The other day, I mentioned that a few people were protesting the cancellation of a panel session at a meeting of the American Anthropological Association and the Canadian Anthropology Society. The first clue that the session was intended to be something unpleasant is that the cancellation outraged Kathleen Stock, the anti-trans advocate who lost her professorship because she was such a big fan of conversion therapy, opposed the idea of gender self-identification, and was a trustee of the LGB Alliance, that group that openly repudiated the idea of trans rights. I’d be wary of support from such a person.

Then I learned further that the panel was a collection of gender critical feminists (the new term for TERFs) who were going to use the panel for their ideological propaganda from Elizabeth Weiss! I’m doubly wary now. Weiss was an anthropologist at San Jose State University who hated the idea of repatriating the bones in their collection, and stirred up a major row after being photographed making light of the remains.

She had claimed she was the target of cancel culture after being blasted for tweeting a photo of herself returning to campus following COVID lockdowns in the fall of 2021, holding a skull with her bare hands and writing: “So happy to be back with some old friends.”

She had already been the subject of criticism over her recently published book — “Repatriation and Erasing the Past” — that opposed laws returning skeletal remains to Native American tribes when 870 academics from Stanford to Oxford denounced it as “explicitly racist ideology.”

In the midst of the backlash, San Jose State University Provost Vincent Del Casino Jr., posted a letter to faculty saying the image of Weiss holding the skull “evoked shock and disgust” and asked, “in what context is it ever ethically appropriate for an academic to handle remains while smiling with ungloved hands while calling these remains ‘friends?’”

In an emailed response to the provost, Weiss wrote that her tweet was showing her admiration for the collection: “We should be celebrating the lives of these first occupants of Silicon Valley — not allowing their voices to be silenced by a vociferous campaign orchestrated by woke activists whose strategy is to try to shut down debate, and promote superstition over science.”

If you’re “celebrating the lives,” why is it that the native peoples whose ancestors you’re treating so cavalierly are complaining? I would think that sensitivity and respect are important parts of your training and work. I guess Ms. Weiss was absent that decade in class. Furthermore, Weiss was the third wife of J. Philippe Rushton, the infamous racist and face of the Pioneer Fund. I can tell whose side she would be on — marrying a prominent racist is a loud commitment to a repugnant point of view.

Are you beginning to see a theme here? You don’t have to scratch a gender critical very deeply to find a fascist.

But wait, there’s more! The organizer of the conference panel was Kathleen Lowry, a proud gender critical feminist whose anti-trans views have been protested.

“The university has said it’s perfectly OK to fire people for doubting that men can get pregnant, for doubting lesbians can have penises,” she said. “The implications are very dangerous because this is a live issue in our contemporary Canadian democracy.”

She was not fired, by the way. She was removed from a university committee, nothing more, which is something many of us would consider a reward.

I think you can see why the panel was dissolved, though. The conference organizers could clearly see that they were going to be platforming a crew of notorious bigots who would be assembling a bomb on stage, that they would be facilitating an ugly exercise in one-sided anti-trans prejudice that would definitely do harm to other attendees at the event.

I don’t feel like being fair to Weiss and her cronies, but I will note that she has expressed her perspective on the cancellation online, at a page titled “Discussing sex is no longer allowed at anthropology conferences”. I will note that even the title is dishonest, since sex is a legitimate topic in anthropology — what isn’t is inflammatory bias and the rhetoric of hate.

The one good thing to emerge from this repugnant episode is that the anthropological society has published a beautiful statement explaining their decision titled “No Place For Transphobia in Anthropology”.

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.

I’m already seeing people trying to argue against that statement that “There is no single biological standard by which all humans can be reliably sorted into a binary male/female sex classification,” largely by insisting that their standard, whatever it may be, is definitive, by definition. I’ve seen this strategy used for decades: first it was morphology, they can tell who is a woman by looking at them; then it was X/Y chromosomes; then it was hormone titers; now many of the bigots have congealed around a definition based on gametes. They never seem to appreciate that the variety of arbitrary ‘standards’ are often in conflict with each other, or that many of them are outright invisible or dependent on invasive and offensive examinations. Do you determine the ‘biological sex’ of people you meet by asking for a sperm sample? I would hope not.

I like the comparison of “gender criticals” to “race scientists”. It’s particularly apt given that at least one of the people behind this panel is a closet race scientist herself.

A few medical students in Duluth are very unhappy with what they’re being taught.

My days were filled with so many lectures and guidelines that I knew were not right or ordered at all and they were most definitely against our beliefs as Catholics, wrote Emma Pero, the first president of the group, in an essay on the site.

How do you know they’re not right or ordered? You’re a student. You’re there to learn. Duluth is a good school, it’s not a Bible college, I’m pretty sure they’re not telling you what to believe, they’re teaching practices that have been empirically demonstrated to be beneficial. Of course we know how she knows they’re wrong, the hint is right their in the quote: she’s Catholic, and a far right conservative Catholic at that.

So what were they teaching her that was not right? That’s pretty clear, too.

A Catholic group for students at the University of Minnesota Medical School in Duluth that opposes gender-affirming care is fracturing the small, rural-focused program.

The student section of the Catholic Medical Association, which also includes students enrolled in the U’s Duluth campus College of Pharmacy, formed in 2021. It aligns with Catholic beliefs that largely oppose gender-affirming care for minors, which includes medications to suppress puberty and hormones for older teens, as well as contraception and abortion, according to its website.

The group is called St. Raphael’s Guild, and these students are heeding the words of old men in funny hats rather than the words of the experienced medical professionals who are their actual professors. They plan to graduate with medical degrees and then scatter to small medical practices across the rural Midwest, where, in addition to refusing to administer health care to trans teens, they will oppose birth control and abortion. They are the worst.

The Duluth medical school is also clear on what students should learn. This is cautiously sensible.

The school teaches its students to care for patients of all backgrounds, he said, and its approach to controversial topics is to teach them to transfer patients to another provider if they must, but to always ensure the patient receives care.

“Our hope is that message gets carried on and that students take that to heart and put it into practice,” Diebel said.

To second-year medical student Jamey Sharp, it appears the group is “working against best practices” that students are taught regarding LGBTQ care, and it makes class uncomfortable, he said.

“It’s really important for trans folks, queer folks, women, to feel comfortable working in this field and feeling like they would be safe and free of discrimination throughout the educational process,” he said.

The St Raphael’s Guild students strongly disagree. They bring in fanatical Catholic weirdos with dubious credentials who explicitly argue against the best practices taught by the school.

In 2022, members of the student group gathered in a conference room to watch a virtual lecture held by the guild. It featured Dr. Quentin Van Meter, a controversial Atlanta-based pediatric endocrinologist who in 2020 was discredited by a Texas court as an expert on puberty blockers and gender-affirming care.

He is the former president of the American College of Pediatricians, a group declared to be a hate organization by the civil rights nonprofit Southern Poverty Law Center.

During the lecture, he called the Southern Poverty Law Center a hate group and told the room full of students that professional medical societies, most of which support gender care, don’t represent science.

He argued against using preferred pronouns with patients.

This is just acquiescing to nonsense and pathology and plays into their delusional thoughts, he said in a recording of the lecture.

He advised avoiding referring minors to transgender care centers, calling them a conveyor belt to hell. Affirming a child’s chosen gender can worsen mental health, he told the students, who should refer minors instead to mental health providers.

Gosh. “acquiescing to nonsense and pathology and plays into their delusional thoughts” sounds like an apt description of Catholic zealotry.

I’ve always thought of the University of Minnesota Duluth to be an excellent branch of the system I’m in, with both a well-regarded medical school and pharmacy school. We send graduates of my university there every year. I guess I still have to be wary of some of the doctors that come out of there.

It was over 10 years ago that feminist man and professor of gender studies Hugo Schwyzer revealed his true colors, admitting that he’d had sex with his students, and worse. It was a dramatic and abrupt fall from grace, and even as he was plummeting to his doom, he was trying to schmooze his way back into leftist circles.

My behavior with students from 1996-98 was unacceptable for a male feminist and, for that matter, an ethical person. The question is whether the penalty for that ought to be a lifetime ban from teaching gender studies, or writing about the subjects I write about. Some feminists feel yes, it should be. I disagree, but only because so many wonderful feminist mentors of mine have encouraged me to stay in this work.

Ick. Ooze all the slime you want, we can see right through you.

He did not fall wailing all the way into Hell, but he came close. He’s writing for The Federalist now. He’s defending Lauren Boebert and arguing that women have historically been happy to marry young and get pregnant right away, and that abortion is wrong, and that leftists are all hedonistic degenerates. It is virtuous to get married at 16 and to be a grandmother in your 30s, he thinks…and it may very well be a good and satisfying thing for some women, but not all women. Lauren Boebert just made a mistake, and wasn’t at all acting like his imaginary left-wing self-indulgent sex fiends.

At that Denver theater, Boebert had a foolish human moment. She has rightly apologized. That should be the end of it. But because she is a conservative, and because her life and her politics give witness to her pro-life convictions, her apology is insufficient.

Rather, she must be shamed over and over again. We must see that surveillance video of her fumblings a hundred times a day. And her ordinary human frailties must somehow be connected to her deepest convictions so her embarrassment becomes an occasion to smear those who share the congresswoman’s commitment to the unborn.

As cruel and dishonest as the mockery of Boebert is, it is even worse that the left uses this incident to peddle a basic lie about human happiness. Someone is indeed robbing people of their youth, but it isn’t conservatives doing the robbing. The thieves are those who preach the lie that self-indulgence and experimentation are pathways to fulfillment rather than despair.

First of all, nobody needs to see that video a hundred times a day. I saw it once, and that was enough. It says something about Hugo that he’s watching it that many times.

Secondly, the Left isn’t preaching lies about self-indulgence and experimentation. The idea is that, instead, women should have the same freedoms men have, the same opportunities to pursue a fulfilling life that isn’t necessarily just having lots of babies as soon as they can. I have classes full of young women (that I’m not abusing sexually, so maybe Schwyzer can’t identify) who are thinking about careers in science, who are doing science, and who are aware that a pregnancy would derail all those plans. Fortunately, they are also smart enough to know about birth control and abortion, not because they want to live frivolously, but because they are hoping for the opposite, a serious and productive life that isn’t controlled by men.

On a happier note, the article closes with a brief biography.

Hugo Schwyzer was a professor of history and gender studies at Pasadena City College from 1993-2013. He is now a ghostwriter living in Los Angeles.

Buh-bye, Hugo. I hope you too are living a fruitful and fulfilling life, but the fact that you are reduced to writing for the Federalist suggests otherwise.

Imagine you are a big prestigious university, with a gigantic endowment — about $13 billion at last count. You have 35,000 students. You are almost 270 years old. You are private, so you’re less subject to the whims of the state congress. You are doing great! Then one of your employees, a gynecologist, does this:

Six weeks after giving birth to a daughter, on a Friday in late June 2012, Kanyok returned to Columbia’s suite of offices on East 60th Street for a checkup. She looked idly at her phone as Hadden examined her. He assured her that all looked good, and the nurse chaperoning the exam left the room. Hadden started to follow her out. Then he paused, turned, and told Kanyok that he’d forgotten to check her stitches. He instructed her to lie down again.

Beneath the paper blanket covering her knees, between her legs, the assault this time was unmistakable. Kanyok jolted back and saw Hadden’s face surface, bright red. She froze as he chattered nervously and performed what he told her was a breast exam. She texted her boyfriend. “Dr Hadden just licked my vagina,” she typed. “I’m shaking And freaked out.”

By the way, the breast exam seems to have been a frequent escape hatch for Hadden. These were two-handed, full-on naked fondling sessions, but they served to distract the patient from whatever he’d been doing below the waste.

Another incident:

She says that as she was lying on the examination table, Hadden rubbed his erect penis on her arm. Stunned and shaken, she told a receptionist that Hadden was a pervert. She recalls that the receptionist replied, “I know” and “I’m sorry.”

Now if I were a major university, I’d work fast — I need to protect the reputation of the college! I would fire that guy so fast, with cause, that he wouldn’t even have time to lick the doorknobs on the way out.

Not Columbia University! They were so concerned about their reputation that they buried the incident, all of the incidents, for 20 years. He was out there practicing pervert’s version of gynecology under Columbia’s imprimatur for decades, while the university hid all these abuses over and over. Once a patient called the cops on him, had him arrested, and a few days after he was released from jail, and the university put him back to work licking and fondling young women.

Eventually, the law caught up with this predator. He and the university were prosecuted, and Hadden got a 20 year prison sentence while Columbia was served with a $71.5 million settlement to 79 victims.

So how did that strategy to protect your reputation work out, Columbia?

How it begins:

An Arizona pro-parent school board member, who was recently elected into office, leaked and alerted parents to a radical science curriculum that is currently being considered in the Peoria Unified School District.

Notice that it calls this new school board member “pro-parent,” to distinguish her from all the anti-parent parents on the school board. Aren’t you curious to find out what “radical science” she objects to? Someone who looks this smug must have oodles of opinions.

I bet you already know what she’s going to freak out about.

Within a month of being at the school board, Rooks leaked a proposed textbook that would be used in the district’s high school. She said she was alarmed that the science curriculum discounted the reality of biological sex.

“I mean, these are kids we’re talking about. It’s not adults making adult decisions. These are children. So their minds are… not developed completely yet,” Rooks said.

Here we go again. At least the news article actually quotes what the textbook says, so we can judge how “radical” it is.

According to a post by Nicole Solas of the Independent Women’s Forum, the textbook said, “The biochemical, physiological, and anatomical features associated with ‘males’ and ‘females’ are turning out to be more complex than previously realized, with many genes involved in their development. We now know that sex is not a binary state, with just two defined outcomes.”

“Because of the complexity of the genes and proteins involved in sex determination, many variations exist. Some individuals are born with intermediate sexual characteristics, or even with anatomical features that do not match an individual’s sense of their own gender (‘transgender individuals’). Sex determination is an active area of research that should yield a more sophisticated understanding in years to come.”

Yeah, no. That’s pretty conventional. Also true and valid.

Fox News also helpfully (?) includes this illustration.

OK, which one is the “male” chromosome? Does it have a penis? Does it make little tiny microgametes? What’s with the blue and yellow and green and purple pseudocolor? Why even include the right panel, are some of those male and female chromosomes, too?

You’ll have to go to the link to see some truly triumphant stupidity, though. They bring on Jack Brewer to opine on the subject. Brewer is a former football player who then became a “wealth manager” for Merrill Lynch, and then founded The Brewer Group, a Christian consulting firm focused on Building the Kingdom through Business. He is completely unqualified to contribute to the discussion.

Brewer mumbles along about how the transgender agenda is witchcraft, literal witchcraft, and also throws in the statistic that transgender teens are 5 times more likely to commit suicide, implying that being transgender is the cause, rather than the oppression brought on by Christian fanatics tormenting them.

I don’t normally watch Fox News. This reminds me why.

In all senses of the word. This has been a disease raging through certain people since at least the Gamergate days — they are ideologically warped, committed to a bizarrely hateful perspective.

So here’s this guy, playing the shiny new role-playing game du jour, and he gets to the beginning character creation screen, a staple of these kinds of games since Dungeons & Dragons. It asks what pronouns his character will use, and he fucking melts down.

this weird british guy losing his mind over selecting pronouns in starfield is the perfect demonstration for why we must bring back lobotomies pic.twitter.com/py3wsH78XC

— hasanabi (@hasanthehun) September 3, 2023

Jesus, guy. It’s a game. A role-playing game. You’re going to have to save some of that energy and fury for when it asks if you want to be an elf or a dwarf or whatever (I haven’t played Starfield. Martian or Venusian? Whatever.)

I wonder if NSF regrets making their logo so prominent in these photos of the McMurdo research station in Antarctica. I can see where there is some pride.

Antarctica’s ancient ice sheet and remoteness make it ideal for scientists studying everything from the earliest moments of the universe to changes in the planet’s climate.

The population at McMurdo, the hub of US operations, usually swells from 200-300 in the southern winter to over 1,000 in the summer. Typically, around 70 per cent are men.

Funded and overseen by the NSF, the US Antarctic Programme is run by a tangle of contractors and subcontractors, with billions of dollars at stake. Since 2017, Leidos has held the main contract, now worth over $200 million per year. Subcontractor PAE, which employs many of the base’s workers, was bought last year by the government services giant Amentum.

Money, isolation, lots of men, it does look like an opportunity for research, but you’d think someone would recognize that it’s also an opportunity for men to behave badly, and that precautions would be taken to protect all the workers there. They weren’t.

The National Science Foundation, the federal agency that oversees the US Antarctic Programme, published a report in 2022 in which 59 per cent of women said they’d experienced harassment or assault while on the ice, and 72 per cent of women said such behaviour was a problem in Antarctica.

But the problem goes beyond the harassment, the Associated Press found. In reviewing court records and internal communications, and in interviews with more than a dozen current and former employees, the AP uncovered a pattern of women who said their claims of harassment or assault were minimised by their employers, often leading to them or others being put in further danger.

In one case, a woman who reported a colleague had groped her was made to work alongside him again. In another, a woman who told her employer she was sexually assaulted was later fired. Another woman said that bosses at the base downgraded her allegations from rape to harassment. The AP generally does not identify those who say they have been sexually assaulted unless they publicly identify themselves.

72%! That’s a rather significant number. You’d think that would be enough to prompt major changes in policy and enforcement. Nope. Instead, it encouraged denial.

Buckingham was hired by PAE. Amentum didn’t respond to questions from the AP. Leidos senior vice-president Melissa Lee Dueñas said it conducts background checks on all its employees.

“Our stance on sexual harassment or assault couldn’t be more clear: we have zero tolerance for such behavior,” Dueñas said in an email. “Each case is thoroughly investigated.”

Those are words that put me on edge: you’re saying “zero tolerance,” but when you’ve got a strong majority of women reporting harassment, that says you’re pretty tolerant. “Thoroughly investigated” sounds more like “thoroughly covered-up.”

I’ll spare you the many personal accounts of sexual abuse documented in the article. I’m most appalled by how the contractors who profit from McMurdo respond to the reports. Here’s how a woman, Liz Monahan, who was assaulted, was dealt with.

With her employers doing nothing to address her concerns, Monahon’s immediate boss and co-workers came up with their own plan, according to two employees familiar with the situation.

Monahon was told to pack her bags, and the next morning joined a group trying to navigate a safe route across the sea ice over eight days to resupply a tiny US outpost. The crossing is risky because the ice can crumble in the spring.

“To protect her, they put her in a dangerous situation,” said Wes Thurmann, a fire department supervisor who had worked in Antarctica every year since 2012.

But they all felt it was safer than her remaining at McMurdo.

It’s a pattern of neglect, denial, and protection of the abusers.

The woman told her bosses she’d been sexually assaulted by a coworker. Her performance was subsequently criticised by a supervisor, who was also the girlfriend of the accused man. Two months later, she was fired.

Many of the woman’s colleagues were outraged. Julie Grundberg, then the McMurdo area manager for Leidos, repeatedly emailed her concerns to her superiors in Denver.

“The fact that we haven’t come out with some sort of public statement is making the community trust our organisation even less,” Grundberg wrote.

Supervisor Ethan Norris replied: “We need your help to keep this calm and be a neutral party, as you have only one side of the story at this point.”

Wow. Leidos has been contracted by the NSF to manage the station since at least 2017; their contract expires in 2025. It’s part of the problem that their incompetence didn’t get them immediately terminated.

The deeper pattern here is that our scientific organizations are setting up remote research stations in places like Antarctica or the tropics while neglecting basic social obligations. They’re building cozy little cabins free of accountability that draw in rapists and abusers.