Have a hair-raisingly brilliant piece of writing by anthropologist Kathleen Lowrey:

How Anthropology Canceled Sex

We’ve met her before via Anthropologists made of crystal and Let’s you not talk last month, about the panel abruptly canceled at the last minute for the usual stupid reasons.

I was motivated to propose the panel by my concern that anthropological publications increasingly deploy “gender” in a manner that implies gender systems are neutral manifestations of human diversity. Second, more and more anthropological literature seeks to reverse-engineer “sex” as if it takes the form of a “spectrum,” while presuming that “biological sex” is possessed of no independent analytic utility.

These developments have generated a conceptual tangle in desperate need of unraveling. Happily, this is a task at which anthropology should excel: spotting where the preoccupations of one cultural order—in this case, that of a late-modern, mostly Anglophone, very-online ecumene—are fervently insisted upon by members of that order as constitutive of reality itself.

Oh but – but – that can’t be right. The late-modern, mostly Anglophone, very-online ecumene can’t be a cultural order subject to analysis; it’s reality itself, truth itself, the way things are.

Ours was not selected as an executive panel, but not necessarily for political reasons: The competition is no doubt fierce. Nonetheless, I wanted to know whether one member of the three-person selection committee had recused herself when our panel came up for judgment. This was Sarah Shulist, an anthropologist at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, who had published two denunciations of me on an anthropology blog (of which I had been a founding contributor) in the aftermath of my 2020 dismissal as chair of undergraduate programs in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Alberta. The committee wrote back to assure me the selection process was rigorous and thorough. I responded that I had no doubt at all that it was, but only specifically wished to know if Shulist had recused herself during deliberations over our panel, given that I was its organizer. To date, I haven’t received any response to this follow-up query.

That seems just a little shifty and evasive of the committee, wouldn’t you say?

So anyway, they resubmitted their panel as a regular conference session and were accepted, albeit in a dud time slot.

We received notice of our acceptance in July and set about reserving hotel rooms, booking flights, discussing overlaps and the possibilities for socializing outside the panel itself. Then came the Sept. 26 email letting us know we were removed.

Almost as if they did it on purpose. “I know, let’s tell them they’re accepted, and then at the last minute say hahaha no you’re not.”

Not for the first time in my experience as a canceled feminist, I feel I have gained some insight into how humans have, at many points in history, managed to gin one another into activities like burning heretics at the stake. Such outcomes cascade from the unreality of an initial premise. The proposition that “some lesbians have penises” requires showy demonstrations of faith. To balk is to suggest you might not think that assertion is true after all. No one wants to be the person who says the next punitive step is a step too far, as there is never a shortage of fanatics eager to make the point that the hesitant must be those whited sepulchers we have all been warned about.

No one even wants to be the person who fails to get a kick in, because uh oh whited sepulcher. That’s what it looked like to me back in summer 2015 when the goons at Freethought blogs solemnly lined up one by one to add their mite to the pile. “Don’t do it to me, look, I too am denouncing her, look, look!”

For nearly four years now, I have felt as if I were the inhabitant of a living-history diorama, albeit one dreamt up by a satirist of the George Saunders variety. At my workplace, I lead a semi-zombie existence. I turn up at department meetings with a wooden stake spectrally hanging out of my chest; my colleagues now treat me with a combination of embarrassed politeness and distinct resentment. Sure, perhaps they didn’t behave quite as they ought, but isn’t it also a bit rude of me to still be hanging about above ground, rather than staying decently buried?

Ugh. I’m so lucky not to have to encounter any of my goons ever again.

Just last week, I had a cordial exchange with none other than Agustín Fuentes, a professor of anthropology at Princeton University, who, along with two other anthropologists, wrote a letter supporting the AAA’s removal of our panel. The exchange was spurred when a senior anthropologist wrote to us both simultaneously. I replied to say I would welcome an exchange of ideas, perhaps at some future conference from which I haven’t been removed. Fuentes responded that he felt sure it would happen someday, and that he has always “found my takes intriguing” (presumably not the ones he alleges are eugenics-adjacent).

I don’t find this sort of thing all that strange anymore. Exactly such sorry for running over your dog, backing up and doing it again several times, see you at the raffle! “neighborliness” characterizes many of my professional interactions. I can’t tell you the number of people who have denounced me as something approximating a Nazi on the internet who nevertheless smile gamely, if a little wanly, when we cross paths on campus. Allow me to confess that I almost always return a feeble smile of my own. What’s the alternative? Fisticuffs?

Well you could make the smile mostly a sneer. Or entirely a sneer. Or you could bare your teeth in a terrifying exaggerated grin like The Joker.

All of this diminishes my ability to crank up the machinery of high dudgeon upon the occasion of the people in charge of an august scholarly conference running the thing as if it were a blanket fort for big babies. The ridiculousness of it all ripples along my ribs, reminding me of my anthropological avocation: my duty to try to understand the odd things people do.

Hahahahahahaha I love her.

Our panel pretty faithfully reflects our discipline: a mix of people who try to make sense of human biology and people who try to make sense of human society. While it is possible, although not strictly necessary, to be pretty buttoned-up most of the time if you have hold of the biology end of the human species, the socio-cultural end is awash with delirious excesses of every variety. Socio-cultural anthropology loses one of its most sensitive analytic instruments—a sense of humor—when it succumbs to the current fashion for po-faced earnestness about all the foibles to which human beings are heir.

For examples of such folly, we need look no further than the measures taken by the anthropological tribe itself, and the broader left-academic milieu of which it is part, to maintain and enforce a cultural order that solidified not so long ago. These days, once you start living as a “TERF,” you can get punched in the face, hit with projectiles, hung in effigy, face masked mobs at your workplace, lose your livelihood, lose your children, lose your liberty, be inundated with rape and death threats. At the same time, you are engaged in battle with opponents so outré, many respectable people refuse to believe they truly exist, and you can end up looking like the crazy one if you try to explain it all. I think this, more than any fundamental cowardice, explains the evident relief of members of academic or medical associations when the leadership assures them it’s an issue no one should be talking about anyway—that “the science is settled.”

The link under outré is to the giant-tits guy in Ontario. I love this woman.