Di cosa parliamo quando parliamo di sesso

This article examines a recent controversy in North American anthropology as a diagnostic case for a broader institutional tendency: the replacement of scientific and logical adjudication with moralized procedural controls, justified through an expansive and rhetorically flexible notion of "harm". The focal episode is the cancellation, in autumn 2023, of an accepted conference panel at the Transitions conference organized under the joint auspices of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) and the Canadian Anthropology Society (CASCA). The panel, organized by Kathleen Lowrey, was titled "Let’s Talk About Sex Baby: Why biological sex remains a necessary analytic category in anthropology". It had passed peer review and been accepted months earlier, then was withdrawn shortly before the event by association leadership. The article argues that the official rationale for cancellation reveals a structural contradiction. Public statements invoke values such as safety, dignity, and scientific integrity, but the operative criterion becomes the alleged "harm" that a session might cause to vulnerable members of the professional community. In the article’s reconstruction, this shift effectively subordinates scientific debate to a political logic of protection, and transforms disagreement over analytic categories into an ethical violation. The outcome is not merely a scheduling decision, but an institutional mechanism for delegitimizing certain positions by morally classifying them as "transphobic" and therefore as speech that must be excluded rather than argued against. A central claim is that the controversy was sustained by a straw man. The article emphasizes that the panel’s core thesis, as reflected in the abstract of one contribution (Elizabeth Weiss), was not that gender is binary. Rather, it was that biological sex, especially in bioarchaeology and forensic anthropology, remains a necessary analytic category because skeletal and genetic data frequently require sex classification for basic descriptive and inferential work (for example, in reconstructing demographic patterns or investigating criminal cases). The panel’s stated orientation was compatible with a strong distinction between sex and gender: sex as a biological constitution that is normally classifiable into two categories, and gender as socially elaborated, historically variable, and potentially non binary. The article therefore treats the institutional charge that the session presupposed a simplistic binary of both sex and gender as a misrepresentation of the session’s actual claims. From this point, the article conducts a logical critique of the AAA’s public justification, arguing that it attributes to the panel a proposition that the panel did not defend, then rejects the panel on the basis of that attributed proposition. This argumentative pattern, in the article’s account, enables an appearance of scientific policing ("settled science", "scholarly standards") while the decision is driven primarily by moral and political considerations. The article proposes that this is precisely how ethics, science, and politics become entangled in a way that undermines truth seeking: ethical language is used to license epistemic closure, and scientific language is used to legitimate what is, at bottom, a moral exclusion. The conceptual core of the article is a set of distinctions intended to restore analytic clarity. The article criticizes a common conflation between gender roles and gender identity. Gender roles are defined as socially constructed expectations about how persons categorized as male or female are supposed to behave. Gender identity is treated as an internal, experienced sense of self in relation to sexed categories. Gender performance is the enacted style of gendered behavior. Sexual orientation is separated again, as a pattern of attraction. With these distinctions in place, the article argues that "misalignment" is intelligible primarily between sex, identity, roles, performance, and orientation, not between anatomy and roles as such. Roles are cultural prescriptions that presuppose, rather than compete with, a prior social recognition of sex categories. The article also stresses that tensions around gender can arise independently of sexual orientation, including cases in which a person experiences distress because a local masculinity script demands aggressiveness while temperament and preferred life projects incline toward care, quietness, or domesticity. The article then addresses standard anthropological examples commonly mobilized in public debate, such as Two Spirit roles in Indigenous North American contexts and Albanian sworn virgins. These are treated as evidence of culturally specific gender roles that do not dissolve the analytic distinction between sex and gender. In the article’s argument, such cases show that societies can institutionalize additional gendered positions or role pathways, but they do so precisely by establishing socially recognizable roles, not by rendering biological sex categories analytically meaningless. They are therefore presented as poor support for the institutional inference that sex itself is not reliably classifiable into male and female. To resolve a recurrent rhetorical move, the article introduces polythetic classification (associated with Rodney Needham) as a decisive conceptual tool. The claim targeted is the suggestion that because there is no single biological criterion that classifies all humans without exception, the male female sex binary is scientifically untenable. The article argues that this is an invalid inference based on an illicit demand for monothetic definitions (one necessary and sufficient criterion). Sex classification is instead described as polythetic: a cluster based classification drawing on multiple features (chromosomes, gametes, reproductive anatomy, endocrine patterns), none of which must be perfectly aligned in every individual for the category system to remain intelligible and practically reliable. Variations of sex development are acknowledged as real and important, but they are treated as mismatches among criteria, not as evidence that the categories of male and female cease to be the primary biological classes. The article reinforces this point with analogical reasoning: unusual morphologies or unusual uses of body parts do not eliminate robust physiological categories. Functional substitution does not redefine the category, and exceptional cases do not generate a continuum that erases the classificatory boundary. On this basis, the article argues that sex is not best described as socially "assigned at birth" in a strong constructivist sense, but as socially recognized through a broadly convergent classificatory practice. This recognition, the article claims, is transcultural in its basic structure, whereas gender roles, identities, and performances vary widely across contexts and can change within a life course. The conclusion frames the dispute as a test of anthropology’s capacity to keep conceptual distinctions stable under political pressure. The article maintains that affirming the distinction between sex and gender is not a moral hostility toward anyone’s identity, but a condition of analytic coherence. When institutional actors collapse categories, or treat disagreement as harm, the article argues that the discipline risks substituting moral slogans for analysis, and political alignment for scientific integrity. The closing thesis is that justice and respect are not secured by denying empirical reality or by prohibiting debate, but by sustaining honest description, clear categories, and argument governed by logic rather than by reputational sanction.