An anthropology conference announced this week that it was canceling a session on gender studies over concerns that it would result in harm to the LGBTQ+ community.
In a press release on Thursday, the American Anthropological Association (AAA) and the Canadian Anthropology Society (CASCA) said that their boards decided to “remove the session ‘Let’s Talk about Sex Baby: Why biological sex remains a necessary analytic category in anthropology’ from the AAA/CASCA 2023 conference program.”
“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 press release said. “It commits one of the cardinal sins of scholarship—it assumes the truth of the proposition that it sets out to prove, namely, that sex and gender are simplistically binary, and that this is a fact with meaningful implications for the discipline.”
The announcement comes as members of the LGBTQ+ community continue to face criticism and backlash from many who disagree with their sexual preference and gender identity.
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In 2021, Arkansas passed legislation banning gender-affirming medical care for minors, becoming the first state to do so. Several other Republican-led states have also sought to pass similar legislation.
Additionally, some sports, such as powerlifting and professional chess, have announced policy changes, prohibiting transgender women from competing in female categories.
A KFF/Washington Post poll conducted in March found that 1-in-4 transgender adults say they’ve been victims of a physical attack because of their gender identity, while 64 percent said they’ve been verbally attacked for the same reason.
Elizabeth Weiss is one of the panel members who was informed that her discussion was canceled. She told Newsweek on Thursday that she was planning to use the conference to speak about the “many different ways anthropologists determine sex; methods which have improved over the decades and methods that work on human skeletons from all cultures, time periods, and places,” as well as “planning to review how our improved ability to determine sex leads to a better understanding of past cultures, including everything from sex differences in diet to infanticide practices.”
“Thus, I wanted to end my talk with a review of the recent research on identification of trans and nonbinary individuals who had undergone medical procedures, such as facial feminization procedures,” she said. “So far, forensic anthropologists have not found a way to determine who is transgender using bones, but this doesn’t mean that it will always be impossible to do so. By investigating gender separately from sex, we may help to bring closure to even more families of crime victims. I cannot understand how this can be viewed as harmful; rather, these endeavors are intended to help all people.”
In the announcement, the AAA and CASCA said that forensic anthropologists discuss bones for “sex estimation” and not “sex identification,” which they said is a “process that is probabilistic rather than clearly determinative, and that is easily influenced by cognitive bias on the part of the researcher.
“Transgender and gender diverse identities have long existed, and we are committed to upholding the value and dignity of transgender people. We believe that a more just future is possible—one where gender diversity is welcomed and supported rather than marginalized and policed.”
Newsweek reached out to the AAA through its website for further comment.