Gender activists push to bar anthropologists from identifying human remains as ‘male’ or ‘female’
Argue scientists cannot know how an ancient individual identified themselves
https://www.thecollegefix.com/gende...-identifying-human-remains-as-male-or-female/
As soon as ancient human remains are excavated, archaeologists begin the work of determining a number of traits about the individual, including age, race and gender.
But a new school of thought within archaeology is pushing scientists to think twice about assigning gender to ancient human remains.
It is possible to determine whether a skeleton is from a biological male or female using objective observations based on the size and shape of the bones. Criminal forensic detectives, for example, do it frequently in their line of work.
But gender activists argue scientists cannot know how an ancient individual identified themselves.
“You might know the argument that the archaeologists who find your bones one day will assign you the same gender as you had at birth, so regardless of whether you transition, you can’t escape your assigned sex,”
tweeted Canadian Master’s degree candidate Emma Palladino last week.
Palladino, who is seeking an advanced degree in archaeology, called assigning gender to an ancient human “bullshit.”
“Labelling remains ‘male’ or ‘female’ is rarely the end goal of any excavation, anyway,” wrote Palladino. “The ‘bioarchaeology of the individual’ is what we aim for, factoring in absolutely everything we discover about a person into a nuanced and open-ended biography of their life.”
She is not alone. Gender activists have formed a group called the
Trans Doe Task Force to “explore ways in which current standards in forensic human identification do a disservice to people who do not clearly fit the gender binary.”
“We propose a gender-expansive approach to human identification by combing missing and unidentified databases looking for contextual clues such as decedents wearing clothing culturally coded to a gender other than their assigned sex,” the group’s mission statement reads.
“We maintain our own database of missing and unidentified people who we have determined may be Transgender or gender-variant, as most current database systems do not permit comparison of missing to unidentified across different binary sex categories,” the group writes.
This February, University of Kansas Associate Professor Jennifer Raff published “
Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas,” in which she argued that there are “no neat divisions between physically or genetically ‘male’ or ‘female’ individuals.”
Raff [...] suggested scientists cannot know the gender of a 9,000 year-old biologically Peruvian hunter because they don’t know whether the hunter identified as male or female – a “duality” concept she says was “imposed by Christian colonizers.”
[...]
Others have called for
changing primate names that were derived from white white men from the northern hemisphere. The activists argue that continuing to use the current names is “perpetuating colonialism and white supremacy.”
“This is just another attempt to insert a current woke ideology where it doesn’t belong,” Weiss said.