Join us for Heterodox Academy’s Colloquium Series, a virtual seminar series designed to highlight the scholarship and thought leadership emerging from our community.

This colloquium will feature Elizabeth Weiss, professor emerita at San José State University, on the controversy over discussing sex and gender in anthropology.

Why Sex has Become a Taboo Topic in Anthropology

Dr. Elizabeth Weiss will talk about how and why anthropologists use skeletal remains to distinguish between males and females. She will discuss how sex identification has become a taboo topic, which resulted in a cancellation at the American Anthropological Association. The cancellation was highlighted in the "Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences" as evidence of anthropology's troubled history with ideological capture and cancel culture. Dr. Weiss will suggest solutions to ways in which anthropologists who disagree with each other could discuss sex and gender in a productive manner.

This colloquium, taking place on Wednesday, December 2, 2026, from 3:00 to 4:00 PM EST, will give you the chance to hear directly from Dr. Weiss and put your own questions to her. HxA members can register to attend and ask questions during the live Q&A. 

Register today to join the conversation.

About the speaker

Elizabeth Weiss completed a B.A. in anthropology from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1996 and an M.A. in anthropology from California State University, Sacramento in 1998. From 1995 to 1996, she lived in Egypt. She spent two months in 1996 in Kenya through Harvard University’s Koobi Fora Field School. In 2001, she received her Ph.D. from the University of Arkansas in Environmental Dynamics (an interdisciplinary program involving anthropology and the geosciences). From 2002 to 2004, she was a post-doctoral research associate at the Canadian Museum of Civilization. In 2004, she started at San José State University. From 2023 to 2024, she held a one-year faculty fellowship position at the Center for Academic Pluralism through Heterodox Academy. She is now a professor emerita. She is also a board member of the National Association of Scholars and a Heterodox Academy senior fellow. She is the author, with James W. Springer, of Repatriation and Erasing the Past (University Press of Florida, 2020), which takes a critical look at repatriation laws and the ideology behind these laws. Her other books include Reading the Bones: Activity, Biology, and Culture (University Press of Florida, 2017) and Paleopathology in Perspective: Bone Health and Disease through Time (Rowman and Littlefield, 2014). Her most recent book, published in 2024, is On the Warpath: My Battles with Indians, Pretendians, and Woke Warriors.