Dr. Elizabeth Weiss has always loved anatomy. “When I was a child, I put model eyes together and had that ‘invisible’ woman where you have all the body parts and have to put them together and you could see them all inside. Those were my toys,” Weiss recalled.

For a time, she considered becoming a pathologist (someone who does autopsies), until she discovered physical anthropology. Weiss now specializes in studying Native American prehistoric skeletal remains, but she has studied remains from Africa dating as far back as 2 million years ago.

“One of the first things you do as a physical anthropologist when you’re looking at skeletal remains is you try to determine the individual’s sex and age. And I say sex and age, because it’s in that sequence,” Weiss told IW Features. If researchers don’t follow protocol correctly, they will reach false conclusions, she added. 

It only took a few minutes of speaking with Dr. Weiss to realize she always puts the integrity of the field first. But this commitment to research quality has put a target on her back, especially among the growing woke contingency in anthropology. 

In October 2023, for example, Dr. Weiss was scheduled to speak on a panel alongside four other women at the American Anthropological Association’s annual meeting. The panel was set to discuss why biological sex remains an irreplaceably relevant research category in anthropology.

Following a deluge of protests from leftist activists, the association shut down the panel and wrote a statement saying there was “no place for transphobia in anthropology.” Per Dr. Weiss, radicals called her a eugenicist.  

“If people disagreed with the panel, I would have been more than happy to talk with them,” Weiss said. “But with cancel culture, there is no room for debate. They won’t tolerate people who disagree with them.”

Sadly, this incident was just the latest in a litany of nonsense that Dr. Weiss had endured.

In 2020, Weiss co-authored a book on her longstanding concerns with the practice of reburying bones after studying them. When the book came out, woke ideologues in the field called her a racist. 

Meanwhile, Dr. Weiss observed several incidents of actual racism and sexism brought on by colleagues in the field, including calls to not hire Hispanics at Native American study centers because they may be confused with Native Americans.

Weiss recalled another instance in which one of her colleagues emailed graduate students to encourage them to use a database that only has black authors, and to cite those authors instead of other authors in the name of “citational justice.” 

“I sent a response saying, although this may be very well-intentioned, I encourage everyone to cite the best work, regardless of the author’s skin color,” Weiss said. 

Again, she was smeared as a racist. 

In another instance, her former employer, San Jose State University, where Weiss had curated the human remains collection for 17 years, enacted an appalling menstrual taboo into its anthropology protocols that stated, “menstruating personnel will not be permitted to handle ancestors.” Why? Because the university was concerned with pushback from indigenous and Native American communities about ancient taboos surrounding menstruating women. 

“Some tribes have menstrual taboos related to beliefs that menstruating women are dirty and can make others, especially men, sick,” Weiss told IW Features. “Some modern Native American activists now claim that this isn’t the reason for the taboos, but rather that menstruating women are so magically powerful that they need to be apart from others. No actual ethnography has shown this to be truly the tribes’ beliefs.”

Dr. Weiss threatened a Title IX lawsuit and the sexist protocol was removed. “It’s just absurd that that even became an issue,” Weiss said. “It’s sex discrimination, and it’s coming from the progressive Left.”

Dr. Weiss is now a faculty fellow at Heterodox Academy and a National Association of Scholars board member in New York City, where she continues to research and speak out to keep the field of anthropology alive. 

Make no bones about it, she is standing her ground. 

For those interested in supporting Dr. Weiss, her latest book is available now: On the Warpath: My Battles With Indians, Pretendians, and Woke Warriors