October 9, 2023

On sex, gender, and conferences

I'm attending the American Anthropological Association annual meeting for the first time later this year (In Toronto! Yay! In November! Boo!), so I've been paying close attention to ongoing discussions around the conference.

AAA is in the news (and also in the social media crosshairs) at the moment because the executive made the decision to remove a previously accepted panel. This panel concerned sex and gender and took approach to these that diverges from scholarly consensus. Panellists included a number of well-known anti-transgender activists, as well as other figures noted for their hostility to marginalised people and their rights. I want to quote the AAA on why they chose to dis-invite this panel, apologies for the long quote - I think this is important:

The first ethical principle in AAA’s Principles of Professional Responsibility is to “Do no harm.” 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. 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.

Such efforts contradict scientific evidence, including the wealth of anthropological scholarship on gender and sex. Forensic anthropologists talk about using bones for “sex estimation,” not “sex identification,” a process that is probabilistic rather than clearly determinative, and that is easily influenced by cognitive bias on the part of the researcher. Around the world and throughout human history, there have always been people whose gender roles do not align neatly with their reproductive anatomy. There is no single biological standard by which all humans can be reliably sorted into a binary male/female sex classification. On the contrary, anthropologists and others have long shown sex and gender to be historically and geographically contextual, deeply entangled, and dynamically mutable categories. 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, in this case, those who exist outside a strict and narrow sex / gender binary.

We (broadly the anglosphere and Europe; but, thanks to the internet, the wider we of the global community too) are in the grip of an ugly, multi-year assault on the rights of queer people (among whom I count myself), with our trans siblings bearing the sharpest edge of the attacks.

Scholarship is not immune from these broader political currents, nor has it ever been. Archaeology and anthropology have always been politicised in that they emerged within the context of European nationalism and both fields have actively advanced and shaped imperial domination.¹ Our disciplines have done immense harm and we are still working to rebuild the foundations of the disciplines and unpick this thread from our scholarship. We cannot be fooled by naive appeals to intellectual freedom to lend our hard earned credibility to bad faith actors and bigots.

The human organism is a complex thing and the simple sex categories we impose on it serve to make comprehensible a continuous a complex and multi-dimensional network of genetic, hormonal, and phenotypic traits that are more or less bimodally distributed but with considerable variance. sex--like gender, race, or other systems of classifying human bodies--is culturally proscribed and deeply entangled in concepts of genders, bodies, norms, and values.

AAA members and biological anthropologists Augustin Fuentes, Kathryn Clancy and Robin Nelson make this point clearly and succinctly in their supportive response to the session retraction:

As anthropologists who work in biological anthropology and human biology, we are aware that definitions of sex can be made using pelvic girdle shape, cranial dimensions, external genitalia, gonads, sex chromosomes, and more. Sex, as biological descriptor, is not binary using any of those definitions. People are born with non-binary genitalia every day – we tend to call people who fall into this group intersex. People are born with sex chromosomes that are not XX or XY but X, XXY, XXXY and more, every day. The same is true with gonads. What’s more, someone can have intersex genitalia but not intersex gonads, intersex chromosomes but not intersex genitalia. These bodily differences demonstrate the massive variation seen in sex physiology across vertebrate species. Looking beyond humans, we see three forms of the adult orangutan. Does this represent a sex binary? Significant percentages of many reptile species have intersex genitalia. Are we still trying to call sex a binary? The binary limits the kinds of questions we can ask and therefore limits the scope of our science.

From Scientific American

Diverse sexed bodies and gendered people have existed as long as there have been people. We are cultural creatures who make sense of the world through the complex relationships we build with humans and non-humans. How we express and understand our sexed and gendered bodies is one of these modes of relating.

I am on record (in multiple places by this point!) as believing that no work in archaeology is apolitical. One consequence of this approach is that I feel it is imperative that we always consider the impacts of our work, the communities we are engaging (explicitly and implicitly), and the legacy we want to have, both in the discipline and the wider culture. With 300,000 years of human history in all its glorious diversity to hand, archaeologists have more than enough evidence to falsify every claim made by transphobes. I take extremely seriously what I see as our duty to use that deep history of human diversity to push back against small-minded bigots and biological essentialists. Theirs is also a culturally contingent definition of gender and sex, one which emerges from and enforces white Euroamerican dominance and capitalist forms of relation.²

There is no place for that in my archaeological community, and I'm thrilled to see such strong commentary from the AAA in support of the queer and trans communities, including society members and research collaborators.