To Think That Archaeology Proves That Men Cannot Be Women

Yes it is, but gender roles get to the heart of what does it mean in human society to be a man or be a woman?

The impact our sex does or does not have on the gender roles assigned or open to us varies through time, location and culture.

So it’s only the tiniest scratch on the surface to say XX skeleton = female and XY skeleton = male. It doesn’t tell us what it then meant in that society to live as a woman, a man or any third option and sometimes as a pp pointed there were several third gender options.

For a woman doing a “man’s job” vs living as a man, we tend to rely on the contemporaneous accounts of the people living in that society then as to what the meaning behind the outward gender nonconformance meant.

I find your post very interesting.
Please correct me if I'm wrong. However, isn't the gender roles a slightly different point?
IMO the discovery that 20% of Viking warriors were women isn't so surprising and points to the fact that we tend to make things black and white in interpreting the past.
In my entirely amateur dabblings in much more recent history I have regularly come across women following supposedly male occupations, normally when a husband/father died.
A woman doing a 'man's job' is a little different from a man living as a woman or vice versa.
Of course, there have also been examples in modern history of woman living as men eg as soldiers.

Yes well, I trust the PhD level archaeologists and osteologists that have examined these finds to be able to tell the difference between a woman that died in battle as evidenced by perimortem bone trauma then buried with her weapons vs a woman or child buried in a settlement graveyard with a ceremonial dress sword.

Humans are Mammals. Mammals can't change Sex.

Is it time to repost the Human Beings Aren't Clownfish" video? 🙄

Go away and shut up you mean? We've had several years of threats made against us, countless battles, violence and lies, damn right we're going to celebrate the moment that sense finally prevailed.

A woman buried with weapons was not necessarily a warrior. She could have belonged to a warrior caste or free class, with the weapons denoting status rather than indicating that she actually took part in warfare.

In pagan Anglo-Saxon graves children, even young ones, are sometimes found with adult sized weapons. They could hardly have used them, so the weapons most likely denote membership of the free class

Yeah we are not the ones imposing our own beliefs on all of past human history!

That is absolutely not at all what I was doing. Historical, written documents from past civilisations, as well as eyewitness interactions with living, non-Western cultures (i.e. anthropology and archaeology) demonstrate that gender identity is anything but a modern, Western cultural construct.

No, gender identity is really not a modern construct. Archaeology spans from modern to medieval to ancient to prehistoric. For all periods and most cultures/civilisations where we have contemporaneous written records (modern, medieval and ancient) we DO find gender identities albeit often called by another name than “gender identity” which do not always match the biological sex. Different cultures and civilisations had different third gender concepts and values but they did in fact exist before modern times.

individuals have had gender identities that do not always conform to their biological sex

That's a modern cultural construct. I'm surprised that a trained archaeologist is making the basic mistake of using their own culture's beliefs and values to interpret past societies.

Came on to say what @Archymum and @SummerFeverVenice said. Skeletons are not always crystal clear because humans are not actually that dimorphic, and there's a good deal of interesting gender stuff in the archaeological record (as well as the historical record).

The strict gender binary is culturally, geographically and chronologically specific.

Your second statement is incorrect. Some DSDs arise precisely because an individual's chromosomes do not fit the typical XX or XY binary.

Some living creatures do change sex.

https://www.bbcearth.com/news/fish-are-the-sex-switching-masters-of-the-animal-kingdom

You can’t say that people had gender identities that didn’t align with their sex unless you accept the concept of a gender identity ffs.

i personally might say you can’t tell if people wee happily conforming to the norms of their society based on sex. And that clearly depends on the local norms.

its clear that that those norms are not always the same as we have today

i recall one isolated tribe with quite clear roles - men hunted , women did babies and gathering. But unlike our society, women were seen as key to the survival and were treated as full equals in all decision makings. The gender roles were biology related but a patriarchal society had not formed as a result. I could imagine that would be quite different to live in.

But where there are historical records..the people talking about themselves and their society we do find third genders (and more)

...... and yet there are still only two sexes.

That's nonsense, because people with DSDs are either male or female. Even skeletons from those people who had DSDs from millions of years ago would only show either a male person or a female person.
There isn't a third sex.

And only 0.018% of the population have DSDs anyway.

Very true, we can discern third gender from historical records, but when it comes to societies with no written record we really have no idea how a woman in a male dominated role or vice versa was viewed. Certainly can’t extrapolate gender identity from any archaeological evidence alone.

But where there are historical records..the people talking about themselves and their society we do find third genders (and more)

Yes exactly! I just posted about how they’ve been going back and re-sexing old digs

I'm not weighing in on whether gender identity is bollocks. I am trying to answer the question posed by the original post, as an actual trained archaeologist and anthropologist. The archaeological record, and anthropology as well, clearly demonstrates that in societies around the globe, and for tens of thousands of years, individuals have had gender identities that do not always conform to their biological sex. It's nothing new, and in most of these non-western and prehistoric societies, these individuals were accepted, and even celebrated. A few examples: Quariwarmi (Incan culture), Yuta shamans of Japan, there are 5 recognised genders within the Bugi culture of Indonesia, Anarya (ancient Scythian clergy).

What sex a skeleton is doesn’t really tell us about gender roles and gender nonconformance. Since DNA testing for sex was folded in and already excavated remains began to be tested en masse, what we have found is way more evidence of women living as men and vice versa through history. In many graves, the grave goods were used to sex a skeleton as much as morphology so if you found a burial with a mirror, jewellery worn by women, and household items like a yarn spinning distaff associated with women the skeleton would be sexed as a woman. Same if you found the grave of a warrior, sword, shield, perhaps buried with a chariot and four sacrificed horses, almost always sexed as male.

DNA has shockingly found many of these were the opposite sex expected by historical gender roles. So we know now that around 20% of Viking warriors for example, were women. Whereas before DNA the Viking “shield maiden” was accounted a myth and it was thought perhaps only the elite ruling women sometimes dressed up as warriors to give stirring speeches to their 100% male army…but didn’t really fight nor command units of fighters.

The same sort of realisation with many graves where the person was buried as a woman but most definitely was a male.

So skeleton male or female tells us nothing about how strict the gender role were enforced on the basis of sex or how many of each lived as the opposite sex, or even if it was viewed as that back then.

Jesus Christ we're going back to the 6th century now to try and prove a point.

You've got your court judgement, you've 'won' is that not enough? Do we need this continuous stream of posts?

Same re: training. I'm old enough to remember the time before everything was just chucked in a laboratory machine! I was mostly just responding to the question about intersex skeletons. I think from an archaeological perspective and strictly referring to the actual morphology of the bones, one could make a reasonable argument that a large proportion of the skeletons that have been uncovered from prehistoric archaeological sites and were given a sex ID before about 10 years ago were not securely identifiable as either clearly male or female.

Gender identity is made up bollocks. A female shaman was not "non binary" FFS. If that society decided it was a male role and female did it, that does not make her a man, or non binary.

But sex in living creatures has been around for over a billion years, it's not going to stop now!