To stop censorship, stop doing it yourself

Last spring, the American Anthropological Association endorsed a statement that condemned Florida for restricting school instruction about sexual orientation and gender identity. And this fall, the association canceled a panel at its own conference that aimed to explore, yes, sexual orientation and gender identity.

That speaks volumes about why so many people distrust universities right now. We professors scream bloody murder about laws to censor American classrooms, then we turn around and censor each other. And you can’t defend freedom with one hand if you’re denying it with the other.

Let’s start with the recent “Ed Scare” of state measures to muzzle American teachers, who are facing the greatest challenge to their liberty since the Red Scare of the 1950s. Dozens of states have considered or passed bills restricting instruction on “divisive concepts,” especially around race or gender. And 11 states have specifically banned discussion of LGBTQ-related issues.

In Florida, a law signed earlier this year by Gov. Ron DeSantis prohibits instruction about gender identity and sexual orientation through the eighth grade; it also requires schools to teach that “sex is determined by biology” and is “binary, stable, and unchangeable.” As the statement signed by the AAA correctly asserts, such restrictions inhibit teachers and students from discussing “cultures, religions and societies ... that have embraced traditions of gender fluidity and homosexuality.”

But the AAA inhibited that discussion, too, by rejecting a previously accepted conference panel about sex and gender. Entitled “Let’s Talk About Sex, Baby: Why Biological Sex Remains a Necessary Analytic Category in Anthropology,” the panel featured five female scholars from four countries. One of them argued that human skeletons were binary — that is, either male or female — even though people don’t always present that way; another critiqued tech companies that were “counting men who identify as trans as women rather than by having more women enter the field.”

In a joint statement, the AAA and the Canadian Anthropology Society declared last month that the panel violated “settled science.” Please. The science of sex and gender is hardly settled; instead, it’s a topic of vigorous debate among biologists, philosophers, and many other scholars.

But the leaders of the anthropological discipline don’t want that debate, any more than DeSantis and his disciples do. Under the new law in Florida, you have to say that sex is a binary, and under the new dogma of anthropology, you have to say that it isn’t. And if you dissent from the received wisdom, you’ll be derided as a bigot. That’s why the anthropologists’ joint statement was headlined, “No Place for Transphobia in Anthropology.” We — always “we” — know that sex is mutable. Suggesting otherwise will “do harm to vulnerable members of our community,” especially those with LGBTQ identities.

That, too, echoes the wave of Republican-sponsored censorship sweeping our statehouses. Several legislatures have prohibited instruction that says a person should feel “discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress on account of the individual’s race or sex.” Teachers are reportedly steering clear of difficult subjects like slavery and Native American genocide, lest anyone (read: white people) feels bad.

The creation of knowledge requires us to confront ideas and theories that are strange, discomfiting, or offensive to us.

That’s the cry of the censor, in all times and places: words hurt, so we need to blot them out. But you can’t have a university — or a democracy — on that basis. The creation of knowledge requires us to confront ideas and theories that are strange, discomfiting, or offensive to us. And so does the process of democratic self-government. Once you decide that “harmful” speech is off the table, we can’t talk at all.

Let’s be clear: There’s a big difference between a state legislature prohibiting certain ideas and a professional association rejecting a panel about them. But they have the same goal: to restrict what we can say and learn.

I just don’t see how professors can resist the GOP censorship machine if we are imitating it at the same time. Most of our major scholarly societies have condemned the Ed Scare laws for trampling upon our most fundamental values: dialogue, discussion, and free expression. But if we are violating those values in our own institutions, nobody will listen to us. And I don’t know why they should.