Anthropology Rejects Attempt to Inject Culture Warring into Major Conference

Conservatives are outraged that a transparent attempt to troll a major anthropological conference was rejected, and the mainstream media is helping to cover up the details of what was planned.

by Evan Urquhart

It’s an outrage! The organizers of a major anthropology conference acted to remove a panel session slated to discuss the importance of biological sex to the anthropological field. In news outlets from the National Review to the New York Times, reporters of a certain lean have portrayed this as an attack on academic freedom while downplaying details about who the controversy-ridden panelists were, and what they planned to present.

Here’s an example of the tone of the response by the National Review. It’s… pretty shrill!

screenshot from the National Review

Other objectors include the people you’d most expect, i.e. FIRE, whose focus on free speech issues tends to skew to ones the right is upset about on college campuses and encompass things that have nothing to do with free speech.

But very few outlets seem to be going deep into who the panelists were, or what discussions they had planned. So, let’s do that now.

The panel was organized by Kathleen Lowrey, an associate professor at the University of Alberta who has referred to trans women as “trans identified men.” Lowrey titled her panel “Let’s Talk About Sex Baby: Why Biological Sex Remains a Necessary Analytic Category in Anthropology.” According to an open letter written by Lowrey and signed by the rejected panelists, it was initially accepted in July before being reviewed by the organizers and pulled. The American Anthropological Association and the Canadian Anthropology Society sent a letter informing the group of their decision last week, on September 25. 

A public-facing explanation of the decision was subsequently posted to the website for the AAA accusing the panelists of bad science and heavily implied the panelists were attempting to use the conference to advance the panelists political goals.

screenshot from the statement by the AAA

Lowery’s open letter in response to these events makes it quite clear what sort of panel this would be. According to that letter, Spanish anthropologist Silvia Carrasco “planned to present data that looked at ‘sex-based oppression, violence and exploitation’ and the difficulty of addressing these issues when biological sex is disavowed.” In other words, it was a direct argument against the acceptance of transgender rights. A presentation planned by UK anthropologist Kathleen Richardson had a similar flavor. The open letter says Richardson’s abstract “highlighted issues surrounding material disparities between the sexes in the tech industry that are being erased by counting men "who identify as trans as women rather than by having more women enter the field.”

News reports in the New York Times and elsewhere have largely neglected to share these descriptions, instead chosing to focus one much less obviously inflammatory presentation, planned by Elizabeth Weiss and titled “No bones about it: Skeletons are binary; people may not be.”

screenshot from the New York Times

This one-liner about skeletons requires a bit of context (which has not been widely provided in other outlets). In anthropology, determining the sex of an individual based on their skeleton is a probabilistic endeavor. It is well known that there are many confounding factors that can interfere with a researcher’s ability to correctly determine an individual’s sex based on their bones alone. In other words, skeletons are flatly not binary in any sense, as a male’s skeleton from one culture may resemble that of a female’s from another, and vice versa. This doesn’t mean there’s no place for using skeletons to approximate sex in the field: If a researcher has access to a full skeleton combined with extensive experience with a given population they can get close to accurately sexing human remains for that group. It’s just tricky, probability based, and prone to error when the corresponding human population is ancient or unknown.

Saying skeletons are binary is therefore an outrageous provocation, one might even say an outright falsehood, in an anthropological context. That’s not surprising as the talk so-titled was proposed by Elizabeth Weiss, who has engaged in multiple similar provocations in the past. Weiss loudly opposes the repatriation of remains unearthed by representatives of colonialism to the indigenous tribes whose ancestors they are. She also once treated human remains as trophies, posting a smiling picture of herself with human skulls in her social media posts. That last incident lost Weiss her position at San Jose State. She seems to be attempting to make a post-academic career on the cancel culture circuit, having accepted a position with “Heterodox Academy” a nonprofit dedicated to advancing culture war grievances in academia.

The AAA and CASCA seems to have looked at these inflammatory titles and the controversy ridden panel members and decided not to let their professional conference be used by these grifters to score cheap political points.

Unfortunately, there’s a distinct feeling of “heads I win, tails you lose” to the whole affair. The researcher’s whose talk was nixed are busy making hay out of the purported censorship, with the help of the NYT, and what’s more they don’t even have to give a talk! While they failed to get the legitimacy of sneaking their political agenda into the conference, but they do get the outrage machine pumping on their behalf. One imagines that for ideologues like these perhaps that’s almost as good.