- Transgender activism has long hampered the sciences, especially medicine. Thousands of years of scientific knowledge are being discarded as medical groups like the AMA believe people may “decide” if they’re male or female. Not just medication is affected. Archeologists and anthropologists face similar pressures.
As an anthropology professor at San José State University, Dr. Elizabeth Weiss is an authority in her field. Weiss just released a piece at Spiked in which she discusses how groups of woke scientists in her field have joined the march of scholars offering “warnings” about determining the gender of human archeological remains. Is there a need to clarify why they’re saying that? Unfortunately, we can’t ask these prehistoric people how they would like to be “identified,” thus we may be “misgendering” them.
Today, disagreeing with woke orthodoxy might get you branded a racist by university officials and threatened with sanctions.
— Pacific Legal 🗡⚖️ (@PacificLegal) September 1, 2021
This was the unfortunate experience of Dr. Elizabeth Weiss, a highly decorated, fully tenured professor of anthropology at SJTU.https://t.co/PlrjjshATl pic.twitter.com/f7a0trR1g7
Archaeologists and anthropologists who have recently “woken up” argue that it is no longer appropriate to assign gender to ancient human remains. We don’t know how they identified themselves.
The Black Trowel Collective, a band of American archaeologists, warned last month against transferring present sex and gender identification categories onto previous humans. Some researchers term ancient skeletal remains ‘nonbinary’ or ‘gender neutral’.
Attempts to ban the use of sex markers to determine the gender of human skeletons that are hundreds or thousands of years old may seem like a trivial academic dispute of interest only to archaeologists and anthropologists. However, this has significant ramifications.
The Black Trowel Collective has never been mentioned before, but it seems to be a group that actually exists. They give microgrants to empower transgender voices in archeology. That’s fine and dandy if the focus is on the archaeologists and how they choose to be recognized. It would be unfortunate if you accidentally offended one of your coworkers.
What about the skeletons? Are they indicating a dead person will be offended? Do they suppose people questioned their gender so long ago? There were undoubtedly a few female Pharaohs in ancient Egypt who passed as men, but that’s different.
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“There’s no nonbinary skeleton,” Dr. Weiss writes. She says this erroneous approach to understanding early man is part of a bigger cultural conflict that weakens science. She writes that archeology activists want to eradicate biological sex from the present by eliminating it from the past.
This activism has real-world consequences. Weiss notes that archaeologists often train forensic anthropologists in law enforcement. How can they identify the bones of a crime victim and carry the inquiry ahead if they couldn’t tell if the deceased was male or female?
Dr. Weiss said that transgender activism is part of a scientific movement to promote anti-Westernism and denigrate Euro-American ideas. However, its underlying aim is to impose a nonbinary history on humanity, notwithstanding the novelty of the concept as a whole. Not to mention lacking medical science. For all of recorded history, people recognized gender roles, especially in terms of procreation.
Let’s take a quick look back and see where we are. Now activists are attempting to overturn long-held assumptions in archaeology and anthropology, joining the ranks of those who have already shaken up the medical and social sciences. What is next? Maths?