But the history world was shaken three years ago when it emerged that a burial site that had been assumed to belong to a high-status warrior from the mid-900s housed a female skeleton.
This is such a brazen misrepresentation of what happened. They fucking suspected all along there were female skeletal remains in that grave, and at least since the 70s the assumption that this was a male was openly questioned as incorrect. But until a first modern analysis in 2013 confirmed that these bones were female, they adamantly denied they could be. Because no woman is a warrior. And that's that.
And they kept on fighting over this, until the 2017 analysis proved unequivocally that this was a female skeleton. Immediately after that result, some archaeologists and historians moved from denying the logical conclusion - that this was a female warrior - to making all kinds of outlandish claims to explain away the presence of female remains with male-coded grave goods and the complete absence of male bones and female-coded grave goods.
Most notably active in that was a female professor at the University of Nottingham. She accused the 2017 team of loving the idea of women warriors so much that they were making the evidence fit their claims.
Now scholars are exploring whether this could mean that the Norse people had transgender members
Well of course they are. That is what female erasure means after all. Since we do not exist as a sex class, none of us can ever have achieved extraordinary success as women in a man's world.