There’s no such thing as a nonbinary skeleton
by Elizabeth Weiss, spiked:
Trans activists are trying to rewrite ancient history.
According to woke archaeologists and anthropologists, ancient human remains should no longer be classified as either male or female. Apparently, this is because we do not know how these people would have identified themselves.
Last month, for instance, the Black Trowel Collective, a group of American archaeologists, said we should be ‘wary of projecting our modern sex and gender identity categories on to past individuals’. Some academics have even started to explicitly label ancient human skeletons as ‘nonbinary’ or ‘gender neutral’.
This attempt to stop the sex identification of skeletal remains, dating hundreds or even thousands of years old, probably sounds like a slightly absurd academic squabble – of concern only to archaeologists and anthropologists. But it has far-reaching implications.
There are always exceptions to the norm, but most individuals can be classified, according to biological characteristics, as either male or female. Trans activists in the archaeological community are now rejecting this mode of classification. And they are doing so for a reason: they are trying to erase the reality of biological sex in the present by erasing it in the past. They want to make it look as if the natural human condition is nonbinary.
Anthropologists, such as Chelsea Blackmore at the University of California, Santa Cruz, have admitted as much. Blackmore argues that ‘queer archaeology’ ideas are ‘powerful tools for changing the past and the present’. This is reminiscent of the party slogan in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four: ‘Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.’
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