The AAA President Dismisses a Scientific Position Without Understanding It

Carolyn M. Rouse, president of the American Anthropological Association and a tenured professor at Princeton, was recently asked about one of the field's most contentious debates: whether biological sex is a useful analytical category. Her response exposed a striking gap between her certainty and her comprehension.

In an interview with The Chronicle of Higher Education, Rouse stated flatly: "The idea that there are two sexes is just factually incorrect." She dismissed scholars who defend binary sex classification as engaging in "nonsensical" speech unfit for academic conference panels. Yet when pressed for specifics about what her opponents actually mean, she admitted: "I still don't know what people mean" when they assert that sex is binary, or "why that matters to people so much."

This gap between dismissal and understanding matters because anthropology, as a discipline, is built on the capacity to reconstruct belief systems—even ones you reject. A belief in two sexes is among the most widespread in human history. That widespread adoption doesn't validate the belief, but it does make it odd for a field leader to characterize billions of humans across different times and places as holding something both "very strange" and incomprehensible.

Rouse's unfamiliarity with the actual arguments became evident when she attempted to refute them. She argued that because humans have chromosomal variations—XXY, XYY, XXX, and rarer combinations like XXYY—the category of binary sex collapses. But scholars defending binary sex typically don't rest their case on chromosomes alone. Many adopt what's known as the "gametic view," which centers on reproductive biology: human reproduction organizes around two types of sex cells and two corresponding reproductive roles. There is no third gamete type. This framework, proponents argue, applies across sexually reproducing animals and accounts for the full complexity of variation within each sex—including intersex conditions, trans identities, and hormonal diversity.

When a journalist pointed out that a 2022 survey of forensic anthropologists found 42.4 percent endorsed the binary sex position, Rouse dismissed the finding outright. "I don't believe in opinion research," she said, then attacked the respondents' credentials, claiming many were just coroners without advanced training. The data contradicted her: 57.9 percent held doctorates, another 25.7 percent held master's degrees, and only 20.5 percent worked in coroner's offices. Most held advanced degrees in forensic or biological anthropology.

Instead of engaging with why fellow scholars value this framework, Rouse treated their position as unworthy of serious debate. She suggested that academic conferences were right to cancel panels defending binary sex, despite the survey evidence that a substantial portion of her own field's practitioners hold that view.

This stance inverts the anthropological mission. If the discipline aims to understand humans in their full diversity—including their belief systems—what kind of scholar declares ignorance of a widespread viewpoint while simultaneously insisting it is both wrong and beneath discussion? The irony is that Rouse has the scholarly tools to understand these arguments. She has chosen not to deploy them.