in response to a tweet criticising the cancellation (retweeted by Kathleen Stock, hence her name in the post title). The tweet said
The start of his response is what caused my confusion. Saying that he had to correct that statement, he wrote:
It really did look to me as though the cancellation had crossed that line of his, causing the scales to drop from his eyes. Oh, silly old optimistic me!
(personally, I’d have put ‘on fallacious ideas about sex’ before ‘at a serious meeting’, but I like clarity. I’m odd that way). Gaslighting much, PZ?
Anyway, the comments are predictably horrendous, but even with the usual blend of sex/gender and trans/race baiting-and-switching, ad hom attacks, bad faith interpretations, yadda yadda, one comment really stood out as a completely fabricated (but presented as fact) GC view. An early commenter (Raging Bee) had ‘debunked’ the obviously true claim that trans ideology was erasing the definition of ‘lesbian’ by asking if anybody anywhere had ever made the same claim about gay erasure, decided that no, of course not, and used that as a good reason to dismiss the lesbian erasure claim. Commenter ‘Silentbob’ said well actually, yes, they absolutely do make that claim.
Not to be outdone in the gaslighting stakes, he goes on to say:
And that’s when my irony meter reached critical mass and went nuclear.
Good grief.
“Settled Science” is a phrase that really grinds my gears when used by scientists who should know better. I even wrote a thing about it. For those who need the tl:dr
The JWST is revealing data that challenges something that we had thought is well-established, and that is the age of the Universe. The process of scientific advancement requires that science be challenged, either to refine evidence for our conclusions or to reveal better conclusions that contradict the old ones.
That aside, there has been no science yet done that I have seen which over-rides the currently understood biology of sex. The only thing that we have seen is wordplay on sex and gender to confuse people with bafflegab about spectra, concentrating on secondary and tertiary sex markers, and avoiding the discussion of sex itself. This sort of thing promotes scientific ignorance because the same people who need everyone to take climate science seriously are promoting this unscience of gender.
Right, PZ, don’t try to make it make sense. That suits your agenda.
That human sex can be reliably inferred from skeletal remains is hardly controversial in anthropology. The cancellation of the panel is obviously because the AAA has chosen as an organization to take the side of the TQ+ with respect to gender ideology, and its insistence that sex doesn’t matter when it comes to what a woman is. Still, sex exists or as Galileo might have put it “still, there are two sexes”.
If there’s some pushback with respect to sex being a material fact in anthropology that matters which the AAA doesn’t like, it’s tripe like this from some in the profession that’s the reason:
https://psmag.com/social-justice/our-bones-reveal-sex-is-not-binary
Given the reliability of the Streisand Effect when it comes to the cancellation of Women We Don’t Like Because We Don’t That’s Why, this issue isn’t going to go away anytime soon.
Sort of depends on which bones.
Thass what I meant. Some are shaped differently – the pelvis being the obvious example – while others are just different sizes. right? And humans don’t always turn up in complete skeletons so that’s why conclusions are tentative?
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2023/09/29/anthropology-panels-elizabeth-weiss-and-the-devious-self-serving-propaganda-of-gender-critical-bigots/
He’s followed up with a longer post justifying the cancellation on the grounds that TERFS can’t be allowed to science or some such shit. He adds the spurious claim that ‘gender critical’ feminist’ is the new term for ‘TERF’, which I think he has the wrong way around, and has also deduced from the title and participants of the cancelled session that it wasn’t going to be about sex and old bones at all.
. When did he gain psychic powers?
There is a side story, but I’ll put that in the Miscellany room to avoid derailing this thread.
God, what a poltroon.
Oh look at that, he lies about Kathleen Stock in the first paragraph. He says she “lost her professorship because” [evil terf blah blah]. No she didn’t; she resigned because people like him made her life there intolerable.
Also in the first paragraph: he calls the LGB Alliance “that group that openly repudiated the idea of trans rights” without saying what trans rights are. It’s certainly not true that the LGB Alliance says trans people should not have human rights.
“You don’t have to scratch a gender critical very deeply to find a fascist.”
Is he morphing (has morphed?) into the DJT of biology?