#which is how you get things like “gay caveman” to mean “Corded Ware Culture burial of someone who was likely a third gender”

[osterby]

The thing all the archaeologst vs. trans body things misses is that archaeologits will know that we were trans and will care about what that meant for us. Even if the archaeologists themselves were to come from an impossible future where no one is trans and where male and female sex and gender binaries are rigid and clearly defined, they would know that we did gender differently and they would be digging us up to find out who we actually were, not to squint at a funny angle on a fragmented ilium to decide which box to put it in. The whole point of archaeology is to learn about the past, and archaeologists understand that the past is not precisely identical to the culture they live in. And future archaeologists, no matter their own culture and perception of gender, are going to have even more tools for getting information out of corpses than we do today.

Right now we can look at someone's hair from 2000 years ago and tell where their drinking water was coming from*. We can look at the DNA in a tiny sliver of degraded bone and know the person had Klinefelter Syndrome. It's very common for archaeologists to look at a body for signs of dentisty, injury, illness, or medical treatment.

Future archaeologists will absolutely have the tools to look at our bone fragments or teeth or mummified skin and understand things like HRT and top surgery. I fully expect anyone working with my archaeologically significant remains will be able to tell at what age a person started T or E. They might make some wrong guesses about our culture and our feelings about our genders, and they might have trouble telling the exact gender of a person from their remains and grave goods, but they will know that trans people existed and they will be able to recognise a lot of us in the archaeological record., and the relative length of a femur will have very very little to do with that.

Grave goods are another important facet of gender in archaeology which is often overlooked in the mainstream. Take a look again at the person with Klinefelter Syndrome; before we had the DNA results, people had various theories about this person's biological sex or lived gender based entirely on the grave goods. We believe the person buried at Sutton Hoo was a king and a man, because all the grave goods are typical of that social role and gender; there is no body left in Sutton Hoo with bones to measure or DNA to test, all we have is a the outline of a ship and the metal grave goods. If you are buried in a suit and your headstone says "brother and son", the archaeologists are going to assume you are male long before they measure your bones (get your wills in order, guys. Don't get buried under a deadname).

Don't worry about your bones getting measured by a twitter phrenologist. Let your burial reflect who you are, and trust the future archaeologists to be curious enough to look at your actual remains and grave goods in the context of what they know about your era and culture, and go "yup, that sure is a trans person who ate a bunch of microplastics circa 1900-2400CE".

*I love this paper in particular because it's such a snarky rebuttal to another paper, but that's beyond the scope of this reblog.

Only the most miserable people on the planet are obsessed with bone structure. Terfs. Incels. Racists probablty. Whoever still thinks that the weird skull shape astrology- no wait I did remember the word. Phrenology. Whoever still thinks that phrenology has any scientific value. Nobody who's enjoying their life goes out of their way to turn the framework of your meatsuit into an inescapable prison.

Future archeologists aren't going to look at my implausibly well-preserved carcass and go "this is a female skeleton", and call it a day. They're going to look at it and go "hmm, this isn't the standard early 2000s era cadaver amount of microplastics. This mf was eating macroplastics."