Anthropology Conference Drops a Panel Defending Sex as Binary
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.
Dr. Lowrey invited a slate of speakers and called the discussion, “Let’s Talk About Sex Baby: Why Biological Sex Remains a Necessary Analytic Category in Anthropology.” Let’s not talk about it, conference organizers said this week, removing the panel that was accepted preliminarily in July.
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.
The headline read: “No Place for Transphobia in Anthropology.” Discussion of sex and gender has become a fraught and politically charged topic, especially in the context of transgender rights.
