On June 8 I posted about the “Boghossian Report,” in which ten scholars argued that the humanities are becoming overly politicized—to the detriment of universities and their ideals. The politicization came, they said, mostly from the Left, and involved the promotion of “progressive” social justice rather than a search for truth. Click below to read it:
This was not a scientific survey but a warning based on a collection of observations and anecdotes. Nevertheless, the report has received considerable pushback from humanities professors who cannot accept that their discipline could possibly be politicized. One maintained that because the humanities were in disarray in the first place, it is that disarray that led to their politicization, not the other way around. At any rate, the report was particularly hard on anthropology, singling it out for special opprobrium:
In some fields (e.g., philosophy) the problems are largely confined to a single subfield focused on a charged topic. In others (e.g., history), while there are streams of scholarship in which standards have been politicized in problematic ways, they run alongside more dominant streams in which a wide range of views is tolerated, and appropriately scholarly standards are brought to bear. In the most extreme cases (e.g., anthropology), we see a widespread deterioration in scholarly standards grounded in a pervasive repudiation of ideals of objectivity together with a toxic intellectual climate in which reasonable dissent on politically charged topics is routinely suppressed and punished.
and:
In rare cases, individual scholars and groups of scholars explicitly repudiate the idea that scholarship aims at knowledge and understanding in favor of an overtly and exclusively political conception of the enterprise.
For example, in a 2021 presidential address to the American Anthropological Association, Akhil Gupta writes that “anthropology is an outlier among the social sciences … because its political project is to challenge the culturally dominant commonsense of capitalist consumerism” (Gupta and Stoolman 2022, emphasis added). In a reply published in American Anthropologist, Fernando Villanea emphasizes the point that “the value of anthropology is not the pursuit of truth, because all truth is subjective,” but rather to “serve the interests” of people who have been harmed by anthropologists in the past (Villanea 2023). Two years later, in the same journal, José Santos argued that “all ethnographies” — the stock in trade of cultural anthropology — have as their goal “not voyeurism but advocacy” (Santos 2025), as if the goal of describing the social world and making sense of it was not only not on the menu, but that it was to be disparaged as a kind of perversion. Taken literally, such remarks call, not for scholarship in the service of a social goal, but for a rejection of the core idea that scholarship aims at understanding.
Note that one of the authors of the Boghossian et al. report is anthropologist Joseph Henrich at Harvard. More on him below.
Well, Carolyn Rouse, the president of the field’s biggest scholarly group—the American Anthropological Association—couldn’t let that rest, but has been firing back at the Boghossian report. Stephanie Lee interviewed Rouse for the Chronicle of Higher Education, and it wasn’t a puffball interview: Lee pressed Rouse hard, and it turns out that Rouse either ducked the questions, was ignorant about the author in her field, and how the Boghossian report was written, and even maintained that science showed there were not two biological sexes. In the end, all Rouse reveals is that the accusations about anthropology in the Boghossian report are substantiated by one who tries to refute them.
You can read the article by clicking below (the photo is of Rouse), or find it archived here:
All text from the article is indented:
From Lee’s introduction:
But one field was singled out as “the most extreme case” — anthropology. Compared to philosophy, sociology, history, literary studies, and music studies, the discipline showed “a pervasive repudiation of ideals of objectivity together with a toxic intellectual climate in which reasonable dissent on politically charged topics is routinely suppressed and punished.” The authors cited writings from several anthropologists, a speech by a recent president of the American Anthropological Association, and an AAA panel about biological sex that was canceled in 2023, among other things. The report described itself as a summary of reports, specific to each field. (Only one, on literary studies, has been released; it was posted after this interview was conducted.)
Six days after the report went online, the AAA fired back with a full-throated defense. “Anthropologists welcome rigorous critique of the discipline,” wrote its president, Carolyn M. Rouse. “What we cannot accept is a sweeping verdict about anthropology’s intellectual culture, scholarly practices, and professional norms built on selective evidence and issued without consultation.”Rouse is an anthropology professor at Princeton University who researches race and inequality in religion, medicine, education, and economic development. In 2016 and 2017, she went viral for leading a walkout of a speech by the political scientist Charles Murray, and for delivering a lecture titled “F%*# Free Speech,” in which she argued that free-speech absolutism does not exist. Rouse was elected president-elect of the AAA in 2023, and assumed the role last year. The Chronicle asked her about her views on the Vanderbilt report and the questions it raises about her field. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Lee’s questions are in bold, and Rouse’s answers in plain text.
First, Rouse says that the Boghossian report was written using AI (not just for research but “used an LLM to write this”. When pressed for evidence, she quotes an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, with Rouse saying, “Anthony Appiah says that they used AI.” But in that article, improperly cited in this report, Appiah actually says this:
We did a fair amount of research, including research using new artificial-intelligence methods to survey large bodies of text and see what was in them, and to identify themes and so on. My report will come with six appendices of such material, not produced by me but produced by the researchers that we were able to hire with the money that was given to us by the chancellors.
This does not say that the authors of the Boghossian et al. report used AI to write the report; it implies that they used AI to survey the bodies of text. It’s completely unfair for Rouse to accuse the authors of writing the report with AI.
To see what really happened, I contacted someone connected with writing this report who characterized that this accusation was “completely bonkers” and that the piece was a “most bizarre interview.” This contact told me that while the report used various analytical tools (including LLMs) to get lists of syllabi, prizes, and so on, this was just the background research. The data were then debated heavily among the authors and the report was, as I expected, written entirely by humans. Rouse has come close to libel in her unfounded accusation.
Then Rouse ducks a question about an address given by Akhil Gupta, the previous AAA President:
Let’s talk about some of the specific critiques that were raised in the Vanderbilt report regarding anthropology, perhaps as a way of talking about these broader issues you have with its conclusion. So, in 2021, then-AAA President Akhil Gupta gave a presidential address where he said anthropology’s “political project is to challenge the culturally dominant commonsense of capitalist consumerism,” and the Vanderbilt report said that this kind of remark is an explicit rejection of “the idea that scholarship aims at knowledge and understanding.” Do you share Dr. Gupta’s conception of anthropology?
Anthropologists love to disagree with one another, so I’m not gonna say I agree or disagree with Akhil. Here’s the thing that I think they don’t understand: We are the instrument for data collection in the same way a Geiger counter detects radiation. We have to do a lot of refining of our instrument, our way of thinking, what we’re doing it for, how we’re seeing it, in order to collect data that we know is, of course, subjective, but uncover some truth. So that’s why we teach our students to be self-reflexive — why you’re doing this, what motivates you, what presumptions did you go into the field with, what do you think this information is going to do for the world?
That’s a non-response. Rouse says that the previous president was misquoted. Lee keeps on pressing Rouse, saying that she (Lee) saw Gupta’s published address and the quote is in there. Caught out, Rouse bobs and weaves:
This is from his presidential address, or the written version of it. Not to be repetitive, but the report highlights this remark and says this remark is a rejection of the idea that “scholarship aims at knowledge and understanding.”It’s a cherry-picked quote. They misquoted him, that’s what he says.I mean, I wasn’t in the audience for this speech, either, but he published a version of this address —I’ve read it, I’ve quoted from it.So that quote is in there, you know.But just because something’s quoted, there’s a whole context. There’s so much more than that. This is the problem with absolutist free speech. We talk in contexts. Speech is never free. Speech is always connected to something else. . . .
There’s that “context” defense, saying that Gupta’s quote didn’t mean what we think it did. Also, everyone knows that free speech is never 100% free: even the First Amendment has its restrictions. Rouse’s example of speech being “connected to something else” is neither an example of the violation of the First Amendment nor does it have anything to do with Gupta’s claim. It’s evasion, pure and simple.
Here Rouse denies that the anthropologist on the report has any reputation:
Can I ask what you think about Joseph Henrich, the sole anthropologist on this commission? Had you heard of him? Were you aware of him having some kind of reputation or something prior to this?
No.
You’d think that Rouse would have looked up the only author of the report who was in her field, but she apparently didn’t. He’s not obscure, either. He’s 57, has published five books (including two trade books) and roughly 200 papers. He’s a cultural anthropologist like Rouse, and according to Wikipedia is “a recipient of the 2003 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers[4] and the 2022 Hayek Prize.” I think he has “a reputation”.
There’s a lot more, but I want to get to the part where Rouse denies there’s two sexes.
In 2023, the AAA canceled an accepted panel at its annual conference, titled “Let’s Talk About Sex, Baby: Why Biological Sex Remains a Necessary Analytic Category in Anthropology.” The AAA said at the time that the panel would have harmed members’ “safety and dignity,” and that its premise contradicted “settled science.” The Vanderbilt report cited this incident to argue that when politically charged questions “are treated as settled by the scholarly community, the result is an illegitimate suppression of dissent.” You were elected president-elect of the AAA shortly after that incident. Do you regret today the fact that the AAA canceled that panel, or the justification that it gave for canceling it?
Rouse thinks that whether sex is binary is a non-issue: it’s settled that there are more than two sexes!
There’s a point in that Vanderbilt report where they talk about astronomy departments becoming astrology departments. All you need to do is literally type into Google and see that we know, factually, that there are different types of “sexes” and “genders.” You can have XY and you present as a woman, you can have XXY — they’re all variations, genetic variations. So the idea that there are two sexes is just factually incorrect, and to force biological anthropologists to teach that is the equivalent of turning an astronomy department into an astrology department. So I don’t know why we’re debating that. You may not like it. I don’t know, maybe you want to kill babies that aren’t just XX presenting XX or XY presenting XY, but that’s what we have in this world. And then we have people who identify with genders that don’t match to their chromosomes, and people like Anthony Appiah, who are gay, and so I don’t know what they want, why they want us to teach in that way — that’s the equivalent of turning an astronomy department into an astrology department.
The second question: It should never have been accepted. At this point, we are demanding that people do good peer review, because that’s what happened — they slacked on the peer review.
Here Rouse is defining sex by karyotype: the chromosomes that someone has. And since there are several chromosomal types (XXY, XO, etc.), sex surely can’t be binary. But sex is defined as whether the individual has a reproductive system designed to produce large vs small gametes, not an individua’s chromosome complement. (These two things, however, align nearly perfectly.) And even if you use chromosomes, 99.8% of people are born either XX or XY. Finally, what is this “maybe you want to kill babies that aren’t just XX presenting XX or XY presenting XY, but that’s what we have in this world”? Who wants to kill these babies? This is just pure confusion and ignorance mixed with performative assertions and accusations of eugenics.
But Lee, who’s done her homework, won’t let this assertion rest, either, and presses Rouse, who issues a lame response, dismissing a survey of the very organization she heads:
OK. So on the question of this particular idea being “settled science,” as the AAA said at the time, there was a survey in 2022, published in the journal Forensic Anthropology, that asked forensic anthropologists about this question, and 42 percent of them said they agree that sex is binary, and 56 percent disagreed that it’s binary. So that ratio would seem to indicate that, in the field, the question hadn’t actually been settled, and I was wondering how you explain that.
I don’t believe in opinion research. Not to disparage them, but a lot of forensic people, they’re coroners, they’re doing it in a practicing level, where they’re actually asked on forms to determine whether this body is male or female, oftentimes they haven’t had advanced schooling. Things are in the air. I just don’t trust opinion polling. That’s from just being an anthropologist and spending a lot of time with people in the field. People don’t know a lot.
Had enough? I won’t burden you further, but this is a sample of how Rouse refuses to give straight answers, lies about the use of AI in the Boghossian et al. report, and completely gets biological sex wrong. She is an ideologue who twists the truth to suit her ends, and that’s exactly what Boghossian et al. see about anthropology (another person Rouse praises is her Princeton colleague, sex-is-a-spectrum miscreant Agustín Fuentes, who’s appeared often on this site for his obtuseness about the sexes.
Rouse’s interview is nothing short of embarrassing. Over at his website Leiter Reports, my law-school colleague Brian Leiter said this:
The CHE reporter Stephanie Lee does a really good job trying to get Professor Rouse to actually answer questions, but Professor Rouse’s responses mostly serve to confirm the doubts expressed about her field in the Boghossian Report.
Brian wrote a lot less than I did above but he has a way of distilling things into pithy but true assessments.
The people that inhabit these university social justice star chambers are not very smart and not very interested in academics.
I think you are right. Pushing the boundaries of human knowledge is difficult….activism and social justice not so much (at least intellectually). Mediocre minds are going to focus on the latter, not the former.
i agree, yet I also have to imagine that someone thinks that her answers are fantastic and that she’s a great thinker. She did, after all, get elected to the presidency of the AAA by her peers and is the Chair of the Department of Anthropology at Princeton. Therefore, she’s at the top of her field. To us, she seems foolish, but to others, she’s obviously respected. This is interesting.
Step 1: Anthropologist is distressed by evidence collected about their beloved study group. Perhaps they have tendancies for violence, rape or environmental disregard. Perhaps they are quite backward and uncivilized. Whatever it is, it looks bad.
Step 2: Anthropologist goes to the frontiers of philosophy to find a way to make what is seem like something else in order to protect the reputation of beloved study group. Foucault is waiting right there. Anthropologist angrily dismisses fact as a hegemonic oppression and mocks anyone who insists on it as either evil or stupid.
Step 3: Anthropologist realizes that their post-modern stance allows them not only to paint their study group as blameless but actually better than modern society. The Noble Savage is reborn. “Traditional ways of knowing” enter the chat.
Step 4: Anthropology as a discipline speaks only to itself in a language no one can understand. Humanity switches back to the baseball game. University administrators start to hungrily eye the department budget.
“Foucalt is waiting right there.”
LMAO.
Brilliant Pat.
He is indeed. Even in death he lurks. He is the Destroyer of Worlds.
And Fuentez has taken up his sick post-modernist mantle.
best,
D.A.
NYC
You gotta wonder. A field where facts are subjective would seem to be susceptible to the whims of fashion. How can something so flimsy even be dignified as a discipline? Surely a better spokesperson needs to make the case.
I’ll just drop this here: Bogossian is so enraged by the woke madness he experienced he almost wants to burn the university system down. I understand the rage in his eyes when he talks about it, really something.
Elizabeth Weiss – anthropologist and a similar woke university refugee – a mighty fine gal I think, has similar sentiments.
Both were at the Stanford conference with PCC(E) last year.
D.A.
NYC
David, are you mixing up Peter Boghossian (former philosophy professor at Portland State University) and Paul Boghossian (philosophy professor at New York University), co-author of the Vanderbilt Report (April 5, 2026)?
My favourite Rouse quote. “How do we count the scholarship of those in the academy who, based on a radical decolonial approach to the discipline, do not publish analytical papers but rather poetry, fiction, or not at all?”
https://x.com/DavidDecosimo/status/2077475429628178493
Publishing poetry or fiction – or not publishing at all! – counts as scholarship in anthropology 🙁 As one wag pointed out on twitter, “A generous reading of this is that she simply supports tenure.”
The journalist and former academic Tyler Austin Harper got it just right: ““Social justice is when you don’t do any work” is a bit on the nose!”
https://x.com/Tyler_A_Harper/status/2077478993578664289
Related to Harper’s assessment, consider this explanation: the “social justice” meme was mostly created by those in the academic population who lack both interest or aptitude to do work in the actual subject of the field they drifted into. Let me suggest a prediction of this hypothesis in STEM or STEM-related fields. It predicts that zealous “social justice” practitioners will be less numerous in the Department of X itself than they are in its auxiliary “Teaching of X” program.
Yes Jon lots of evidence for your prediction. For example, coming soon to a biology department seminar near me (and perhaps near you):
“Advancing Equity, Inclusion, Access, and Justice in Biology Education Research”
CBE Life Sciences Education https://doi.org/10.1187/cbe.24-11-0265
“The fields of biology and biology education have been constructed to perpetuate white, patriarchal, classist, ableist, heteronormative, cis-normative, and other systems of power and privilege.”
Well, points for honesty to the orignal speaker. It’s quite clear, however, that this is not just the project of Anthropology, but of much of academia at the moment. Much of modern scholarship in the Humanities and Social Sciences is leftist just-so stories.
I like Tyler Austin Harper’s quote on this: Increasingly, academics—particularly humanists—remind me of addicts who refuse to admit they have a problem: they’ve lost their spouse and kids, no one trusts them anymore, but they think everything would be fine if people just stopped spreading rumors about their bad behavior.
That line ““maybe you want to kill babies that aren’t just XX presenting XX or XY presenting XY…” really ticked my off. To put it mildly, it is a straw man fallacy. If it was directed toward a particular individual, it would definitely be slander. She really needs to watch herself.
It was fascinating to send this interview to Chat for analysis. Here was its conclusion:
My bottom line
I would draw three conclusions of differing strength:
Highly confident: Rouse is not handling disagreement as a scholar responsible for maintaining an intellectually pluralistic professional association. She answers criticism with motive attribution, identity reasoning, moral escalation, and repeated refusal to distinguish empirical, conceptual, and ethical questions.
Also highly confident: The AAA’s cancellation of the 2023 panel was an abuse of institutional authority. Even were the panel intellectually tendentious, the “safety,” “dignity,” and “settled science” rationale was ideologically coercive rather than scholarly.
Only moderately confident from this material: Anthropology as a whole is characterized by “widespread deterioration” and is worse than philosophy, sociology, history, literary studies, and music studies. That may be true—my prior moved appreciably in that direction after reading this—but the Vanderbilt report has not publicly done the work needed to establish it.
The truly damning thing is therefore not that Rouse fails to refute every empirical conclusion in a methodologically inadequate report. It is that she was handed its weakest point—its unsupported extrapolation from examples to prevalence—and could have made a disciplined, devastating case against it. Instead, she repeatedly supplied fresh examples for its underlying diagnosis.
—-
PS its comments about the Vanderbilt report are in part a result of me training my instance to act like a physicist and therefore pose extremely high evidentiary standards before declaring a conclusion settled.
Hmmm…. I wonder if ….
[ Google search “queering anthropology” ]
Wilson, Ara. (2019) 2023
Queer anthropology
The Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology, edited by Felix Stein. Facsimile of the first edition in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology.
Online: http://doi.org/10.29164/19queer
“The aim is not to describe gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender (LGBTQ) life in universal terms. Rather, ethnographies emphasise the different forms that queer existence takes.”
Once again, it is shown that :
“UNLIKE GAY identity, [..] queer identity need not be grounded in any positive truth or in any stable reality. [..] Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers. It is an identity without an essence.”
-David M. Halperin
Saint Foucault – Towards a Gay Hagiography
Oxford University Press
1995
The interview suggests two obvious outcomes. (A) Professor Rouse is no doubt a front-running candidate to become the next president of Harvard. (B) As a discipline, Anthropology is ready to be moved into the School of Ed at Princeton and other campuses.
“…oftentimes they haven’t had advanced schooling.
… People don’t know a lot.”
She’s quite disparaging about people in her own organization.
Don’t trust coroners, the people who do actual objective fact gathering about the sex of an individual, but rather we should trust those with “advanced” indoctrination who operate in the realm of social justice theory.
“Well, who ya gonna believe me or your own eyes?” Chico Marx, Duck Soup.
“…they’re doing it in a practicing level, where they’re actually asked on forms to determine whether this body is male or female, oftentimes they haven’t had advanced schooling.”
Schooling in what?
How to read a dead mind to find out how it felt about itself?
Truly reveals the depth of her shallowness.
Presumably the “forensic people” haven’t had the advanced schooling which would compel them to cross out the part of the forms which actually asks them to distinguish between male and female (??!!!OOOO!!)
If only Professor Rouse were a politician, ducking and dodging, weaving and bobbing her way through unflattering information and defending a litany of known falsehoods. I think it’s worse than that. I’ll let John McWhorter characterize the situation:
https://x.com/JohnHMcWhorter/status/2077376282216595852
Regarding sex, Rouse dismisses the opinions of physical anthropologists by calling them “coroners”, implying that their views of sex are irrelevant because of their field. Hmmm.. one wonders what she would say about biologists? Are we also unqualified? Based on one of my interactions with as Gender Studies professor in a curriculum committee, I would say that that is indeed the case. She literally told me, in a response to a question that I asked about why their program did not involve a biology class, that “we don’t BELIEVE (my caps, I don’t know how to get holding or italics on this site) that biology has any relevance.”
I am not sure how we, in the “hard sciences” can be expected to take such fields seriously as academic disciplines. And anthropology, which once was respectable, has indeed gone the way of astrology.
If biology is irrelevant then how does anyone know what “gender” to identify as?? A male can’t identify as female if he has no idea what “female” even means.
The Gender Studies professoriate is virtually unanimous that Biology has no relevance to their field of scholarship. I wonder if they are ever embarrassed by the need to call in technical staff to fix the heating, air-conditioning, electrical, electronic, and other infrastructure aspects of their field’s physical quarters. Alas, the technicians, engineers, repairmen, and janitors have no academic training in matters as elevated as Gender Theory. In Medicine, the DEI practitioners have been trying to make their flights of ideology well represented in the training of doctors, along with old subjects as irrelevant to higher thoughts as Biology.
Its not “Gender Theory” anymore, Jon.
It is Queer Theory.
Bigot.
D.A.
NYC
“We are the instrument for data collection in the same way a Geiger counter detects radiation.”
One of these instruments is useful and not to be ignored. The other makes stuff up and can be. Pity.
“Carolyn M. Rouse is the Henry G. Bryant Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the Department of Anthropology at Princeton University, where she has taught since 2000. She is also the Ritter Professor of Anthropology and has served as President of the American Anthropological Association (2025–2027).”
It is truly appalling, given how obtuse she is. She did not even bother to check the definition of sex accepted by biologists. The DEI appointees, I am guessing here, but I see no other explanation for her titles, will not go quietly into the night.
That’s what I thought too: DEI appointee.
At one point in the interview Rouse says (bolding added):
Yes, she is confused: Sex is about gametes (sex cells), not about chromosomes. The sexes are reproductive classes.
Weaselly woke grifters in academia are just con artists. Such characters have always been around, but postmodernism has allowed them to flourish as never before.
Standards have apparently slipped very badly. Old-school con artists were adept at appearing trustworthy. This one’s not even competent at appearing competent.
The woke is strong in this one.
D.A.
NYC
I’ve met many similar academics to Rouse. They all seem to be fundamentally unhappy people probably because they really are not interested in the pursuit of knowledge and they don’t really love what they do. Possibly they also have Imposter Syndrome. They gravitate towards fellow travelers…seeking the shelter of the group. Of course not just Anthropology, which is now basically Cultural Anthropology (in the old days, top Anthropogists were excellent historians) but also English, Sociology etc. I had one student who switched from his English major because he had lost the love of reading.
“They all seem to be fundamentally unhappy people probably because they really are not interested in the pursuit of knowledge and they don’t really love what they do…”
Yet more evidence that academia is overstuffed. There are simply too many intellectually untalented people clogging up the system.
“Broken English Departments” by Reynolds Cotter (a pseudonym) suggests a
historical explanation for wokery in the groves of academe. He traces it back to the cohort who entered grad school for the sole purpose of avoiding the Vietnam war draft—and then concocted pseudoacademic subjects and discourse as a way to pretend to their status in the groves. We are now 1-2 generations past this cohort itself, but the hypothesis is that they, and then their students, created the woke culture, its memes, and its behavior patterns. If there is some truth in this analysis, then academia’s current state is history’s revenge, so to speak, for LBJ’s decision for US military intervention in the civil war of the Vietnamese.
I remember reading about the American Anthropology Association voting to boycott Israel. This was prior to Oct.7, and at the time I just thought that this was just an example of a woke social sciences/humanities umbrella organization doing its thing.
And now, when I see what is really happening in this field, I have to say that I would be astonished if these academic pseudointellectual posers did not vote to boycott Israel. That is precisely the kind of thing that they do. It would not surprise me to see publications from anthropologists investigating the “protest camps for Palestine” as the new hot topic padding resumes in the field.
Decades ago (many) Anthropology was already regarded as a joke. It appears to gotten worse over time.
“But sex is defined as whether the individual has a reproductive system designed to produce large vs small gametes, not an individua’s chromosome complement.”
This just simply isn’t true. When a baby is born, the doctor looks at the external genitalia and assigns sex based on what it looks like. That person may or may not have the chromosomes that theoretically match. No one assigns sex based on a chromosome test or gamete test.
Why is it so hard to accept that sex and gender are complicated? It frankly doesn’t matter whether or not sex is binary to allow a person to express themselves however they feel comfortable.
I’m sorry, but you do not know what you’re talking about. As I’ve said many times–and you should know this–you are confusing sex RECOGNITION with sex DEFINITION. The genitals, which are associated with sex, and a good indicator of biological sex, are not the biological DEFINITION of sex, which is based on gametes. “Assign” is different from “define”.
WHy is it so hard for people to learn the biological definition of sex rather than make definitive (and insulting) statements here that are simply wrong. I recommend reading Alex Byrne, Colin Wright, or Richard Dawkins,