SEX IS BINARY, PERSONALITY IS A CONTINUUM.

Yes, Richard Dawkins, who has the relevant intellectual capital, has trouble selling that message.

No less than Richard Dawkins has recently taken stick for maintaining that sex is binary whilst race, and I contend, personality, are better understood as existing on a spectrum (his word) or in a continuum in n-space.

The disciplines of psychology and psychiatry, unfortunately, aren't yet well-enough developed to be able to assess such claims in a systematic way.  We're a century or so away from eugenics and sterilization, three score and ten years or so away from frontal lobotomies, and forty years ago Leonid Brezhnev's Soviet Union had regime psychiatrists diagnosing dissidents as schizophrenic, in order to make the dissenters go away whilst claiming the corrective labor camps were for more conventional criminals alone.  There is a Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for neuroses and psychoses, but the committee that revises it responds to Popular Sentiment.  That is not the behavior of scholars confident in their paradigm.

Current academic thinking is complicit in some sort of experiment against reality, but I'm not sure which experiment that is.

It doesn't matter much whether I take a side in that argument, or not, but perhaps I cannot resist the temptation to mock the anthropology establishment.  "Dear reader, we begin thus.  "Is it that difficult to understand that sex is binary, while personality is a continuum?"  The idea is so difficult to understand that it takes an academic discipline to screw it up."

The screw-ups just keep on coming.  "Anthropology groups cancel all-female panel defending biological sex as ‘necessary category.’"  You know, because it takes an academic discipline to screw things up.

The canceled scholars were set to focus on the fact that while “it has become increasingly common in anthropology and public life to substitute ‘sex’ with ‘gender,’ there are multiple domains of research in which biological sex remains irreplaceably relevant to anthropological analysis,” according to the panel’s description.

However in their letter scrubbing the presentation, the two groups stated 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.”

The canceled all-female panel was to feature a number of scholars who have defended biological sex in the sciences and research.

Apparently the anthropologists have decided idiocy is a form of intellect.

“The first ethical principle in AAA’s Principles of Professional Responsibility is to ‘Do no harm.’ The session was rejected because it relied on assumptions that run contrary to the settled science in our discipline, framed in ways that do harm to vulnerable members of our community,” the group said in a prepared statement. “It commits one of the cardinal sins of scholarship—it assumes the truth of the proposition that it sets out to prove, namely, that sex and gender are simplistically binary, and that this is a fact with meaningful implications for the discipline.”

On Sept. 26, the canceled panelists wrote an open letter to Pérez and Heller pointing out their presentation had been approved in mid-July and they were not given any indication there were concerns until it was axed, calling the decision a “shock.”

“Our panel included a group of diverse women, one of whom is a lesbian. In addition to having three fields of anthropology presented in our panel, our panel also included anthropologists from four countries with three languages – an international panel concerned about the erasure of women,” the letter stated.

It also argued the panel planned to address the topic with care: “Our panel description … acknowledges that not all anthropologists need to differentiate between sex and gender. One of the abstracts explicitly expresses concerns that ignoring the distinction between sex and gender identity may cause harm to people in the LGBTQI community.”

It might have come to this when social scientists got squeamish about disaggregating populations by age and sex, as that second word had connotations of the sort of fillllllm you'd go to the Times Fine Arts to see; and here we are using one word to refer both to sexual dimorphism and to expressions of personality.  It came to this, dear reader, because anthropologist Elizabeth Weiss looked at some old bones.  "Weiss planned to discuss how scientific breakthroughs have made determining the sex of skeletal remains a more exact science. Her presentation was to be moderate; she titled it 'No Bones About It: Skeletons Are Binary; People May Not Be,' and conceded in her abstract the growing need in forensics to 'to ensure that skeletal finds are identified by both biological sex and their gender identity' due to 'the current rise in transitioning individuals and their overrepresentation as crime victims.'"  In a conversation with City Journal's Chris Wright, she elaborates.

We used to say there’s sex, and gender. Sex is biological, and gender is not. Then it’s no, you can no longer talk about sex. Sex and gender are one, and separating the two makes you a transphobe, when of course it doesn’t. In anthropology and many topics, the goalposts are continuously moved. And, because of that, we need to stand up and say, “I’m not moving from my place unless there’s good scientific evidence that my place is wrong.” And I don’t think there is good scientific evidence that there are more than two sexes.

That's the way research is supposed to proceed. Present the evidence that persuades me to revise my priors.  At the anthropological association, though, those priors are so tight that I have to behave myself rather than unleash the sort of scatological reference they deserve.

The AAA and CASCA boards reached a decision to remove the session “Let’s Talk about Sex Baby: Why biological sex remains a necessary analytic category in anthropology” from the AAA/CASCA 2023 conference program. This decision was based on extensive consultation and was reached in the spirit of respect for our values, in order to ensure the safety and dignity of all of our members, as well as the scientific integrity of the program.

The first ethical principle in AAA’s Principles of Professional Responsibility is to “Do no harm.” The session was rejected because it relied on assumptions that run contrary to the settled science in our discipline, framed in ways that do harm to vulnerable members of our community. It commits one of the cardinal sins of scholarship—it assumes the truth of the proposition that it sets out to prove, namely, that sex and gender are simplistically binary, and that this is a fact with meaningful implications for the discipline.

Such efforts contradict scientific evidence, including the wealth of anthropological scholarship on gender and sex. Forensic anthropologists talk about using bones for “sex estimation,” not “sex identification,” a process that is probabilistic rather than clearly determinative, and that is easily influenced by cognitive bias on the part of the researcher. Around the world and throughout human history, there have always been people whose gender roles do not align neatly with their reproductive anatomy. There is no single biological standard by which all humans can be reliably sorted into a binary male/female sex classification. On the contrary, anthropologists and others have long shown sex and gender to be historically and geographically contextual, deeply entangled, and dynamically mutable categories.

The function of the “gender critical” scholarship advocated in this session, like the function of the “race science” of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, is to advance a “scientific” reason to question the humanity of already marginalized groups of people, in this case, those who exist outside a strict and narrow sex / gender binary.

Transgender and gender diverse identities have long existed, and we are committed to upholding the value and dignity of transgender people. We believe that a more just future is possible—one where gender diversity is welcomed and supported rather than marginalized and policed.

Catch that "run contrary to the settled science" just before that "advance a 'scientific' reason to question the humanity?"

Mr Wright is having none of it.

Each of these assertions is empirically false. An individual’s sex can be determined by observing their primary sex organs, or gonads, as these organs determine the type of gamete an individual can or would have the function to produce. The existence of a very rare subset of individuals with developmental conditions that make their sex difficult to assess does not substantiate the existence of a third sex. Sex is binary because are only two sexes, not because every human in existence is neatly classifiable. Additionally, while some organisms are capable of changing sex, humans are not among them. Therefore, the assertion that human sex is “dynamically mutable” is false.

Weiss appropriately highlights the “false equivalency” inherent in the claim that the existence of people with intersex conditions disproves the binary nature of sex. “People who are born intersex or with disorders of sex development are not nonbinary or transgender, they are individuals with medical pathologies,” she said. “We would not argue that because some people are born with polydactyly (extra fingers or toes), often seen in inbred populations, that you can’t say that humans have ten fingers and ten toes. It's an absurd conclusion.”

Maybe after they've tried everything else, they'll use sex to refer to, oh, the possession of gonads, and gender to refer to a manifestation of personality.