Warrior buried in women's clothes, DMA test

Thanks for the link to the actual paper, which is a lot better.

Good post Clumping.

Could be interesting if we can try to get past our preconceptions and current ways thinking about things… to work out what we can actually deduce from the evidence about how this person who may have had an obvious difference of sexual development was integrated within that specific society. It didn't seem to have a lot of detail about exactly what the person was buried with and how they know what the connotations of those items were in that society. I think it's a problem to use retroactive labels like androgynous and non-binary that have culture-specific meanings for us; it would be better to be more specific and name biological conditions plus the details of the body and the burial and then clearly state what's extrapolation or surmise.

I mean, even assuming it is a bloke buried in women's clothes - why are they assuming that was his choice and not (say) some kind of weird insult or act of vengeance?

And yes of course it's fair to say that throughout history people will have struggled with "gender roles". We KNOW they did. That's why society has to be so rigidly prescriptive about gender rules over and over after all - if they were innate, like breathing and eating, there'd be no need to mention rules or enforce them.

But that doesn't mean that people from millennia ago thought of themselves as "non binary".

Barring the unnecessary stuff about self identifying, that’s an interesting snippet about how others would have identified and treated someone with sex differences at that time - someone difficult to categorise as male or female on outer appearance.

I also wish they hadn't used androgynous to describe the complexity of Klinefelter

They now believe that the spot, unearthed in 1968, is the final resting place of one of history’s first known androgynous fighters.
…
The warrior was wearing typical feminine clothes of the period and a hiltless sword was placed on their left hip.

Elina Salmela, a postdoctoral researcher from the University of Helsinki, said: “According to current data, it is likely that the individual found in Suontaka had the chromosomes XXY, although the DNA results are based on a very small set of data.”
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I interpret Salmela's comments as a warning that it might be unwise to place too much confidence in these results. I don't know if there's any wariness about mosaicism? It's interesting that the usual (even mild) manifestations of Klinefelter would seem to run counter to being an active warrior.

archived Times in case it's useful in the future or the share token lapses: archive.is/jfpKI

Fuck me.

If the TRAs are so up in arms about misgendering, where do they get off labelling the gender of people who’ve been dead for centuries anyway? How on earth would they know how that person identified?

Total bollocks as usual.