The woke culture is starting to affect science. Anthropology can be defined as the study of humanity using applications of biology, cultural studies, archaeology, linguistics, and other social sciences. Using different methods, anthropologists provide a deeper analysis of the human remains and sketch a possible history of humans.
When archaeologists find any human remains, their first aim is to determine several traits, including age, race and gender. It helps in creating a proper map of history. However, the woke culture that is gripping the education system at an unprecedented pace is now questioning the gender assigning techniques used by archaeologists.
Several experts, including archaeologists, anthropologists, and even criminal forensic detectives, use several markers such as the size and shape of the bones to determine if the human remains were of a male or a female. The aspect of biological gender is crucial to the study of the remains because it provides essential details of the anatomy and socio-cultural aspects of the subject under study.
However, gender activists are now reportedly arguing that it is not possible to determine by the bones how an ancient person “identified themselves”.
Last week, Canadian Master’s degree candidate Emma Palladino wrote a Twitter thread on the matter and sparked controversy. She is pursuing an advanced degree in archaeology. That means it is possible that in the near future, she will be working on archaeological projects, and her “findings” may find their way into the history books forever. Notably, she locked her profile after her thread started gaining traction on social media. OpIndia found her thread on Archive.org, and here is what she has suggested.
In a 10-Tweet long thread, she called the methodology used by the archaeologists to determine the sex of the human remains “stupid”. She claimed that the archaeologists are “acutely aware of how culturally and spatially relative the concepts of sex, gender, and identity are. While a bioarchaeologist might identify a set of remains as “probably female”, it is understood that the gender of an individual is never necessarily the same as their sex, and that gender is a whole spectrum we’ve barely begun to unpack.”
Essentially, the woke concepts of ‘gender identity’ are being brought into scientific studies that rely on actual scientific facts, that humans are either male or female. Biological sex is determined by one’s chromosomes and is reflected accordingly in physical appearance. Females have XX chromosomes and males have XY chromosomes. No matter what gender a certain individual identifies with, the genes never change.
For example, in Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales from 1386, the singular “they” was used to describe someone’s features. Also, in Shakespeare’s Hamlet from 1599 “they” was used for describing singular persons.
She further argued, “Labelling remains “male” or “female” is rarely the end goal of any excavation, anyway. The “bioarchaeology of the individual” is what we aim for, factoring in absolutely everything we discover about a person into a nuanced and open-ended biography of their life.” Continuing her argument, she talked about gender-affirmation surgery.
She said, “For those who’ve medically transitioned or have had gender-affirming surgery, there’s also that to consider. It’s still unknown how long-term use of things like HRT or estrogen might be visible in the bones, but you’d be surprised just how much our bones retain of our lives. (But for those who haven’t, as I said earlier, the bioarch of the individual is about surmising nuanced life stories and not about assigning rigid + arbitrary genders to skeletons).” Interestingly, as per records, the first gender-affirmation surgery was done in 1917. It is just over 100 years old, and interestingly, the woke propagandists want to use such surgeries as the base for interfering in the determination of a skeleton based on birth sex.
How ‘gender activists’ are working hand-in-hand to propagate their agenda
Palladino is not the only one who is propagating to change the way forensic experts identify human remains. A group named Trans Doe Task Force comprises gender activists who are exploring ways “in which current standards in forensic human identification do a disservice to people who do not clearly fit the gender binary.”
In its mission statement, the group says, “We propose a gender-expansive approach to human identification by combing missing and unidentified databases looking for contextual clues such as decedents wearing clothing culturally coded to a gender other than their assigned sex. We maintain our own database of missing and unidentified people who we have determined may be Transgender or gender-variant, as most current database systems do not permit comparison of missing to unidentified across different binary sex categories.”
Furthermore, Associate Professor Jennifer Raff of the University of Kansas published a paper in February 2022 titled “Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas”, in which she argued that the division between physically or genetically ‘male’ or ‘female’ individuals was not possible. She suggested it was impossible to determine the gender of a 9,000-year-old Peruvian hunter as no one knows how “that person identified themselves”. She further argued that the dual-gender system was imposed by Christian colonizers.
There are several “experts” in the field that want to change the way sex is determined in archaeology, anthropology and forensic sciences, so human history gets in sync with their agenda. However, while doing so, they are creating a barrier for the scientists to do their work properly and efficiently. Just imagine a scenario where a forensic analyst examining an unknown person’s body won’t be allowed to say whether the victim of a crime was male or female, or an anthropologist working on old skeletons won’t be allowed to say whether the bones belonged to a woman or a man.
