The other day I discussed how several anthropologists wrote a letter supporting the decision of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) and the Canadian Anthropological Society (CASCA) to cancel a panel on sex (“Let’s talk about sex, baby: why biological sex remains a necessary analytic category in anthropology”) at their annual meeting. Appaerntly they objected to the fact that there are two sexes in humans that can be identified in skeletons with a high degree of accuracy.
One of the three signers of the letter was our old friend Agustín Fuentes, a Princeton professor who apparently decided to devote most of his career being uber-woke (he has, for example, damned Charles Darwin for promoting genocide and being a misogynist).
The letter by Fuentes et al, attacked the sex binary in humans, implying that in our relatives the orangutans there are more than two sexes, because there are two types of males in at least one of the three named species: big dominant males with cheek flaps, and smaller males lacking jowls. The statement was this was this (my bolding):
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.
Well that’s just stupid. They’re clearly implying that there are more than two sexes in orangutans. In fact, as all sane primatologists agree, there are only two sexes in orangs: in this case there are two types of males and one type of female. Yep, still two sexes! Even Wikipedia recognizes that the two forms of males are, yes, MALES. They produce sperm, and that’s the diagnosis and definition of males in animals (and vascular plants).
I will say no more except to add that this letter and its craziness comes purely from the ideological view that if there are humans who don’t feel that they are members of their natal sex, then we must be able to see a spectrum of biological sex in nature. That is, we impose what we want to be true upon nature itself, an error called the “reverse appeal to nature” fallacy. Luana and I described that in our paper:
This inverts an old fallacy into a new one, which we call the reverse appeal to nature. Instead of assuming that what is natural must be good, this fallacy holds that “what is good must be natural.”
If there are humans with gender dysphoria, then we must see a spectrum of sex in humans. But in fact we don’t. And we don’t see it on other animals either. The “reverse appeal to nature” is the basis for six misstatements by ideologues in my field that Luana Maroja and I discussed in an article called “The ideological subversion of biology.”
But now there’s another infection of anthropology by wokeness that I’ve learned of, and it’s an infection not just of cultural anthropology, but anthropology in general. I refer to the following statement by the American Association of Biological Anthropologists. This is an old and venerable (founded 1928) organization that used to be called the American Association of Physical Anthropology, but changed their name after a series of votes, though I’m not sure why. At any rate, I hear that it’s the home of the top peer-reviewed journal in anthropology.
That, however, didn’t keep it from going full woke, and it issued a statement in support of trans lives (below) that denies the sex binary in humans. And it clearly does that on ideological grounds. Here’s the statement (it appears here). I’ve added red where they go off the rails.
This society, like all science societies, really should institute a policy of institutional neutrality, because this has almost nothing to do with anthropology. It’s virtue-signaling, pure and simple, and their denial of the sex binary is simply nonsense. Of course it’s proper to oppose bias and bigotry against trans people, but it’s also proper to oppose attacks on innocent Israelis and the murder of Syrians by their own President. Note as well that they make a contentious statement here, approving of “care that is gender and life affirming,” There are many people, presumably including anthropologists, who don’t approve of the form of “gender-affirming” care that immediately accept’s a child’s self-diagnosis of being born in the wrong body, and putting them on a conveyer belt that ineluctably leads to hormone treatment and surgery.
Shame on the American Association of Biological Anthropologists! Not only do they make a big scientific mistake, but, in their effort to show how wonderful they are, promote a form of therapy that may well be harmful to the very group of gender-dysphoric youngsters that they want to help.
h/t: Elizabeth Weiss
Yes – gnosis and hermetic alchemy of antiquity in our modern age.
“Subversion” is precisely the term to use – of biology, of medicine, of knowledge.
Why do people do this?
+1 exactly
“Why do people do this?”
I think it’s a kind of tragedy of the commons. Guys like Fuentes don’t really want to undo all reason and evidence. He just wants to apply gnosis and hermeneutics in *his* little field of anthropology because he benefits from this (professionally, personally). He’s sure that nibbling away at one corner of the Enlightenment won’t bring the whole thing crashing down.
The answer I had in mind was The Revolution – and yes, cultural/communist revolution.
But you know, feel free to disagree.
I saw recently the Cheka got their start right at the beginning, 1917. I think they are still in business.
It’s a brain disease (very transmissible) called Sheep.
It’s just too depressing.
+1
They had me at “reproductive justice.”
BTW, about that orangutan post the other day which is relevant to this posting. Orangutans are binary male and female with dimorphic males.
Twenty five year old Arnold Schwarzenegger and me are very dimorphic, but we are both males.
+1
The famous book, supposedly debunking myths about human nature, by Agustin Fuentes (Race, Monogamy, and Other Lies They Told You), from a very prestigious publisher (U Cal Press, second edition, 2022) has, unfortunately, received many highly favorable reviews, on Amazon and elsewhere.
“As biological anthropologists we condemn the historical role of our discipline in producing binaries of sex…”
This manner of speaking presupposes the radical constructionist standpoint of the Foucauldian Left, according to which both social/cultural reality and natural reality are human constructs made and maintained by power-driven discourses, such that the binarity of sex wasn’t made by nature but by biologists.
It’s the opposite of an appeal to nature – whatever that’s called.
Yes, you’re right, it’s what Luana and I called the “REVERSE appeal to nature fallacy.” I’ve corrected that now, thanks.
Sometimes called the moralistic fallacy.
We certainly live in exceedingly weird times. I graduated with a BA in social/cultural anthropology in 1985. The discipline seemed quite rooted in reality back then. Now it seems to have fallen into some kind of mass psychosis. Someone from the non-woke world of academia should do an anthropological study of the phenomenon.
In skeptic magazines back in the 80s and 90s I regularly came across articles written by anthropologists on psychiatric ailments which were unique to specific cultures. In Africa, men would fear a shrinking penis. Native Americans had Windigo, or fear of becoming a cannibal. Different locations had evolved invented illnesses for the expression of real anxiety, depression, grief, etc. which were then experienced by its members.
Current popular manifestations of psychological distress such as Multiple Personality Disorder or alien abduction would be analyzed within this framework of culture-bound syndromes. Anthropology was an area of study which illuminated the bizarre things skeptics were trying to understand and explain.
I would have therefore expected anthropologists to get involved in the transgender debate from this perspective. Instead, they ran amok.
They are suitable not to do such a study but to be its objects.
In France they suffer from Heavy Legs Syndrome, a malady unknown in the Anglophone world: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/7779126.stm
Yes, the times are right for an Anthropological study of Anthropology. As for a more
general anthropological study of academia, we already have that: “Changing Places”
and “Small World” by David Lodge, which are incisive as well as very funny. The age of Lodge’s monographs confirms the idea (see comment #11) that postmodernism was the reservoir from which academia’s current plague emerged. It remains to be worked out whether this emergence was more like a lab leak or an escape from a wet market.
I have both of those titles in “A David Lodge Trilogy”. I’ll take a look.
A protagonist in both novels is a postmodernish celebrity literature prof at a thinly disguised Berkeley, whose ambition in life is to become the most highly paid professor in history. Rumor has it that this character is modeled on a real celebrity prof, by now an old fogy like me, who taught at Berkeley, Duke, Univ. of Illinois, and Florida Intl. Univ.
It was, of course, the struggle for Biology justice that led the Biology establishment in the USSR to cast out “the followers of Virchow, Weismann, Mendel, and Morgan, talking of the immutability of the gene, denying the effect of the environment, are preachers of pseudoscientific tidings of bourgeois eugenicists” ( according to the notable researcher O.B. Lepeshinskaya). By the late 1940s, this view came to predominate in the official institutions of Agronomy, and Biology, and in the Ministry of Education. The resulting ascendancy of researchers of Lepeshinskaya’s sterling qualities will perhaps be re-enacted in Anthropology and other subjects in the US academic world. Lepeshinskaya’s great discoveries, it will be recalled, ranged from spontaneous generation of protozoans, and generation of living cells from egg albumen, to the reversal of aging by soda baths.
I’m pleased to see trans people defined here as “humans who don’t feel that they are members of their natal sex,” as opposed to the more common “people whose gender doesn’t match their sex” or the like.
Gender — socially constructed roles and norms associated with the sexes — really doesn’t come into it, surprisingly. A feminine male or masculine female wouldn’t be labeled “transgender,” they’d simply be gender nonconforming. We could then describe that by saying gender isn’t binary: there’s a range of people with behaviors and interests which don’t fit neatly into the idealized versions of a properly manly man on one side and a properly womanly woman on the other side.
Anthropologists, cultural or physical, could point this out without contradicting science. And without bringing up sex. And without bringing up transgender.
Sex — and whether a gonochoristic species consists of just two sexes of male and female — comes in because transgender isn’t about gender. It’s about not feeling as if you’re your sex. I don’t think physical anthropologists could or should legitimately weigh in on a psychological matter. Sex is binary, regardless of whether there’s variations within sex traits or people want to modify these.
+1
I was a member the the American Anthropological Association for years but finding less and less of its journal contents readable. Post Modernism (mid 90s) preceded this current outhouse of scholarship and concurrent student idiocy,, but that is where it came from and it’s even worse. I see the Times nit picking Harvard’s president. Pot/Black?
Fuentez is a known fanatic, not a serious person at all, best ignored.
I’m a huge fan of Prof Weiss, however. I encountered her first on Michael Sherman’s podcast and I’ve followed her since. She’s a champ and a cool person.
D.A.
NYC
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2020/06/10/photos-of-readers-93/
Serious question- Most of the commentary I’ve come across making claims like this has been written by non-biologists, with anthropologists some of the worst. Are there any actual biologists, with background and research credentials relevant to the topic, who seriously make the claim that biological sex is non-binary?
This is what I would like to know.
There are but talking about this reasonably has been made difficult because of the culture wars. In humans there are only two types of gametes so if you are an evolutionary biologists it makes sense to think of sex as binary, individuals producing sperm and individuals producing ovum. However, developmental biologists which come across the need to classify specific individuals as male or female have been wondering for a while if a model which allows for a less strict version of binary sex would be a better model.
The sex binary debate is kind of silly because the biological mechanisms underneath work the same no matter if we think of sex as a strict binary or a fuzzy binary. Depending on the type of research you are doing, you are going to prefer one model over the other.
Again the confusion of ontology–what are sexes and how many are there?–with epistemology–how can we know what sex an individual is?
You can fuzzify your sexing criteria all you want–and you may have to use different criteria for different organisms–but it does not change the ontological binary nature of sex.
Zach Elliott has said that the way to look at it is that sex-linked characteristics are “non-binary.” Of course they are. But sex itself is binary: there are only two of them.
Gender ideologues love to trot out the example of disorders of sexual development as evidence for their contention that sex isn’t binary. Someone, I forget who (maybe Andy Lewis) called this “the Intersex gambit.”
It’s anybody’s guess how we’re supposed to get from the existence of a condition like CAIS to “…therefore a male person is a woman if he says he feels he is, QED.”
Aside from the denial of binary sex, what I find preposterous is the idea that anthropology had a role in creating that binary (and enough of a role that they’re obligated to condemn it now). Uhh… how, exactly?
Totally out of touch with reality, in more ways than one.
We are slowly surrendering our search for the truth to those who favor the emotionally of kindness, even embracement, of a small minority of humans. It’s akin to Galileo declaring that the sun, indeed, does revolve around earth, and anyone who denies this is guilty of heresy.
One of the authors of that AABA piece actually wrote her PhD dissertation on “the two types of male orangutans”
To be filed under “You Couldn’t Make It Up”
https://anthropology.sas.upenn.edu/people/alexandra-kralick
So many articles trying to fight against lies. Its a waste of effort.
We need to stop pretending there is any possibility of “changing” or “choosing” one’s sex.
“…if there are humans who don’t feel that they are members of their natal sex, then we must be able to see a spectrum of biological sex in nature.” (note: I know you are saying this about the subject’s views).
No, we should be saying clearly that the people who insist they are NOT a member of their natal sex are either:
1. Lying and deliberately doing so and trying to force everyone else to lie
OR.
2. A mentally insane.
No one has ever changed sex. Sex is entirely binary and immutable, those with a congenital chromosomal disorder are not evidence of a spectrum or that there is no binary.
It is baffling that anyone in science can state and push the lie that humans can change/choose their sex. Every single one of them should be fired from their jobs for lying and encouraging such fundamental and very dangerous lies!
No one should be having any medical interventions (drugs or surgeries) to have extreme body modification in a vain and very harmful attempt to change the body’s sex. Its a waste of medical resources doing it and its a burden to medical resources to manage that serious harms being done to that body. The earlier it is done (eg to teenagers), the more harms are done.
From a societal perspective, lying that humans can choose/change their sex, raises a generation or more of humans who believe it. Why are we allowing such lies to be taught to vulnerable children. These are children who will become scientists and medical professionals. They cannot be effective if their basic fundamental understanding of the human body – that of the sex of humans – can be “changed” at will?
Medical science is guilty of harming individuals, groups of humans and society itself by supporting these lies.
Very good post and an excellent skeptical inquirer article summarizing the topic. I don’t know how Jerry and his Williams coauthor are treated but I am glad skeptical inquirer published. I had kind gotten the impression that group had drifted from scientific atheism (i.e. research) to progressive humanism (i.e. social reform)
In the article there is a reference to Galileo being ‘first’… I don’t have a good earlier reference but now I will be on the lookout. Maybe the earlier burning of books or scrolls that were considered heretical? But ideally need science based example like Galileo.