By SJ Dillon

This essay is a call to action by an AAA member, and is not an official statement from the PoLAR editorial collective.

You may have heard about the recent American Anthropological Association Business Meeting at the 2023 conference in Toronto. A quorum of membership was not reached for the purposes of passing resolutions, so all decisions made that day moved forward only as advice to the AAA Executive Board. We voted for a resolution about Palestine, standing against the violence in Gaza and the West Bank in all its multiplicities of horror and ongoing ethnic cleansing. I was so proud, like many others, to be in a professional organization that stands against genocide so strongly and repeatedly.

After passing that resolution, AnthroBoycott organizers raised another resolution, this one voting to cancel the 2024 planned conference meeting in Tampa Bay, Florida and move it to another location. In the United States, Florida is the site of the greatest fluorescence of anti-trans legislation and rhetoric measured by force and has become emblematic of a future many people across the country fear. This is all part of the state’s increasingly fascist governance: Florida has passed bills censoring how history can be taught in schools and at universities and removed books from school libraries (sanitizing the cruelty of both anti-Black chattel slavey and Indigenous genocide in American history, as well as removing any material that speaks about LGBT+ lives and history). The state also has increased populist censorship of educational materials: the state itself need not be a watchdog if exceptional citizens[1] can sanitize institutions themselves. In addition, the American Association of University Professors and the American Historical Association have protested the state’s suppression of academic freedom, and the American Association of Biological Anthropologists has condemned all similar legislative attacks. In Florida, it is increasingly difficult for topics that are considered quite basic for most anthropologists to be taught in the classroom.

Even worse, trans people throughout the state have had to flee, especially trans parents or parents to trans children, as being transgender is considered a form of child abuse, whether parent or child. Minors can no longer access gender affirming care, and there is increasing appetite to ban gender affirming care for all adults as well. Furthermore, “drag bans,” which, through loose language and vague definitions of drag, have made it technically illegal to be trans on the street, as within the legal language, trans people are apprehended as “cross-dressing.” The situation is stark, and the 2024 Florida legislative session is gearing up to pass more anti-transgender legislation of this type, as transgender folks are and increasingly become the special object of diminishing rights.

Trans people are, unfortunately, not the only community impacted by the rising tide of oppressive Florida legislation (and of course trans people are members of all of these communities). Florida has passed legislation to curb the types of choices pregnant people can make about their bodies with a six-week abortion ban, and has even limited access to birth control. The state has restricted voting rights, a move that primarily targets Black communities in the state, and legislative restrictions on the movement and employment of un(der)documented immigrants has made more precarious the lives of some of the most marginalized members of Floridian communities. This rising fascist sentiment made legal and normative by its being pursued through the official legislative body of the state has given license to white supremacists: events such as the devastating murders of Angela Michelle Carr, A.J. Laguerre, and Jerrald Gallion in Jacksonville on August 26, 2023, become more possible and more common in a political milieu that centers white supremacist concerns. For all these reasons and more, the NAACP has issued a travel advisory for Florida arguing that the state “has engaged in an all-out attack on Black Americans, accurate Black history, voting rights, members of the LGBTQ+ community, immigrants, women’s reproductive rights, and free speech.” These groups, while most vulnerable to fascist agendas, will not be the last should these politics continue to advance in Florida. In addition to the NAACP, Equality Florida, Human Rights Campaign, Florida Immigrant Coalition, League of United Latin American Citizens, and Florida National Organization for Women have also issued travel warnings. AAA members who are part of these communities and groups will be endangered, their safety potentially threatened, by going to Tampa Bay. Furthermore, members of these groups living in Florida, while most vulnerable to fascist agendas, will not be the last to be endangered should these politics continue to advance in Florida and elsewhere.

In response to this resolution, the AAA Executive Board was quite defensive, and at times condescending. They primarily communicated that this meeting needed to happen in Florida.[2] They argued that this conference would be different: they would shake things up, with events like book ban parties. We were told that holding the conference in Florida was actually an act of solidarity for teachers and librarians in that state, which that community had asked for. We were also informed that moving the conference was financially unfeasible, and in truth this seemed to be the most important point as far as the Executive Board was concerned.

One dear individual stood and pointed out that in the past, a AAA conference had been moved in far less time before the then-start of the conference. The AAA annual meeting relocated away from San Francisco about a decade ago, in order not to cross the picket line of striking hotel workers in the city. With a full year before the 2024 conference, we have even more time to plan. The board informed us that the San Francisco case was entirely different. Marginalized communities threatened by the Florida government are not quite as compelling as strikers, I suppose. The Board also argued that the meeting was held in New Orleans after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, and thus, hosting the conference in Florida would be the same. I’m not sure how to theorize marginalized people’s kinship with hurricanes. The Board also claimed that moving the conference away from San Francisco was a financially ruinous decision still felt in AAA coffers; that decision then precludes activism now, because otherwise the AAA might not have a future.

For the Board, money was what it all seemed to come down to. AAA have already spent a million dollars to go to Tampa Bay as a down payment: if we move the meeting location, we break our contract and lose more money, and still have more we to spend on the actual conference we then hold. We were told that the future of the AAA meetings could be at stake at this level of financial loss. And this idea left me wondering. Am I not the future of the AAA? Are the people impacted by Florida legislation not the future of the AAA? Does our anthropological future not include marginalized communities in the South?

People in the audience posed these questions and stood against these claims repeatedly, refusing such logics and pointing out the defensiveness, the condescension, the holes in the Board’s logic. We all made quite a ruckus together. I carry that ruckus to you now, whether you came to the Business Meeting or had not even heard about the AAA Business Meeting.

I am a white trans person from the South, born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia. I am not from Florida, but part of my research has required I monitor every single day of the 2022 and 2023 legislative sessions of the Georgia General Assembly, specifically analyzing anti-trans legislation and debates in that space. I will watch the 2024 legislative session as well. All this is to say, I am intimately familiar with anti-trans politics in the state just north of Florida, and I am immersed in and understand the logics at play in my state. Furthermore, I have interviewed 70 trans people as part of my dissertation work, including refugees fleeing Florida precisely because of anti-trans legislation. That is to say, I see the fear in my community and throughout the South in this escalating movement towards fascism.  This positionality offers me a unique perspective on the question of whether the AAA annual meeting should be held in Florida in 2024, and if it must be held there, what we can do to support communities in Florida as well as members attending the AAA meeting in 2024—and mitigate the risks our members face.

The reason we have not seen anti-trans legislation throughout the rest of the South to the same degree as in Florida is entirely monetary. For example: one of the single most important industries in Georgia is tourism, and the majority of tourism income comes to the state’s economy in the form of gigantic conferences (of the like of the AAA meeting), as well as sports events. Georgia legislators talk regularly about needing to pass or not pass certain pieces of legislation in order to protect that industry: they think about conferences like ours often. They clearly fear the collapse of conference attendance in Atlanta; a year or two of boycott would hamstring the state budget and threaten Georgia politicians’ personal aspirations. I know politicians throughout the South follow this same line of thinking: how far can they go without losing the almighty dollar? How many trans youth, Black voters, and un(der)documented jobs can be sacrificed to capture the conservative vote and support ALEC’s[3] and the ADF’s[4] national agenda? How do they balance these two competing desires?

If we go to Florida, we communicate to politicians throughout the South that they don’t need to worry. Conferences, even progressive ones like the AAA’s, don’t mind the rise of fascism, and passing similarly transphobic, racist- anti-immigrant, and sexist legislation will have no effect whatsoever on where we choose to put our money. We tell politicians like the ones in Georgia and Florida: Carry on.

The money that we are talking about is not insignificant: we, the membership of the AAA’s, will personally and directly pump millions of dollars directly into Florida government coffers if we hold our conference in Tampa Bay. I hear from the Executive Board, that we will do this conference differently and stand in solidarity with librarians and teachers. We could flood the state (well, Tampa Bay’s fanciest conference center) with anthropologists. And I assure you, none of that matters, because if we give the state government several millions of dollars, whatever we say next simply holds no resonance. The truth is that they can still make money; what do they care for our rhetorical political commitments? We can have our intellectual claims, and they can have our material support.

I also push back against the binary logic present within the AAA Business Meeting, that giving Florida millions in our funding is the best way we can be in solidarity with our colleagues in the state. I want so desperately to be in solidarity with people impacted in Florida by censorship bills. We’ve seen similar legislation in Georgia, and throughout the South. Teachers and librarians are on the front line, and that’s a lonely and scary place to be. We need to stand with them and stand against this kind of state-sponsored censorship in a material way. I simply do not believe hosting a conference is the best way to do that. I believe this solidarity can arise through greater conversation, through creativity, and an imagination that goes beyond such a convenient notion of standing alongside.

Furthermore, I reject the idea that solidarity against censorship means that Black people, un(der)documented people, trans people, people who are or will be pregnant, and any person of color  “can choose not to come.” Of course, the Board told us that there would be an online option offered to us, as though this is an adequate replacement, when we all know Zoom conferences are not as useful for networking, not as intellectually stimulating, and not as emotionally connecting. Why would an acceptable solution be that our most marginalized members have to simply lose out, especially when this necessarily disproportionately impacts trans people of color who are already the most marginalized in academics in terms of funding, publishing, and hiring practices? Transphobic policies are always racist: the people most at risk if they came to Florida are the same ones most negatively impacted by any solution that does not center the conference leaving Florida.

Many students, such as myself, rely on these conferences to network, improve our CV, find out about new and interesting opportunities, and socialize into anthropological professionalism. Covid-19 has impacted many graduate students by preventing those possibilities in the past few years, and anthropology graduate students throughout the United States and abroad must attend conferences if we want to find academic employment. Likewise, a boycott, while a popular idea, punishes those graduate students. The people we most need to network with are the ones who would refuse to come. Boycotting our own conference, in effect, doubly punishes minority anthropology graduate students, especially those not from top-10 anthropology programs. Surely our solidarity can go beyond that.

This decision matters materially: we talk often about how academics don’t do enough collectively on real world issues, and claim that all anthropologists do at these conferences is talk to each other. Know that moving this conference is something material that we can do, not just in Florida, but in Georgia, in Tennessee, in South Carolina, in Alabama, in all of the American South. The reason North Carolina rolled back their anti-trans bathroom bill just a few years ago is because of revenue loss, boycotts, and a powerful, material refusal to engage with their bigotry.[5] If we communicate to the American South we won’t spend our AAA money where they imperil lives—and we will not put our own membership at risk of the same—we stand on our values everywhere in the United States. It will not stop this tide single handedly, but it will matter and it is within our power.

In truth, the stakes are even higher than all this. I want to tell you about Orange, who fled Florida.

He knew he wanted to medically transition, and he knew that as a Black trans person in Florida, he simply wasn’t safe. I want to show you their longing to go home, that their soul will never be at ease until he is back in their Florida land.

I want to tell you about Echo, a trans parent of two trans kids, who drove out of Florida with barely more than the clothes on their back. I want to show you all the lunches and dinners and breakfasts they’ve skipped, to keep their kids fed.

I want to show you the pockmarked scars all over my own body, hatred I carved into my flesh because I didn’t have the words and the tools to know what was so wrong with me, to know nothing was ever wrong with me.

I want to show you the weight of a child-sized coffin.

Despite it all, the likelihood of the next AAA Conference being held in Tampa Bay is high. That does not mean our activism and protest of the decision should end. In fact, it becomes more urgent that those of us who oppose the decision take action to mitigate its multiple negative effects and serious risks. Thus, I have some ideas of how we can do this conference differently, beyond just shaking it up, but rather reimagining the conference, that Dr. Agustín Fuentes and Dr. Jennifer Curtis brainstormed with me. Perhaps, if we all scheme together we can come up with ideas that are exciting and could allow us to stand together in solidarity to make Florida politicians uncomfortable—and keep one another safe. This would not address the utter ethical and political failure it is to hold the conference in Tampa Bay (a failure that is not the fault of the current Executive Board at all), but could mitigate some of the harm, or at least materially support communities being impacted by that legislation. To have that kind of solidarity, though, we need to confront how serious the choice to hold the conference in that space is: only by understanding how problematic holding a conference in Florida is at this time, a decision that, although made years ago, was made while Florida was already displaying legislative behaviors on this violent continuum. Only by understanding how the AAA got to this point can we learn to do a conference differently, and we cannot stop talking about the profound error it would be to host the conference in Florida, regardless of the financial requirements of our current situation.

Community Partnership: First and foremost, we need to partner with community in Tampa Bay, in Florida, and in the South. If we are going to give Florida millions of dollars as a professional organization, we need to give and spend money with communities being impacted by Florida policies. This means material support and payment, not just tokenism. Tampa Bay has famously diverse activist and artistic community and the AAA meeting should center these people, un(der)documented activists, Latine/Latinx researchers, Black theorists, Indigenous students, trans artists, and immigrant scholars from Tampa Bay itself. By centering especially Black, Indigenous, Latine/Latinx, disabled, immigrant, un(der)documented, queer, trans and other marginalized folks, who are disproportionately targeted by increasingly fascist legislation, we materially engage with individuals, institutions, and communities beyond just the Florida government.

Working Group: The AAA contains some of the smartest people I have ever heard of or met: we should bring interested minds, graduate students, early career anthropologists, and tenured professors together to strategize and plan around the Tampa Bay conference. Even in the Business Meeting, people were planning and brainstorming and sparking off each other. Rather than resisting that urge towards thinking sideways, the AAA should encourage it. Will all the ideas be feasible? Maybe not, but we may think of things that could not have been imagined otherwise.

Safety: Part of the concern many marginalized anthropologists have about going to Tampa Bay is the reality of being in Florida streets as a person being targeted by the government’s explicit fascism. If the AAA paid for impacted graduate students and early career scholars to be housed in the conference hotel (which is often out of budget for many young scholars) and for their food (so they do not have to go out to get it), it would decrease how much folks have to be physically put at risk. This should absolutely center people of color, un(der)documented people, trans folks of color, and transfeminine people in particular, who are most at risk for this type of targeted violence, a risk that people throughout Florida face daily. If funds are not available, we may need to organize a buddy/escort collective of AAA members to provide safety as vulnerable members navigate the city, with training in emergency response, documentation skills (video/audio recording), and de-escalation. Furthermore, the AAA needs a safety plan for marginalized members who do want to come, and staff dedicated to assisting them in emergencies. We also need to provide a medical hotline and contingency plans to assist pregnant people who may experience medical emergencies in a state where they cannot receive appropriate clinical care. All of the groups being targeted by the Florida fascist agenda would be in danger, and like all organizers of conferences, the AAA needs a plan to protect its membership, especially those most vulnerable.

Virtual Spaces: Many people, perhaps most people, will not want to come to Tampa Bay, particularly if they are at risk. Online spaces are being offered as an alternative, but as I argue, we all know virtual spaces are not the same. So rather than accepting that, how can we design virtual spaces to be radically connective? We, as a community, have got a year to think about this, and it will be a critical piece to making sure students who were disproportionately impacted by Covid-19 still get a chance at professional success.

Hotel Boycott: Dr. Fuentes pointed out that if 50 percent of hotel income is made through the food and drink sold within the hotel, perhaps one way we can decrease the AAA footprint in the Florida industry is by boycotting those things from the official hotel. This should mean that the AAA put together resources about alternative places in Tampa Bay that people can go to, that are close enough to actually be accessible. We can work with our colleagues in Tampa Bay on this list of resources, centering Latine, Black, immigrant, people of color, and queer owned places and spaces.

Praxis: The AAA Conference 2024 theme is praxis, and the praxis of solidarity is central to the issues at play here, for many communities in Florida and throughout the South being impacted or threatened by state legislatures. What is a praxis of solidarity? What is a praxis of care? The AAA can answer these questions through its conference, perhaps.

Conference Fellows: Graduate students, who are some of the most marginalized members of the AAA community, should have input into this conference and future conferences too. Could the AAA establish conference fellows, a paid position for providing support around planning these conferences and framing how they work and who they center? The AAA could center anthropologists who tend to be most marginalized in the field, Black and Indigenous folks, people of color, trans folks, immigrants, un(der)documented people, queer people, disabled folks, etc. into a paid fellowship that would allow them to be involved with the internal mechanics of AAA business and conference management. Beyond organizing panels, this would allow more marginalized scholars to access training, professionalization, networking, and skill acquisition that can otherwise take years to develop and would give them real input into the conference itself. If these positions are paid, relying on student labor becomes less exploitative and something that can be put on a CV.

These are not the only ideas, or perhaps even the best ideas, that AAA members can come up with in thinking about a Tampa Bay conference. I want there to be a future of the AAA and I want there to be a future of communities like mine in the South, living safely and well. These two goals are not opposed, but if Tampa Bay is going to be the future AAA conference meeting location, then this conference must be radically different from every other conference the AAA has hosted.

SJ Dillon (they/them) is a PhD candidate in Emory University’s anthropology department. Their dissertation work investigates gender dysphoria and will provide an ethnographic account of a diverse group of trans* communities in contemporary Atlanta, Georgia, contextualized within state-level legal and national-level medical discourses. Their work seeks to shed light on the understandings of gender dysphoria that differ across spaces and racialized experiences of gender in the southern U.S.

Notes

[1] Grewal, Inderpal. 2017. Saving the Security State: Exceptional Citizens in Twenty-First-Century America. Duke: Duke University Press.

[2] In a later communication, they also stated that the NAACP lifted its “boycott” of Florida. An interesting claim, considering that the NAACP prominently states on its website that its travel advisory for Florida is still in effect. The only Florida boycott from the NAACP I found reference to was indeed lifted. It ended on May 13, 1993, after a nearly three-year boycott of Miami, in response to Miami politicians rebuking Nelson Mandela and refusing to honor him when he visited the city in 1990. I fail to see how the lifting of a boycott in 1993, a measure that was quite effective in its time, bears much relation to the AAA conference now.

[3] The American Legislative Exchange Council is a conservative think tank that writes most of the anti-transgender laws being passed currently in the United States (which is why most of them are nearly identical) and works with state legislators and private lobbyists to pass those laws.

[4] The Alliance Defending Freedom is another leader of the conservative movement promoting fascism in the United States.

[5]  Though anti-trans legislation has regained ground in the state due to the current climate, as anti-trans rhetoric is increasingly normalized.