Some activists are attempting to end the archaeological practice of classifying the gender of ancient human remains, calling it "a disservice to people who do not clearly fit the gender binary."
On Monday, The College Fix reported that the progressive group called the Trans Doe Task Force is at the forefront of seeking to encourage scientists to find new ways of discerning a human fossil's gender apart from biology.
"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," the group mission statement read.
"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," it added.
The niche advocacy issue gained widespread attention after a now-deleted thread from Emma Palladino, a master's degree candidate at Montreal University, went viral on July 4.
In the thread, Palladino asserted that "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."
The outlet also noted that an even larger contingent of progressive archaeologists is pushing for an end to classifying the race of human remains. A study from Binghamton University released earlier this year argues as much.
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