What happens when in the service of a noble goal, in this case, making sure that all people live dignified lives free of bigotry, any reasonable person would support a bill that sought to incorporate gender expression and gender identity under the rubric of hate crimes?
00:08:19.940Contesting the transition from sex to gender and anthropological scholarship deserves much more critical consideration
00:08:26.800than it has hitherto received in major disciplinary fora like AAA,
00:08:32.900the American Association of Anthropology, whatever, and the Canadian Anthropological Society.
00:08:39.320This diverse international panel made up of all apparent women who some physician roughly guessed probabilistically that they were female when they were born.
00:08:51.540They were assigned as female because they had vaginas.
00:08:54.940So it has hitherto received in major disciplinary fora.
00:09:41.820This is particularly the case when the work is concerned with equity and the deep analysis of power and which has an aim, the achievement of genuine inclusivity.
00:09:51.460With research foci from hominin evolution to contemporary artificial intelligence from the anthropology of education to the debates within contemporary feminism about surrogacy,
00:10:01.680panelists make the case that while not all anthropologists need to talk about sex, baby, some absolutely do.
00:10:08.660So all that they're saying is that sure, you could talk about distinction between sex and gender, although by the way, they're highly correlated.
00:10:15.540Yes, there are some women who are very masculine in their overt orientations.
00:10:19.940And then there are some women and men who are, you know, more feminine in some of their orientations, some of their preferences, some of their behavioral patterns.
00:10:28.920These two tend to be highly correlated.
00:10:31.920But in any case, that's a separate issue.
00:10:34.020All that they're saying here is that there are many domains of inquiry within anthropology where talking about gender instead of sex makes no sense.
00:10:42.900And that the binary marker of biological sex remains important, right?
00:10:51.100The average three-day-old pigeon knows this to be true.
00:10:55.380But these are sophisticated anthropologists that need to be told that in the 21st century.
00:11:01.480When until 15 minutes ago, 117 billion people who reproduced, because each of the two people who reproduced knew exactly what male and female was,
00:14:11.520And 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.
00:14:35.380Remember, the highest association in Canadian anthropology and American anthropology are saying that six or seven women, I can't remember the number,
00:14:48.780who are established researchers, who wish to have a session on why, in some contexts, anthropological research must recognize the marker of biological sex.
00:15:02.080That does not pass scientific scrutiny, and it doesn't promote the safety and dignity of the association's members.
00:15:13.060You know, that association that is made up of members of two phenotypes, male and female.
00:16:33.380I mean, I'm an evolutionary psychologist, but I'm not by training a biologist.
00:16:37.180So just like the noble Supreme Court person who can't tell who's a woman because she's not a biologist, I was just going on hunches, guesses.
00:16:45.700My two choices were I was either going to have sex with Dave Rubin or with my wife.
00:16:53.780I did a flip because it's a best-guest estimate.
00:16:56.300I chose my wife, and then we produced children.
00:16:58.820But I could have been still mating with Dave Rubin right now, not knowing that we can't produce children through our mating because I'm not a biologist, and I'm not as accomplished as these anthropologists because I was going on this old antiquated thing, penis, vagina stuff.
00:17:22.680So that run contrary to the settled science in our discipline, framed in ways that do harm to vulnerable members of our community.
00:17:30.220In my testimony, I used the term tyranny of the minority, which has now become, you see it everywhere.
00:17:38.820I use that term, and I use it in the parasitic mind because you have 0.01% of people who are official.
00:17:45.760I mean, there are different estimates, but it's well under 1%, well under 1% who are not comfortable with the binary class nomenclature of male-female.
00:17:58.020They might be gender fluid and so on and so forth.
00:18:01.620Therefore, 99.9% of people who do identify, who are cis, who are heteronormative, have to no longer abide by those markers of personhood because that marginalizes the 0.01%.
00:18:20.660It commits one of the cardinal sins of scholarship.
00:18:26.320It assumes the truth of the proposition that it sets out to prove, namely that sex and gender are simplistically binary, and this is a fact with meaningful implications for this discipline.
00:18:37.400It is absolutely not true that sex is binary.
00:18:41.380You know, just like, for example, I've done a sad truth clip where I've shown that there are situations where people are born with more than 10 toes or less than 10 toes or more than 10 fingers or less than 10 fingers.
00:18:55.880That proves to you that it's not a fixed trait that humans have 10 fingers and 10 toes.
00:19:01.700As the nurse checks, when a baby is born, they count the number of toes and fingers.
00:19:07.700The reality is that people are born with finger fluidity, right?
00:19:13.440Some people are born with two, some people.
00:19:15.020It's simply anatomically and biologically wrong to say that we are born with 10 fingers and 10 toes because Uncle Timmy was born with nine.
00:19:29.720Such efforts contradict scientific evidence, including the wealth of anthropological scholarship on gender and sex.
00:19:36.500Forensic 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.
00:19:52.180And by the way, the same argument is being used when they now say that a physician takes a best-guessed estimate as to what your sex is when they see, you know, penis and vagina.
00:20:32.720Around the world and throughout human history, there have always been people whose gender roles do not align neatly with their reproductive anatomy.
00:23:38.620The function of the gender critical scholarship advocated in this session, like the function of the race science of the late 19th and early 20th century is to advance a quote, scientific reason to question the humanity of already marginalized groups of people.
00:23:59.560In this case, those who exist outside a strict and narrow sex slash gender binary.
00:24:04.340So look at here, the beautiful progressive sleight of hand.
00:24:08.660The people who are now saying that there's such a thing as biological sex are just like the race eugenicists, the Nazis.
00:24:21.820Transgender and gender diverse identities have long existed, and we are committed to upholding the value and dignity of transgender people.
00:24:34.260We believe that a more just future is possible, one where gender diversity is welcomed and supported rather than marginalized and policed.
00:24:42.800There is nothing in the session that I read in question that marginalized or policed transgender people or said anything derogatory about transgender people.
00:24:52.440They were simply saying that there are many contexts where biological sex matters.
00:25:00.360I study psychology of decision making.
00:25:09.820I've published many papers on sex differences where I seem to exactly know what male or female was.
00:25:14.940According to these anthropologists, you know, I'm no different than Himmler.
00:25:19.300And by the way, I've had many papers in my career that were desk rejected exactly for what just happened.
00:25:24.960So it is a miracle that I was able to publish all that I published in academia, given the positions that I've taken, both in my scientific career and in my public outreach.
00:25:35.920Because it is better to live as a truthful person with dignity for a minute than to live as a lobotomized coward for 10,000 years.
00:25:46.100It is astonishing that in the 21st century, a supposedly august organization like the American Anthropological Association, with its history, like the Canadian Society of Anthropology, would be pulling a session where well-established female scholars in the field are simply making the very tepid statement that there are contexts where people are in the field.
00:26:16.080Creating the gender versus sex distinction is meaningless because in those contexts, the biological binary classification of male and female matters.
00:26:37.640The mere fact that they're saying that, yes, there is such a thing as biological sex, and in some instances it matters, was enough to pull it.