Gender panel canceled by Anthropology association due to backlash

Female scholars will no longer lead a panel at an anthropological conference next month explaining why biological sex remains necessary for scientific analysis due to concerns that the discussion could be considered harmful to the LGBT community. 

The Anthropological Association and the Canadian Anthropology Society announced last week the removal of the session from their annual conference set to take place from Nov. 15-19. 

The scratched panel carried the title “Let’s Talk about Sex Baby: Why biological sex remains a necessary analytic category in anthropology.” 

The panel was organized by Kathleen Lowrey, an associate professor at the University of Alberta. It featured Elizabeth Weiss of San Jose State University, Silvia Carrasco of the Autonomous University of Barcelona, Kathleen Richardson of United Kingdom’s De Montfort University and Michèle Sirois, the president of the women’s rights group Pour les droits des femmes du Québec.

Another panelist, Carole Hooven, a senior fellow at the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute, was scheduled as a speaker for the session but dropped out. 

Jeff Martin, director of communications and public affairs for AAA, told The Christian Post Friday that the meeting has 30 sessions related to sex and gender deemed acceptable taking place in various formats, including roundtables and poster presentations.

“Basically, we feel the abstract submitted was intentionally misleading and disingenuously pushing a political agenda that would harm not only individuals but the field itself as it attempts to redirect the evidence-based science our discipline has put forward on sex and gender,” Martin said. 

A Sept. 29 letter of support for the decision to withdraw the session from scholars at Princeton University, University of Illinois and Arizona State University states that the panelists’ abstract asserted sex is a “biological binary.” They contend that human sex and gender categories are not binary, “shift” and “are always affected by the cultural beliefs of the time.”

The Canadian Anthropology Society did not immediately respond to The Christian Post’s request for comment.

On Thursday, the education nonprofit Heterodox Academy announced that it would host a virtual version of the session on Nov. 8 featuring the panel talks as “originally prepared.” The panelists will present five papers, four in English and one in French, before taking questions from the audience.

According to the description of the panel in the preliminary program for AAA and CASCA’s annual meeting, the session intended to challenge the concept of replacing sex with gender, both in anthropology and in public life. 

“Contesting the transition from sex to gender in anthropological scholarship deserves much more critical consideration than it has hitherto received in major disciplinary fora like AAA / CASCA,” the panel description reads. 

“This diverse international panel brings together scholars from socio-cultural anthropology, archaeology, and biological anthropology who describe why in their work gender is not helpful and only sex will do,” it continued. 

In a Sept. 25 letter, AAA President Ramona Pérez and CAS President Monica Heller notified the panelists that their planned session would not happen despite the initial approval of the panel in July. The letter said that the decision to cancel was at the request of numerous AAA and CAS executive board members. 

“This decision was based on extensive consultation and was reached in the spirit of respect for our values, the safety and dignity of our members, and the scientific integrity of the program(me),” the letter stated. 

“The reason the session deserved further scrutiny was that the ideas were advanced in such a way as to cause harm to members represented by the Trans and LGBTQI of the anthropological community as well as the community at large,” the document continued. 

On Sept. 26, the panelists issued a response letter to Pérez and Heller, expressing disappointment with their respective organizations. The scholars noted that the panel was originally accepted on July 13 after it was reviewed by “AAA’s Section Program Chairs or by CASCA’s Scientific Committee/Comité Scientifique de la CASCA.” 

From the time of the acceptance to the date that they received the letter, the scholars say no one from AAA or CASCA reached out to them with concerns about the panel. The scholars requested that AAA and CASCA share the sources and nature of the complaints and the correspondence that led to the decision due to the serious nature of the allegations. 

“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,” the letter stated. 

“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,” the scholars continued. 

In a statement last week to Just the News, Weiss questioned why the panel was accepted in the first place if the topic was so “egregious.” 

The anthropologist wondered if the decision to cancel may have been based partly on her controversial opposition to the reburial of Native American remains and her posing with a skull in 2021. 

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