I tried to find the original of this on the Canadian Museum of History website but couldn’t (because I couldn’t figure out how to narrow the search from 4,300 hits). Secondary source will have to do for now.
How backward can you get?
Has anyone ever understood the point of feminism at all???
No, you dumbfux, finding axes in women’s graves doesn’t = anshent peeple new genner idenniny are complikated. Finding axes in women’s graves = it appears that some women used axes.
Yes it’s interesting. Yes it could mean that gender roles weren’t always strictly enforced, or were unlike our ideas of gender roles. It could mean a lot of things of that type. What it’s highly unlikely to mean is that ancient people thought about gender the way brainless hipsters do in 2024.
Comments
11 responses to “Simply “male” and “female””
Probably not on the website, that looks like a photo of an exhibit label
This needs to be juxtaposed with the reintrepretation of Norse culture produced by the discovery of warrior graves containing female skeletons. But I guess they were Trans too
Ya it does look like a label, I just thought they might have a corresponding bit of information I could link to – mostly because I feel apologetic about using so much social meeja.
That’s one hell of a conclusion to reach. Bones and axes say something about gender identity? That’s not just wild speculation, it’s antiscientific and has no place in a museum. Gender ideology is poisoning minds and culture. I would think any archaeologist worth the title would know better, but apparently I’d be wrong.
Have they not heard of Lizzie Borden?
Naif, if you dig back through the archives I think you’ll find discussion of exactly that. I chased down the paper at the time and it amounted to – men behaved this way and women did not, therefore a women with weapons must have been trans. No consideration that a women could be exceptional or non-conforming and remain a woman. It’s junk ‘science’ frankly. Anthropologists are really sociologists with one arm tied behind their backs. Their study subjects are dead and gone and everything is guesswork based on your own world view to interpret the physical evidence and come up with a culture that matches the few facts known. Imagine doing the same to any given western culture on the basis of only having a millionth of the physical and written records currently available. Sure, you’d sketch out the broad outline, but would you capture the breadth and variation in our culture? I think not.
The Rest of History podcast has a lauded to this issue a couple of times when dealing with ancient cultures with sparse factual data. I recall them mentioning that there has even been a/some studies showing that the tone of the culture reconstruction very much depended on the priors of the researcher.
haha!
And they haven’t claimed L.B. as trans! I wonder why not?
Ah, well. The ways of the Genderborg are mysterious.
Have they not heard of Girl Guides?
Real life is messy but the skeletons belong to people long gone and thus not able to contradict simplistic fairy stories. So a perfect fit for trans ideology.
The noble savage is a fiction that never stops giving.
In our species, both male and female have opposable thumbs. A man can make a tool and use it. A woman can make a tool and use it. Simple as that.
It’s not all *that* long ago that I saw reference to finding weapons in graves of women. They were determined to be women because of anatomy eg: the arrangement of the pelvis that allows a baby to be born.
This was taken to be evidence that at least some women in that culture trained with weapons and fought, not that they were anything resembling ‘trans’.
See also the recent Hardcore History episode
https://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-71-mania-for-subjugation/
mostly about the parents of Alexander the Great, in which it is discussed how Olympia (Alexander’s mother) and some of Phillip of Macedon’s other wives were fairly skilled fighters.
See also
https://www.amazon.ca/Amazons-Legends-Warrior-across-Ancient/dp/0691170274