On TDOV, a historian’s perspective on the transphobic nonsense some people spout about bones, burials and gender.
We have been finding burials of gender divergent folk and folk outside the binary since we started any form of organised study of archaeology. The 18th and 19th century European and European-derived archaeologists who didn’t recognise that were the ignorant ones, assuming their definitions of gender were “universal”. Including within the binary; their definitions were deeply reductionist and deeply inaccurate, failing to recognise that even societies they actively claimed some form of cultural descent from had very different definitions of what a “man” or “woman” was from theirs.
Notably, they came from a *very* colonialist society that was doing its best to destroy living cultures with fuller definitions of gender than it allowed. We are still living in a framework of repairing the damage they did in how we understand past cultures, and modern media is frequently very unhelpful on how it reports on discoveries and interpretations, erasing or flattening the huge element of interpretation and uncertainty involved even with the exciting level of data that new techniques can give us on any given site.
Anyone who takes even a cursory look into bioarchaeology will find out that “sexing” bones - which every modern archaeologist knows is at best one element in gendering the person they belonged to - is *incredibly* fucking difficult. A lot of the techniques for it involve measuring proportions of anatomical features that may well not be present - it’s rare for a specimen to be intact. And, frankly - humans are a spectrum in every physical feature. Height, weight, bone density, width of shoulders and pelvis etc etc. Cheaper and more widespread DNA testing is slowly making more people realise that chromosomes aren’t the final word they were told in first year high school biology either. For the remains of people from some cultures, we have some written history to cross-reference archaeology with about the meanings of artefacts. In others, we don’t - and even when we do, half the time what we have is the interpretation of two lines from some dude from a different culture altogether, or from an aside in a religious tract, or a recipe book.
Almost every older specimen we have has been reinterpreted multiple times. Probably the oldest remains as yet found in the UK, from circa 31,000 BCE based on current best estimates, were known as “the Red Lady of Paviland” because they were dyed red with ochre, and the person who found them in 1832 decided from that fact and fact that there was jewellery found with them that they belonged to a female Roman-era sex worker. From around 200 years more work, and considerably more data, we now interpret them as having belonged to a male hunter-gatherer, likely from a nomadic or semi-nomadic people who frequently lived much closer to the coast than the place in Wales where the remains were found. We do not have the information about this person’s culture, how their culture viewed gender, the pronouns their language used and if they related to gender; this was minimum 20,000 years before and on the other side of the world from the oldest writing we have as yet found. We are putting data together and interpreting as best we can, with the awareness that there could be a discovery tomorrow that could utterly change that.
I’m sorry if this seems an obscure topic to address for TDOV, but I do know how this idea of “the bones don’t lie” has got into plenty of folks’ heads when they are having a bad time. So I wanted to address the fact that not only is it bawbins, the entire series of assumptions it posits is bawbins of the type that TERFs and transphobes, like racists, misogynists, and fascists in general, like to spew out there - that gender, or indeed race, is biological, fixed, and essential, that their understandings of it are “fact-based”, and that science is a series of fixed, immutable facts that are just lying there like stones on a beach.
And all of that is complete and utter bawbins.
Gender, and race, like all human frameworks of knowledge and understanding, are constructs - tools we use to understand a ridiculously complex and difficult world. They may *reference* objective facts, but are not in *themselves* facts. None of which means they aren’t incredibly meaningful or don’t have massive impacts on our experiences as humans. But they are mutable, ever-evolving, and incredibly open to constant interpretation and re-definition, and while your individual experience of them will be mediated by your culture, it’s also unique to you too.
No one else’s definition of your gender can *ever* be more accurate than yours. Because it is *yours*.
Happy Trans Day of Visibility, everyone 🏳️⚧️💛🤍🖤💜🩷🤍💙
