To Think That Archaeology Proves That Men Cannot Be Women

[MrsMappFlint]

A burial site has been found in Cardiff. It dates from the 6th or 7th Century.
The skeletons are all women.

In death, when all genitals have gone, the skeleton retains the truth about the simple fact-it is either male or female.

There is no third way. That's science and hundreds of years after death, the truth of biology is retained in the bone.

Your sex is in your very bones-male or female-that's it. In the end, that's all there is.

Men can pretend to be women but skeletons tell the truth.

The story is on the BBC website.

If that's how you introduced yourself, sure I would. Why wouldn't I? I would laugh my head off once out of earshot, though.

Whats wrong with my name?

why wouldn't you have the courage to tell me I was being ridiculous to my face, like a normal adult?

Possibly because of the slight suspicion that you had mental health problems

Thank you for showing us all who you are with this lovely comment.

Because 1) you aren't that important, and 2) you have the right to choose whatever name you want, and the onus is on me to respect that as per the rules of everyday courtesy.

a) you're on the Internet, so anything you say, as with anybody else, is unprovable.
b) it's a typo from when I was on the bus. I meant to type drug fuelled, as in they'd have to have been off their tits to see that as evidence that women might have thought it was what they looked like due to the absence of mirrors (McDermott, Leroy (1996). "Self-Representation in Upper Paleolithic Female Figurines"). Pretty sure the person who carved it would have seen a woman before, so no wobbly puddles would have been necessary either (Bisson)
c) if you think that a typical female form including breasts, vulva and traces of red can't possibly be described as female, I despair of science.

I'm very aware of the McDermott and Leroy paper. It has never been widely respected among experts in the field. Even when it was recently published, it was seen as an outlier theory without any real data to back it up. It's also pulling up on 30 years out of date. Most modern research on the topic is, thankfully, much more quantitatively robust.

Do they? I was under the impression that female (human) pelvises have a gap in the front and male ones don't - are there exceptions?

tell us you're not a midwife without telling us you're not a midwife

Very few archaeological remains, of any material, are discovered intact. This is especially true for earlier/older archaeological remains. The discover of a "pelvis" is actually usually the discovery of a fragment of a bone that is part of the pelvis, the same way the discovery of a "pot" is often a potsherd or a "house" is often the foundations. It may not always be possible to reconstruct enough of the morphology of the pelvis from discovered fragments to determine the sex of that individual. As stated above by another person, DNA analysis can tell us more.

Are there any cases where DNA shows that a prehistoric person had an intersex condition? Or can that not be established from DNA alone?

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/dna-test-shows-medieval-person-buried-sword-and-womens-clothing-may-have-been-intersex-180978407/

One example. This is beyond the scope of my expertise and I don't know much about this research or if there are other examples.

Doom scrolling on Facebook yesterday the algorithm offered me a 'news' article that some prehistoric remains had been found of a non-binary person. Turns out they extracted DNA and found Kleinfelters. My eyes rolled extremely hard that anyone is stupid enough to think Kleinfelters= non binary gender identity.

Yeah, haven't had time to read the article @Archymum linked to properly (re the Kleinfelter Syndrome case) yet but I noticed it was using the same sort of terminology by paragraph two. And obviously that's daft. And (not having read it properly yet) I don't even know yet if this syndrome causes any physical stuff that would have been visually apparent, i.e. in such a way that prehistoric people could tell by looking that this wasn't an entirely normal male OR female. But what's interesting to me is whether, IF they could tell someone was intersex, whether that person would have then been allowed to cross the usual barriers of gender roles in that society, and, if so, in what ways. I asked because I just wondered how they might respond to someone with ambiguous physical characteristics - would they think they were some sort of monster / bad omen and kill them, or would they think they were somehow magical and give them a special status and an exception to normal societal rules, or what? But yeah, this is very much the sort of thing that's always going to lead to some very crappy reporting by non-scientists who don't understand the difference between intersex and transgender or who always try to impose modern concepts on eras / societies where they don't belong or who make out that anyone who doesn't conform to the usual gender roles in their society is "non-binary" and all that crap. But ignore all the guff and there's some very interesting questions here. Definitely going to read the piece when I'm not falling asleep...

I actually know a man with Kleinfelters. He only discovered he had it when he got testicular cancer and his doctors were looking at his testosterone levels and then clocked he's somewhat 'dumpy' for want of a better description. I realise that's a sample of one, but would prehistoric people see him as something other than a man, because he's a bit pear shaped and tends to moobs? They wouldn't know his chromosomes or testosterone level. He's clearly a man in terms of genitals and would prehistoric people even get much body fat, given their lifestyle? Seems a reach to me.

There is also a rare male XX syndrome, also known as de la Chapelle syndrome. Sufferers have normal looking male bodies but are sterile. So if you dna tested skeletal remains of someone with this syndrome and found XX chromosomes you’d assume they were female.

And of course any speculation around gender roles in prehistoric times is just that - speculation. They may well have been less obsessed with the binary than we are right now.

Ugh - the old “When archaeologists dig up your bones in 500 years…”

Most people get cremated these days. What are these futuristic archaeologists going to do? Sift our ash for XX?

”Hahaha! They’ll know! They’ll know!”

Well, so what? I won’t care Moira. I’ll be dead 🤷🏻

Do we also need to prove that the earth is not flat?

Well, that what the SC decision felt like to me!

No, it's not just speculation - it's often possible to see quite a lot of evidence for how individuals spent their time and therefore what their roles were. For example, people buried with the kinds of artefacts which show they were probably warriors are almost always male. It can be seen that grinding of grains was a female job because female skeletons often have the sort of skeletal wear and tear that suggests a lot of time using a grindstone. There's all kinds of things like that.

I still haven't had chance to read up on how Kleinfelter's manifests, but I know that some intersex conditions produce babies with ambiguous genitalia, where you would just look at the newborn and know you had something out of the ordinary. I'm interested in how they would have responded to that.

Only people ignorant of DSDs would disagree.

People with DSD have one sex same as us every one else.