“Vulnerable members of our community”
The Times on that canceled anthropology panel:
For a big annual conference on anthropology, Kathleen Lowrey, an associate professor at the University of Alberta, put together several panelists around a controversial theme: that their discipline was in the midst of erasing discussions of sex, which they believe is binary — either male or female.
So she collected a panel of speakers, only to have the profession…er…erase it.
That statement again, in case it’s faded over the past few days:
In a joint statement on Thursday, the two sponsors of the conference, the American Anthropological Association and the Canadian Anthropology Society, said that they wanted to protect the transgender community: “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.”
The statement also compared the panelists’ views to eugenics.
“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,” the statement said.
Of course gender critical scholarship is not “like” 19th century “race science.” Claiming it is is just enhanced bullying.
In recent decades, many anthropologists have moved to a more nuanced view of sex, one that often rejects it as simply binary.
Nuanced shmuanced. The word they’re looking for is “supernatural.”
Dr. Lowrey said that she and the other panelists were blindsided by the decision and that none of them had been contacted about any concerns from the anthropology groups since the panel received its July approval. In a statement, the panelists said that it was a “false accusation” that their ideas were intended to harm
the transgender community[trans people].
Of course their ideas weren’t “intended to harm” anyone, and sneaking that “community” in there is just part of the general manipulation and outright lying. I don’t know if it’s the Times that sneaked it in or the goons who canceled the panel, quoted by the panelists, but either way it’s manipulative.
The move was criticized by some academic freedom advocates who said that the two anthropology groups had caved to political pressure and proved the panel’s point: that the discipline was unfriendly to dissenting views on sex and gender.
But Ramona Pérez, the president of the American Anthropological Association, rejected the attacks.
Bam, there it is again. What “attacks”?? The Times is putting a big fat foot on the scales here. Saying the cancellation is wrong is not an “attack.”
The panel was nixed, she said, only after complaints that it did not have scientific merit and that it was harmful to some of the association’s 8,000 members.
“This was an intention to marginalize, not engage scientifically,” Dr. Pérez said.
What the hell is that supposed to mean?
Dr. Lowrey’s panel received preliminary approval based on a relatively anodyne abstract, reviewed by people without subject-matter expertise, Dr. Pérez said. It was later, when others took a closer look at more detailed plans for each presenter, that the association started receiving complaints by biological, evolutionary and cultural anthropologists, Dr. Pérez said.
“We looked at who was actually in it,” she said, and “we began to see that this really was one of those times where people who have an alternative agenda come into professional associations, try to get into these conferences, in order to push an agenda that doesn’t actually match up with the discipline.”
That’s extraordinarily offensive. The witches “come into professional associations” like people crashing a party – please ignore the fact that they’re anthropologists at an anthropology conference. They “try to get into these conferences” because they are anthropologists and the conferences are anthropology conferences – that’s how that works. Not all panels are accepted, but it’s not fraud or gate-crashing or sneaking in the back door to propose one. The Times sucks at this.
I think some idiotic trans-allies have opened themselves up for all sorts of defamation lawsuits.
I also think they hate women and want them to die.
It’s “settled science”. “Many anthropologists have moved to a more nuanced view of sex, one that often rejects it as simply binary.“
That does not sound very “settled” to me.
I guess that eventually, like habituation to a drug, DARVO starts losing its effectivenes, and you have to use more and more of it to acheive the same effect that used to come with a much lower dosage.
Or, if DARVO is the only tool you have, everything starts to look like a nail?
Or something.
People with DSD’s/VSD’s are the ones who are not actually being listened to, here. Why do these “folx of Science” use such a bad argument to claim that sex is not binary, when they should know that such conditions are not examples of a middle set of sexes and are not related to the transgender claim of gender ID separate from the body’s sex?
The tone of dogmatic authority in laying down what is, and is not, anthropology is reminiscent of Malcolm Bradbury’s Howard Kirk laying down what is, and is not, sociology in The History Man. Sadly, I lack the skill to write the parody that observation should inspire.
I need to read that again. It’s been a long time.
If not looked at too closely, Dr. Perez’s justification quoted in the OP sounds reasonable enough. A proposal for a panel was given preliminary approval based on an abstract, but after looking at the details of what the panel was actually going to present it was realised that the panel’s agenda was unrelated to the theme of the conference and so the approval was rescinded. But the Devil is in the details – or lack thereof.
If someone is asked to explain or justify their actions but telling the truth will reflect poorly on them and they don’t want to be caught telling lies, they turn to evasive tactics. The true-but-self-incriminating details are withheld and the lies are told by omission, and if thirty-five years as a parent and grandparent has taught me anything, it’s how to spot evasive or otherwise problematic answers from a mile away.
I’ve never worked in academia but I do know that when proposals are vetted they are (or should be) done so by people with a working knowledge of the subject at hand. Proposals for inclusion in an anthropology conference will be reviewed by people with at least a working knowledge of anthropology. So what that tells me is that either the conference organisers turned the initial review process over to people with no expertise in anthropology, or that the subject-matter the reviewers had no expertise in was not anthropology
OK, how did these ‘others’ get their hands on the more detailed plans? Did the panel members send out transcripts of each member’s contribution to their planned session? What was the nature of the complaints being received?
Bait and switch: from vetting content to vetting panel members.
So the superficially reasonable justification is anything but. My reading of the statement is that the subject-matter in which the initial reviewers lacked expertise was not anthropology but rather gender critical feminism, and more precisely of gender critical activists. When the conference details were released, ‘others’ who were aware of and who opposed the gender critical views of the members of this one panel began sending in complaints, not regarding the content but of the presenters themselves. In transworld everything that gender critical feminists say is harmful purely by dint of being said by a dissenter from the ideology, and because the mere presence of such people is harmful even if they don’t utter a single word, cancelling their session was the only possible option. Perez couldn’t say it that way because it’s clearly a ridiculous reason – the truth that will reflect poorly on the speaker. She couldn’t lie and say outright that the content of the session was not anthropological in nature, not if the panel had not released transcripts of the contents of their session – that would be the easily uncovered lie. Instead, the justification was based on a bad-faith interpretation of the title and abstract alone but framed in such a way that it implied without explicitly stating that the content was the issue – the lying by omission.
AoS, you might be right it was from the title alone, but I’ve been to conferences where presenters sent their talk to the other presenters in advance. So it could be someone actually did see the planned panel discussion (or details about it) perfectly legitimately. It could also be someone just made assumptions, knowing the presenter was GC.
@7 I pride myself on my high ‘hit rate’ of having talks accepted at conferences; in fact, I’ve only ever been turned down twice. One of these I had obviously misunderstood what the conference was about, as was made clear when I saw the abstracts of the talks that had been accepted – that’s fine, my bad, I understood why they’d rejected my pitch. (The other one I’m still fuming about.) Of course, if that had been the case in this situation the conference conveners would have been able to explain that rather than resorting to weird, vague, and obviously untrue statements about the presenters themselves.
iknklast, it was the switch from the focus being on the details to being on the presenters that made me look at it more closely. Even if they had seen a copy of the full presentation it is still clear that their problem was with the panel rather than the material. As guest said (#8), if the content was genuinely problematic they wouldn’t have had to look at the who, just the what. Problematic material is problematic regardless of who put it together.
If they had seen the full content it just adds one more step to my earlier interpretation: having been informed of the GC views of the panellists the organisers made a bad faith interpretation of the content and criticised the strawman version – a tactic beloved of the TRAs (and one that was used on me recently: I might have mentioned it here :-)). Either way, they either assumed the content or they assumed the intention behind the content after being informed of the GC views of the panellists. The decision to cancel came first, the reason for it was an <ad hoc fabrication.