Stone age non binary woman.

[deadpan]

Wtf is going on with the daily mail online. I don't like the mail btw, they did great work on the post office scandal but that's about as far as my slight admiration goes.

They have seemed pretty good on GI too, but why do they have this ridiculous headline, and not only that, in their science news.

My main question for them though is, how did they know the skeleton was a female skeleton if we're all "assigned"

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-15613181/Stone-Age-woman-buried-MAN.html

Not strict gender-specific roles - great.
This makes these people non-binary - clickbait bollocks.

From that, I think we agree, tbh! We just have different ways of expressing what we agree with 😊.

ETA: I think what you disagreed with most was thatNB "implies that everyone else has decided to stick to society’s gender stereotypes". Wheres I agree that "non-binary", literally by definition, does reinforce this idea of an artificial binary despite the reality being this complex, insubstantial mush (good word!) So even the concept of NB solidifies the reductive two-path notion that we don't really believe in and reject here by shouting, I'm not on these paths, therefore (by implication), the rest of you normies must be.

Where do you live? Do you really think society is that rigid about gender roles?

Gender roles are pretty rigid in places like Afghanistan, but I don't see any evidence of people taking on nonbinary identities there. And where were all the nonbinaries a hundred years ago here?

Nonbinary seems to be a way of saying "look at me, I'm different and special" when we can all basically dress how we want and do what we want anyway, regardless of sex.

The truth - in this and similar cases - is that we simply don't know how she thought of herself, or how her society thought of her.

Assuming that they probably understood the difference between the kind of human that might pop out a baby and the kind that doesn't (they'd have to be pretty unobservant not to), we don't know what baggage they did/didn't attach to those categories, nor whether they had any other ways of classifying people that cut across those categories.

If a woman did things that men more commonly did, the way she spent her life may have been seen as so transgressive of cultural expectations for women that neither she nor others could see her as a proper woman, and therefore classified her as a man or as something in between men and women.

Or activities/presentation in that culture may not have been strictly coded as men's or women's to the point where she was transgressing anything; and so she was merely seen as a woman making a statistically minority choice.

Or some people might have had no problem with a "tomboy", and some might have shunned her as an unwomanly freak. Why should we assume that prehistoric people never disagreed amongst themselves?

Or she might have known she was a woman but spent her life fooling everyone else, quite deliberately, in order to enjoy a kind of life she would not otherwise have been allowed. Until she died and they prepared her for burial and - hey, look at this! Such cases have been documented in historical times.

The trouble starts when using a modern term like "non-binary" leads to modern-style assumptions instead of the open questions that need to be asked.

The DM Is a rag.

Like Catiette, I'm probably not disagreeing with you either,
but I think rejecting stereotypes of femininity is political per se.

Making 'a declaration of rejecting stereotypes' can appear to be attention-seeking and reinforcing the binary it purports to undermine -
you [one] don't have to make a declaration about it, you just have to live it, which many of us do.

That doesn't make them non binary does it. It makes them women.

I often think that because men are pretty rigid - they need to pigeonhole women in the same way.

They still don't get how insulting this 'non binary' shit is to women. Okay, say a woman was buried with a sword in a society where typically only men were warriors. It could mean:

-- a woman disguised herself as a man because she wouldn't have been allowed to be a warrior otherwise.
-- a woman was a warrior, unusual for her community, and she was valued for it.
-- a woman was a warrior, unusual for her community, and she was shunned for it or seen as transgressive but did it anyway.
-- the woman wasn't a warrior and the sword belonged to a male relative but was buried with her for symbolic or sentimental reasons.
-- the woman wasn't a warrior but had high status or a leadership role in her community and her grave goods reflect that.

I'm sure you can think of more options. The point being that 'women weren't typically warriors in this community, so this person wasn't a woman' is an appallingly sexist interpretation. Bewilderingly so, if I'm honest. I can forgive a 19th century archaeologist who couldn't correctly determine the sex of a skeleton and relied on stereotypes, for not knowing any better. A 21st century person who believes that 'woman' = 'person who complies with feminine gender stereotypes' and that anyone who doesn't is therefore not a woman is far more offensive. Especially when speaking about women long dead who can't speak for themselves.

Well that's exactly the problem isn't it? Saying this woman was "non binary" requires exactly the same modern strict male/female social roles that impacted how (usually male) researchers interpreted burial sites etc.

Why would anyone conclude she was somehow seen in her own time as a fundamentally different type of person than most women just because we interpreted certain burials as "for men" or "for women"? Why not the much more likely interpretation that social factors meant some roles were more common for one sex or the other, but the contempraneous people didn't see them as roles reserved for one sex or the other?

Generally this is the modern attitude towards the period yes. I imagine it was the mail using the non-binary term rather than the archaeologists. But I didn't read the article as I don't read the mail

Expressing it like that makes me realise afresh how regressive NB is. To think that, after millennia, this is where we end up again.

That recently reported research re. a growing proportion of men believing wives should obey their husbands? I'm starting to think there never was - and never will be - enduring progress towards or hope of long-term sexual equality.

Maybe it's just that the '80s to '00s were the top of the bell curve of just one little wave among many, and now we're sliding back down its other side to something truly awful again. Which means that, eventually, that trough will be awful enough for more women to wake up and join the fight... whereupon we'll spend another century struggling up to another wave crest only to see the privilege we find there generate exactly the same kind of complacency we're seeing now all over again. So we lose those gains, too, and slip right back down into the next trough along. And on, and on.

I deliberately posted the link to the original statement by the academic idiots who started this nonsense.

The DM is taking the piss.

This happens on so many FWR everyone gets in a froth about the DM or the BBC or whoever, never the actual culprits.

So called educated people are publishing this crap.

They are teaching it to young people.

Why do they "edcated" people use meaningless phrases like non binary, and not atl least accurately record it as "gender non conforming" (to our limited knowledge here and now in the 21st century).

So please read the source of this problem.

Not the DM just using it as click bait.

This happens on so many FWR everyone gets in a froth about the DM or the BBC or whoever, never the actual culprits.

There is no "(f)actual culprit", though.

Who we think it is, is subjective. The random academic in some obscure area with no readership to speak of? The populist media using their work as ragebait? The cultural context that makes it all possible? And then you get into chicken and egg, anyway.

But I dislike the patronising phrase "getting in a froth" about the BBC in particular. Individual academics are free to explore and publish what they like (or should be - Stock, Bindel etc.!) Academics explore and publish all sorts, and the hope is that our collective intelligence and social structures (peer review through to a free media) mean that the valuable, high-quality stuff gains prominence, while the rest is filtered out.

I think media like the BBC, publicly funded with a remit to be objective and educate the Great British public etc., bears far more responsibility than a corner-office queer theorist, in having failed to act as the buffer against misinformation and authoritarian madness it should be. The BBC's not just given this particular ideology credence, but played a large part in building a kind of state religion from it: thou shalt not misgender a rapist etc. It's this that makes it especially hard for educated people in other certain captured contexts (eg. school teachers) to push back.

If anything's worth "frothing over", I think that is. But "frothing" suggests irrational anger, and I don't think it's irrational to be angry about that. I don't get angry with the DM because it's got a very different remit (sell, sell, sell!) And OK, I recognise the BBC's struggling to stay afloat and retain readers and all that, so it's not as simple as a mutually exclusive public service v. commercial self-interest thing - but I'll never forgive its total abdication of responsibility as far as GI's concerned.

You posted an AI summary with links to a few things, I'm not sure which 'idiots' you are referring to?

The paper by Pape & Iongo doesn't use the term non-binary to refer to how individuals may have self identified, it uses it to refer to whether burial sites match a binary sex=gender or not. ie a female buried with weapons does not meet this binary.

It concludes around 90% of burial sites with enough data to study do meet this, and 10% don't. There's also an interesting discussion of whether that 10% should be referred to as exceptions or minorities.

She can froth if she wants to, she can leave her friends behind
Because her friends don't froth and if they don't froth
then they're no friends of mine...

<missing point entirely but stuck with new earworm>

it uses it to refer to whether burial sites match a binary sex=gender or not

If that is what it says then I disagree it's any better.

The researchers are looking to see whether "men" and "women" were strictly sex roles or could be social gender roles occupied by either sex.

That question presupposes the existence of social gender as a meaningful organising concept for prehistoric people.

It does not leave space for the far more likely possibility that there were men and women as simple sex classes, and there were social roles that tended more to one sex or the other, but no expectation that individuals of one sex performing a social role more commonly associated with the other were in any way different to others of their sex or taking a role reserved for the opposite sex.

That is a contemporary 21st century narrative rooted in the ideological belief that social gender is independently meaningful - that if someone performs a usually-opposite-sex role in one part of their life it signifies their personal identity in all of their life.

Though.... I'm reading Stone Age Non Binary Woman in the tone of a TV cartoon narrator announcing the entrance of super hero, so there is that.

Well yes it presupposes this. The entire field of prehistory and archaeology is presupposed on patriarchal and rigid gender norms, as it was developed in the 1800s. So modern articles use that as a starting point to question whether that is actually the case.

I don't see the issue with using the term non-binary here. I think it is separate to the way many people today use it. The research shows that in 90% of burial sites, we see that female skeletons are buried with X and male skeletons are buried with Y. However 10% of burial sites do not match this binary, so it is non-binary. How else would you describe it?

"It does not leave space for the far more likely possibility that there were men and women as simple sex classes, and there were social roles that tended more to one sex or the other, but no expectation that individuals of one sex performing a social role more commonly associated with the other were in any way different to others of their sex or taking a role reserved for the opposite sex."

I have to disagree. The two articles (one a research paper one an online article) in the AI summary PP posted specifically argue that this 10% of people should be referred to as 'minorities' rather than 'exceptions', because exception implies there is a hard rule to which they are an exception, whereas minority implies that the gender roles are not fixed according to sex, and that either role is acceptable, just that taking the role of the opposite sex is a minority as the data shows. Which seems like exactly what you're referring to here?

Surely this kind of stuff serves to contradict the concept of gender existing in the period - i.e. women didn't conform to what some might term the female gender role today.

This is the paper the DM article is about. It was published last month and doesn't use the term non-binary at all.

Fixed and Fluid: The Two Faces of Gender Roles—A Combined Study of Activity Patterns and Burial Practices in the European Neolithic - Villotte - 2026 - American Journal of Biological Anthropology - Wiley Online Library

The links you posted are about a different paper from 2023 (with different authors), which at one point uses the term non-binary when referring to people with DSDs.

Honestly I don't see why they have to be nouned at all. If the point is to say there is no reason to assume these "minorities" were seen as a separate type of their sex, an adjective or similar descriptor would seem more appropriate surely? The noun unavoidably implies a discrete group.

"Burials do not seem to be been exclusively determined by sex. We see from time to time women buried in contexts formerly presumed to be exclusively reserved for men or vice versa. Approximately 10% of burials fit this pattern".

EXACTLY! This post is pretty much what I was going to say. We know of multiple women in various very different societies, some very ancient, who became monarchs, warriors and even army generals, when that was not the norm in their society - sometimes they were the only woman in a long dynasty of men, like Empress Wu. That does not mean they weren’t women, it means they were women who were unusual for that society - just as there will have been men who were unusual, including in relation to gender stereotypes. And like you say there are numerous other reasons a woman could have been buried with typically male accoutrements or in a normally male role etc.

It’s so appallingly sexist I can’t believe people who come out with this crap can’t see that and think they’re being worthy and woke. But it’s also just so arrogant. We don’t necessarily know what the exact social mores and mechanisms were in that society, and how that woman came to be buried that way. To just smugly impose a nonsensical ideology that someone thought up last Tuesday in historical terms, is the opposite of trying to learn about and understand that society. And what about societies where women warriors were normal? Were they therefore all men (or “NB”), because we’re imposing our sexist views of historical norms, or if it was normal for that society, does that make it ok for them to be women? It doesn’t even stand up to the slightest picking apart.

We can also look at more resent history and see women who took more usually male roles even in very sexist societies, and this was possible despite women continuing to be heavily oppressed on a wider/societally less elite level. Indira Gandhi for example. Because of dynastic systems and individual drive (whether for noble motives or not). It is so much more complex and nuanced that “woman wasn’t a stereotype, must have been not a real woman” FFS.

Or even a woman thought 'oh bloody hell Dave forgot to take his sword to the afterlife, when I die I'll have to lug it with me and give it to him.'

I don't see the issue with using the term non-binary here. I think it is separate to the way many people today use it. The research shows that in 90% of burial sites, we see that female skeletons are buried with X and male skeletons are buried with Y. However 10% of burial sites do not match this binary, so it is non-binary. How else would you describe it?

Non-stereotypical, non-typical, unusual. Non-binary is a sexist red herring. It implies there is more of a binary than there actually is, and also imposes a gender-ideological framework on past societies whose ideas about gender stereotypes were almost certainly different (as gender norms vary massively across time and place). We should resist the tendency to assume people in the past were always more rigidly stereotyped than we are, or more sexist that we are. Western society is more sexist and gender-polarised now than it was 40 years ago. We are not automatically less sexist than a society that exist 2,000 or 5,000 years ago either. And much of what people do in any society is non-gendered anyway, so everyone is always “non-binary”. It’s an illogical and meaningless term.