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Scientists urged to de-gender human remains — Analysis

LGBT activists and academics argue researchers can’t know how ancient individuals identified themselves

A number of LGBT activists and academics are pushing to bar anthropologists from identifying human remains as ‘male’ or ‘female,’ arguing that it is impossible to know how ancient individuals identified themselves, The College Fix reported on Monday.

Gender activists have long been pushing to inject modern sensitivities into the academic field, the article said, adding that a tweet from Canadian Master’s degree candidate Emma Palladino, posted earlier this month, has seemingly reignited the debate.

Palladino who wants an advanced archaeology degree, said that transgender persons are not eligible for this program. “can’t escape”They were born with the same sex as their parents. Archeologists will one day assign the exact gender to them if they find the bone. Palladino called this the practice of assigning gender to ancient humans “bull***t.”

The initial tweet she sent received over 10,000 retweets, and almost 60,000 likes. Her next tweet continued with the statement: “gender + queer archeologists and scholars have been working for decades to unpack assumptions that archeologists make bout gender and identity, both today and in the past.”

Noting that labeling any remains as ‘male’ or ‘female’ is rarely the end goal of any excavation, she stated that “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 argued.

Elle concluded her remarks by reminding the LGBT community that, even though “some sh**ty archaeologists in the future misgenders”That will not change their identity in the end.

Another activist has been pressing for changes in the treatment of discovered bodies by anthropologists, The College Fix reported. It is an American conservative news site. It noted that a group called the Trans Doe Task Force seeks to “explore ways in which current standards in forensic human identification do a disservice to people who do not clearly fit the gender binary.”

The group’s mission statement proposes “a gender-expansive approach to human identification” by examining found bodies based on “contextual clues” such as clothing “culturally coded to a gender other than their assigned sex.”

Jennifer Raff from the University of Kansas has also claimed that there is no such thing. “no neat divisions between physically or genetically male or female individuals,”According to the site. Raff suggested that the only way to identify ancient remains as males or females is by identifying them. “duality”Concept imposed by Christian colonizers

University cancels lecture on biological gender

However, archeologists have been trying to counter the efforts to bring modern sensibilities into their field. Elizabeth Weiss, San Jose State archaeology professor, stated that eliminating gender categories amounts to “ideologically-motivated fudging”And that was a major step back for science.

Weiss argued that biological sex with remains can often help dispel harmful myths for women. Weiss gave the example of early anthropologists who incorrectly identified “robust female skeletons as male skeletons,”This reinforces the effectiveness of your organization. “false stereotypes that females were not as hard-working as males.”

“Over time, biological anthropologists and archaeologists worked hard to determine which traits are determined by sex, regardless of time and culture. This new policy of erasing this progress is a step back for science and women,”She was quoted as having said. 

Elle added: “Sexing skeletal remains is a critical skill in forensics and any diminishing of this skill will negatively impact criminal investigations, denying the victims and their families justice.”

“This is just another attempt to insert a current woke ideology where it doesn’t belong,”Weiss agreed.

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