Oct 2, 2023 04:28 PM
(This post was last modified: Oct 2, 2023 04:28 PM by C C.)
https://retractionwatch.com/2023/10/01/h...ore-127981
EXCERPTS: In case you didn’t get the memo, the presidents of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) and the Canadian Anthropology Society (CASCA) want you to stop talking about sex already.
Or at least they want anthropologists to stop.
Ellie Kincaid reported last week for Retraction Watch that a panel presentation entitled “Let’s Talk About Sex, Baby: Why biological sex remains a necessary analytic category in anthropology” had been scheduled for November’s joint AAA-CASCA meeting in Toronto. The conference session had been approved by the programming committee.
But then AAA President Ramona Pérez and CASCA president Monica Heller decided “safety and dignity” were threatened by anthropologists who think biological sex is still a category worth considering. Overriding the programming committee, the two leaders canceled the panel.
[...] It’s entirely possible – indeed, reasonable – to consider the categories of male and female in science and other forms of scholarship, and doing so does not require denying that not everyone fits those categories. (I say this as someone whose scholarship and activism centered on intersex for decades as a person who has advocated for trans rights.) Indeed, the canceled panelists alluded to the existence of people who don’t fit those categories in the abstracts.
At the (alleged) risk of endangering safety and dignity, I’m going to say it: The great majority of humans come biologically in one of two forms, male and female. While it’s worth cautioning against simplistic thinking that assumes gendered behaviors and attributes are always biologically inborn and not culturally learned, you can also learn a lot by thinking in terms of categories of sex, especially if you look at the places where genders don’t easily map to sex.
[...] But policing what scholars can say and think about sex and gender is no way to help minority sex, gender, and sexual-orientation populations. That policing will always end up harming some of them. (The letter objecting to the canceling notes that one member of the committee-approved panel is lesbian.)
Moreover, this kind of attempt at silencing feeds the Right’s portrayal of academics as hopelessly partisan and the right’s belief that political censorship is fair game... (MORE - missing details)
EXCERPTS: In case you didn’t get the memo, the presidents of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) and the Canadian Anthropology Society (CASCA) want you to stop talking about sex already.
Or at least they want anthropologists to stop.
Ellie Kincaid reported last week for Retraction Watch that a panel presentation entitled “Let’s Talk About Sex, Baby: Why biological sex remains a necessary analytic category in anthropology” had been scheduled for November’s joint AAA-CASCA meeting in Toronto. The conference session had been approved by the programming committee.
But then AAA President Ramona Pérez and CASCA president Monica Heller decided “safety and dignity” were threatened by anthropologists who think biological sex is still a category worth considering. Overriding the programming committee, the two leaders canceled the panel.
[...] It’s entirely possible – indeed, reasonable – to consider the categories of male and female in science and other forms of scholarship, and doing so does not require denying that not everyone fits those categories. (I say this as someone whose scholarship and activism centered on intersex for decades as a person who has advocated for trans rights.) Indeed, the canceled panelists alluded to the existence of people who don’t fit those categories in the abstracts.
At the (alleged) risk of endangering safety and dignity, I’m going to say it: The great majority of humans come biologically in one of two forms, male and female. While it’s worth cautioning against simplistic thinking that assumes gendered behaviors and attributes are always biologically inborn and not culturally learned, you can also learn a lot by thinking in terms of categories of sex, especially if you look at the places where genders don’t easily map to sex.
[...] But policing what scholars can say and think about sex and gender is no way to help minority sex, gender, and sexual-orientation populations. That policing will always end up harming some of them. (The letter objecting to the canceling notes that one member of the committee-approved panel is lesbian.)
Moreover, this kind of attempt at silencing feeds the Right’s portrayal of academics as hopelessly partisan and the right’s belief that political censorship is fair game... (MORE - missing details)