Last month, the American Anthropology Association canceled an accepted panel called “Let’s Talk About Sex, Baby: Why biological sex remains a necessary analytic category in anthropology.” In its statement explaining the cancellation, the AAA made two arguments. First, they accused the panelists of bigotry, of working “to advance a ‘scientific’ reason to question the humanity of already-marginalized groups of people, in this case, those who exist outside a strict and narrow sex/gender binary.” Second, they accused the panelists of pseudoscientific charlatanism. The panelists were said to have “relied on assumptions that run contrary to the settled science in our discipline” and to “contradict scientific evidence, including the wealth of anthropological scholarship on gender and sex.” The exclusion of the panel, the AAA wanted to insist, was not political, but scientific.
As Nicolas Langlitz argued in our pages, the “settled science” line is, to put it mildly, an exaggeration. And it’s an ironic one, given anthropology’s longstanding interest in exposing the social uses of scientific authority. The AAA would have done better to rely exclusively on the bigotry claim, for which, as Ryan Quinn reported in Inside Higher Ed, there is some evidence. One presenter, for instance, mocked the use of preferred pronouns on her office door; another said that “trans children do not exist; they are being fabricated en masse by a very well-planned and financed initiative.” The AAA might simply have written that, after looking into the backgrounds of the panelists, it had determined that on balance they were bigots acting in bad faith. That decision would still have been controversial, but it would have been coherent.
Instead, it relied on an authoritarian invocation of “science” to justify an ideological decision, asserting a disciplinary consensus where none exists. That fact cannot be stressed enough: Many anthropologists flatly dispute the AAA’s claim that “settled science” shows that biological sex is not binary. Some even think the opposite. The biological anthropologist Robert Lynch, at Pennsylvania State University, told me bluntly: “I do think that the science is basically settled, just not in the Orwellian, up is down, manner suggested by the AAA. Certainly from an evolutionary standpoint, the science was settled in 1972 when my Ph.D. adviser Robert Trivers threw down the gauntlet with ‘Parental Investment and Sexual Selection,’ and the basic evolutionary principles have been largely unchallenged since.” Mark Collard, a professor of archaeology and biological anthropology at Simon Fraser University, had this to say: “I think the AAA leadership group are either ignorant about biological thinking regarding sex or being disingenuous. Their statement is nonsense.” Lynch and Collard are far from alone. Their understanding of biological sex may, of course, be incorrect. The point is that there is nothing approaching agreement among the anthropologists.
To have pretended otherwise involved an elementary abuse of the authority residing in scholarly organizations like the AAA. As the late intellectual historian Thomas L. Haskell explains in his contribution to the 1996 volume The Future of Academic Freedom, professional societies like the Modern Language Association, the American Historical Association, and the American Economic Association (to name some of the earliest ones, all founded in the 1880s) helped establish the authority of their respective disciplines precisely by guaranteeing that the ideas offered by researchers in any given area have been acid-tested by informed specialist disputation. (The AAA was founded not long after, in 1902.) “If there is anything at all that justifies the special authority and trustworthiness of community-sponsored opinions,” Haskell writes, “it lies in the fact that these truth-claims have weathered competition more severe than would be thought acceptable in ordinary human communities.”
In claiming that “Let’s Talk About Sex, Baby” was pulled to protect “the scientific integrity” of the conference, the AAA illegitimately banked on its role as corporate arbiter of expert consensus, risking damage to the reputation of its discipline not just within the academy but with the wider public. The unavoidable impression is that the AAA is averse to the “perpetual exposure to criticism” from which, Haskell points out, scholarly communities derive their authority. As PEN America’s press release puts it, “Reservations about the scientific rigor of the panel, which were raised by association members after its initial acceptance, would have been better addressed at the conference itself.” The AAA made sure they couldn’t be.
That’s bad for anthropology, and it’s bad for the academy more generally. “Even people friendly to the university,” Louis Menand writes in the introduction to The Future of Academic Freedom, “have begun to feel that it has brought its troubles on itself by failing to agree on an account of its activities that merits continued social commitment.” The confusion that marks the AAA’s handling of the canceled panel reflects one such failure. The public does not need to understand all of the work that scholars do, and it doesn’t need to find their various ideological, moral, or epistemic commitments appealing. It does need to trust that scholars argue with one another rigorously and fairly; that their knowledge-claims are not just politics by other means; and that when they assert a scholarly consensus, they do so in good faith. That good faith seems to have been absent here.
