the-lemonster

1. I’m very flattered that you think my skeleton will be examined by scientists. Thank you for believing in my longevity.

2. When I’m a skeleton a thousand years from now, I plan on being dead so tbh I don’t see this being an issue.

3. I have an anthropology degree and I’ve worked with bones (not my focus, but it was still part of my curriculum), and yes we do use terms like “female pelvis” or “male proportions” when discussing remains. Even though I’m a trans person, I’ve never once been bothered by this. Gender and sex can exhibit themselves differently in a variety of contexts and language can adapt accordingly. Tbh I’m more concerned about my job security and my access to equal healthcare, rather than the gendered language my physical anthropology instructor uses.

4. In studying these bones, I can say that the sex or gender of the specimen I was looking at was the least interesting thing about them. Do you think archeologists thousands of years from now will care what biological sex I was? No, they’d probably wonder why I have a piece of metal permanently glued to the back of my teeth. Or the fact that my jaw is misaligned. Or what my joints can say about my daily lifestyle and level of movement. These details can help paint a broader picture of what life looked like back then on a physical level. That is the story my bones tell, not the shape of my pelvis or brow ridge or whatever.

Assessing biological sex from skeletal remains is not nearly as straightforward as it’s made out to be. Sure, there are landmarks on certain bones that show stronger sexual dimorphism than others, but:

 - There is more diversity within the statistical parameters of “typically male” and “typically female” than there is between them

 - There are quite gracile men and quite robust women too

 - There are notable differences in skeletal forms between ancestral groups that further confound “Western” or “universalized” osteometric systems that compare bone measurements and distances between landmarks

 - Visual assessments of bone morphology at sexually dimorphic sites (that is, bone shapes rather than measurements) require extensive experience and are subject to the anthropologist’s own interpretation

- Gender affirming measures like facial feminization and masculinization surgery and long-term hormone therapy DO leave evidence of chosen gender expression on the skeleton, in predictable locations

 - THE WHOLE IDEA of splitting humanity into male, female and anyone-else-is-an-outlier is extremely Western and extremely weird to many cultures

 - Any decent forensic anthropologist will make a careful and detailed analysis of all your physical and contextual/social clues of gender, as well as a DNA analysis (which aren’t the be-all, end-all either.)

 - Any decent forensic archaeologist will be paying more attention to your social customs, cultural role and how you lived rather than whether your bones look more like one sex than the other