I read an article today called Anthropologists Call for an End to Classifying Human Remains by Gender and Ancestry by Jonathan Turley. Here’s a link to Turley’s extensive bio.

Here’s the first paragraph of the article. If this interests you, please click the link above to read the entire story.

There is an interesting controversy brewing in anthropology departments where professors have called for researchers to stop identifying ancient human remains by biological gender because they cannot gauge how a person identified at that the time. Other scholars are calling for researchers to stop identifying race as a practice because it fuels white supremacy.  One of the academics objecting to this effort to stop gender identifications, San Jose State archaeology Professor Elizabeth Weiss, is currently  suing her school. Weiss maintains that she was barred from access to the human remains collection due to her opposition to the repatriation of human remains. The school objected that she posted a picture holding a skull from the collection on social media, expressing how she was “so happy to be back with some old friends.”

https://jonathanturley.org/2022/07/18/anthropologists-call-for-an-end-of-classifying-human-remains-by-gender-and-ancestry/

Here’s another quote from the article:

Graduate students like Emma Palladino have objected  that “the archaeologists who find your bones one day will assign you the same gender as you had at birth, so regardless of whether you transition, you can’t escape your assigned sex.”

What are your thoughts about no longer identifying remains as male or female? Do you think that it will impede or help scientific study? Why?