Len Gutkin
The Review, Chronicle of Higher Education
The decision by the American Anthropological Association to expel a panel (“Let’s Talk About Sex, Baby”) from its 2023 annual meeting — on the manifestly false grounds that the panelists’ belief in a biological sex binary “contradicts … settled science” — remains an open wound disfiguring the face of the discipline.
So it is no surprise that the Harvard anthropologist Joseph Henrich, in his critique of the state of anthropology (released last week, it is the fifth field-specific supplement to the Vanderbilt/WashU “Report on the Humanities and Humanistic Social Sciences”) spends several pages on the controversy. Why, he wonders, did the Princeton anthropologist Carolyn Rouse, the AAA’s current president, tell the Chronicle that, if you are an anthropologist who considers biological sex to be binary, perhaps “you want to kill babies” born with atypical sex chromosomes?
Leave a comment
Comments will be approved before showing up.