Once again, cultural anthropologists claim that there are not two sexes, using a stupid and misleading example from orangutans

This fracas has confirmed my feeling that while physical anthropology is a science, cultural anthropology is, by and large, ideology devoted to buttressing progressive social narratives.

As I reported in September (see here and here), the American Anthropological Association (AAA) and Canadian Anthropological Society (CASCA), in their annual meeting in Toronto, had decided to cancel a panel on sex (“Let’s talk about sex, baby: why biological sex remains a necessary analytic category in anthropology”). As I wrote at the time:

As I said, the proposal was accepted by the AAA and CASCA for the meeting. But then they has second thoughts—and rejected it (see below).  I suspect that the main issue was [Elizabeth] Weiss’s talk, which maintained that “skeletons are binary”, which is true, but not something that cultural anthropologists, at least, would find comfortable. THERE IS NO BINARY IN WOKEWORLD!

Of course sex in humans is binary, with the proportion of exceptions to the male/femake definition based on gamete size being only about 0.018/%, or one in 5,600 people. Now if you’re a Pecksniff, and I’ve had many of these, you’ll say, “well, 1 in 5,600 doesn’t mean an absolute binary.” Okay, fine, I can respond, “For all practical purposes, it is a binary.” After all, if you toss a nickel in the air, the chance it will land on its edge is also about 1 in 5600, but when the Pecksniffs toss a coin, even they don’t say, “Heads, tails, or edge?”.  The reason for asserting that sex is a spectrum, of course, is that the binary of sex in nature doesn’t match the more spectrum-like nature of gender. But gender is not sex.  The assertion of binary sex in all animals and vascular plants also, for some reason, is said to offend transsexuals and gender activists, although of course the very nature of transexuality—transitioning from male to female morphology or vice versa—presumes a sex binary.  It was this twisted attempt to force nature into a Procrustean bed of ideology that led the anthropology societies to cancel the meeting (it was held elsewhere). As the societies said in their letter of rejection (or, rather, of deplatforming); emphasis is mine:

We write to inform you that at the request of numerous members the respective executive boards of AAA and CASCA reviewed the panel submission “Let’s Talk about Sex Baby: Why biological sex remains a necessary analytic category in anthropology” and reached a decision to remove the session from the AAA/CASCA 2023 conference program(me). This decision was based on extensive consultation and was reached in the spirit of respect for our values, the safety and dignity of our members, and the scientific integrity of the program (me). The reason the session deserved further scrutiny was that the ideas were advanced in such a way as to cause harm to members represented by the Trans and LGBTQI of the anthropological community as well as the community at large.

Yes, the idea of a sex binary was said to be “unsafe” “harmful,” and “undignified.” That the binary was true apparently didn’t matter. Such is cultural anthropology.

Now Kathleen Lowrey, who organized the panel, wrote an analogy between the canceling of the panel (and a letter from The Offended) and medieval bestiaries that tended to affix human traits on imaginary animals. The centerpiece of her article is a letter from three anthropologists adamantly maintaining that sex in humans is NOT binary, using an example from orangutans that involves, yes, binary sex.

Click below to read the piece from Reality’s Last Stand.

Involved in this fracas as an opponent of binary sex is the omnipresent Agustín Fuentes, a Princeton anthropologist who always shows up when a dose of wokeness is needed in anthropology (see all I’ve written about his missteps here, which include accusing Darwin of misogyny and promoting genocide). Lowrey’s statements are indented:

In September, several colleagues and I were pre-emptively booted from the 2023 joint meetings of the American Anthropological Association and Canadian Anthropology Society in Toronto. Our panel, titled “Let’s Talk about Sex, Baby: Why biological sex remains a necessary analytic category in anthropology,” was scheduled for Sunday, November 20. I have already detailed this regrettable situation elsewhere, so I won’t repeat it here.

Instead, I want to focus on a specific point about why our panel was said to fly in the face of the “settled science” in anthropology: the contention that evidence from orangutans demonstrates that the great apes, humans included, are not sexually dimorphic species. In a joint letter, three anthropologists—Kathryn Clancy from the University of Illinois, Agustin Fuentes from Princeton, and Robin Nelson from Arizona State University—wrote, “We see three forms of the adult orangutan. Does this represent a sex binary?” They proffer this rhetorically, expecting the reader to assent that the answer can only be “no.” I am indebted to my co-panelist, Elizabeth Weiss, for sharing and discussing the relevant literature on this with me.

What? Now we have orangutans showing that sex isn’t binary, alongside clownfish (which of course do show binary sexes)?  Yes, that’s what it says in the letter by the three misguided anthropologists, and I quote from that letter

• Implicit in the session abstract and several of the individual abstracts is the assumption that sex is a biological binary; a concept that is rejected by current biological anthropology and human biology, and highly disputed across contemporary biology.

So much the worse for biological anthropology. But wait! Here come the orangutans! (my emphasis in the letter):

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.

Clearly the implied answer to the rhetorical question of Fuentes et al. is “Hell no! Orangutans clearly demolish the sex binary.”

Except that they don’t. What the three sweating anthropologists are doing here is conflating sex-related traits like chromosome and genital appearance with biological sex itself, which is defined as whether you have large, immobile gametes (females) or small mobile gametes (males). There are no other types of gametes, so there are just two sexes. Further, the binary nature of gamete size has led to all kinds of advances in understanding nature—for example, how sexual selection works. Turtles don’t have sex chromosomes, but they have sexes—two of them—sex being determined by rearing temperature.  As Luana and I wrote in our Skeptical Inquirer paper:

Natural selection has independently produced diverse pathways to generate the sexes, but at the end there are just two destinations: males and females. And so we have an evolved and objectively recognized dichotomy—not an arbitrary spectrum of sexes.

Back to Lowrey, who handily and quickly dismantles the “orangutans-have-three-sexes” argument:

Clancy, Fuentes, and Nelson are referring to a phenomenon observed among male orangutans whereby junior males will not always develop secondary sexual characteristics if a dominant senior male is present. While these junior males are reproductively capable, and will impregnate female orangutans when the opportunity arises, they do not develop the larger body size, heavy jowls, and “laryngeal sac” that produces the loud, resonant calls typical of dominant males. Consequently, female orangutans are much less willing to mate voluntarily with these developmentally arrested junior males than with dominant senior males.

The mechanism that induces developmental arrest in junior males in the presence of a dominant senior male is unknown. Initially, it was hypothesized that this was a stress response. However, dominant males produce more stress hormones than developmentally arrested junior males. This suggests that the lack of mating opportunities for junior males might be offset by a significant reduction in violent conflicts with other males. Dominant senior males are relatively tolerant of developmentally arrested males but engage in aggressive combat during encounters with other mature males, resulting in injuries and sometimes premature death. This behavior may be a canonical example of what evolutionary biologists have termed the “sneaky fucker” gambit, observed in many species, where some males monopolize mating opportunities with females through aggression, forcing unsuccessful males pursue alternative strategies that avoid direct male-male competition. The arrested development observed in some male orangutans may be a particularly highly developed example of this strategy.

Are orangutans, then, a trimorphic species proving that primate sex is not binary? This species exhibits three adult body forms; however, two of these are male, and one is female. Consequently, orangutans, like humans, have only two sexes. The alternate male body forms likely represent reproductive strategies evolved to access the limiting factor for the production of orangutan offspring. This limiting factor is the bodies and capacities of female orangutans, including their large sessile gametes, uteruses for gestating baby orangutans, mammary glands for nourishing young over extended juvenile periods (orangutan offspring can be breastfed for up to eight years), and the devoted care from orangutan mums necessary to rear orangutan offspring to maturity.

The story of the trimorphic orangutan, therefore, doesn’t hold up under scientific scrutiny as a slam-dunk example that refutes the sex binary. Instead, it serves a different purpose. It contributes not to scientific literature but to the evolving canon of a postmodern bestiary.

It’s weird how people who purport to be scientific will use the example of three forms of orangs, two of them indisputably male and one of them female, to argue for the existence of three sexes. It’s as if people observed that there are dwarf men and women, big outliers in height, to claim that humans have four sexes.

Lowrey, of course, knows that this fallacious “appeal to nature argument”, which claims that what we want to see in nature is what we must see, is purely ideological:

When gender ideologues rifle the annals of animal science in hope of rumbling a plausible tale about white-throated sparrows or bearded dragons, they are looking not for evidence but for allegories. Tracking down their sources is like asking Aesop if foxes ought to eat grapes even if they are within easy reach (they definitely should not, by the way). Such narratives are not aimed at advancing animal ethology or biology, but at telling humans how to behave and what to believe about their own natures.

. . . What kind of morality is enjoined by the parable of the trimorphic orangutan? A creed that says giving kids drugs that erode their bones is groovy. One that urges us to free our minds, man, about where and with whom Marina Volz should be housed. An ethos that claps like a trained seal every time WPATH issues new “settled science” from on high.

WPATH is the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, which has been repeatedly criticized for promoting “standards of care” for trangender health that aren’t safe, and for making statements that aren’t true. You can look up Marina Volz for yourself.

Fortunately, biologists have clarified the cases of the white-throated sparrow and clownfish, both mistakenly said by ideologues to demonstrate a “spectrum of sexes.” Now we have a takedown of the stupid orangutan example as well.  Really, cultural anthropology, which used to be more respectable, has become somewhat of a swamp.

Here’s a demonstration of the two types of MALE orangutans from Wikipedia. Note the caption: