This article popped up today, continuing a theme
seems highly speculative, but interesting nonetheless
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cumquat may will not be commenting further on the allegations, Tue 10 Aug 2021, 5:13,
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Only if you think that chromosomal abnormalities
have anything to do with so-called gender identity. Which they don't.
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Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Tue 10 Aug 2021, 9:20,
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...
And, of course, an XXY male is - drumroll - male. So still binary. Because that's what sex is.
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Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Tue 10 Aug 2021, 9:41,
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Indeed, there are only 10 sexes of people
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Mudface The web isn't callipygian, Tue 10 Aug 2021, 10:23,
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Please, let there be a Middlesex
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cumquat may will not be commenting further on the allegations, Tue 10 Aug 2021, 10:48,
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Intersex is certainly a real phenomenon.
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FeralCatMan Long ads need comments sections, Tue 10 Aug 2021, 13:33,
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DSDs are sex-specific.
There is no "third" where one is neither make nor female.
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Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Tue 10 Aug 2021, 13:58,
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I'm intersex, have been since I discovered a jazz mag in my dad's wardrobe
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cumquat may will not be commenting further on the allegations, Tue 10 Aug 2021, 14:07,
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it was also that they'd be buried with both male and female grave goods
but anything else seems highly speculative, such as claims like "might have viewed them as non-binary". It's a rare find and probably signifies something about the period, but I don't think there's enough to build any reliable narrative in the absence of other evidence.
If I was taking a punt, I'd hazard that in those superstitious days in non-christian european societies, freakish people were often looked on as having something magical or spirit connected about them, and that might account for the high status position, rather than some sort of normalisation of transgender roles hitherto unevidenced. Although, there is observed anthropological evidence of acceptance of transgender roles in relatively more recent east siberian hunter gatherer societies, almost always taking a medicine man/woman type role, but a congolese pygmy is closer to finland than a chukchi reindeer herder as the crow flies. and speculation should never be more than a placeholder, as people often latch onto it when it suits their own wishful narrative
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cumquat may will not be commenting further on the allegations, Tue 10 Aug 2021, 10:44,
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You're smuggling a lot in even there.
"Transgender roles" implies that our (sexist) intuitions about what is "proper" to which sex - and "gender" is nothing but that - and therefore about what is "transgender" by dint of defying those intuitions are both normal and normative. But I'm not sure that there's evidence for normality, and there's no basis at all for their normativity.
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Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Tue 10 Aug 2021, 12:57,
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to be honest I can't remember what label they gave them, it probably wasn't transgender, it not being used at the time
But transgender roles as I've used it just means someone behaving as a trangender person does (i.e. dressing and acting like the opposite sex) I wouldn't read any more into it than that, unless you're trying make some other point.
I just remember years ago reading a book about some polish anthropologist still in the time of the czars, before their way of life was mostly wiped out, reporting on shamanism in the koryaks and chukchis and how male shaman dressed as woman and took on feminine behaviours (and even male partners if memory serves). She postulated that shamans might have been women in the past but men took over and adopted that gender behaviour, perhaps for it's traditional authority in their culture. It's a fair bit of different to some androgynous scot posting youtube vids, granted.
And I did say mine was speculation, I just think it's more likely than their take, which has a whiff of imposing modern values on quite a different time and culture
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cumquat may will not be commenting further on the allegations, Tue 10 Aug 2021, 13:39,
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I dug up excerpts from the book by Czaplick. sounds quite like transgender if you ask me, albeit a quite culturally specific one:
Bogoras distinguishes various degrees of 'transformation' among the Chukchee:
1. The shaman, or the sick person at the bidding of a shaman, arranges and braids his hair like a woman.
2. The change of dress: Kimiqai, for instance, were woman's clothes by order of the spirits. In his youth he had been afflicted by in illness and had been greatly benefited by the change of dress. At the time described he was an elderly man with a beard, and had a wife and four children.[5]
3. The change in the habits of one sex is shown when the man 'throws away the rifle and the lance, the lasso of the reindeer herdman, and the harpoon of the seal-hunter, and takes to the needle and the skin-scraper '.[6] He learns the use of these quickly, because the 'spirits' help him all the time. Even his pronunciation changes from masculine to feminine. His body loses its masculine appearance, and he becomes shy.
4. In rare cases the 'soft man' begins to feel himself a woman; he seeks for a lover, and sometimes marries.
The marriage is performed with the usual rites, and the union is as durable as any other. The 'man' goes hunting and fishing, the 'woman' does domestic work. Bogoras thinks they cohabit modo Socratis, though they are sometimes said to have mistresses in secret and to produce children by them.[1] The wife does not, however, change her name, though the husband sometimes adds the name of his wife to his own.
Public opinion is always against them,[2] but as the transformed shamans are very dangerous, they are not opposed and no outward objections are raised. Each 'soft man' is supposed to have a special protector among the 'spirits', who is usually said to play the part of a supernatural husband, the 'kele-husband' of the 'transformed' one. This husband is supposed to be the real head of the family and to communicate his orders by means of his 'transformed' wife. The human husband, of course, has to execute these orders faithfully under fear of prompt punishment.[3]
www.sacred-texts.com/sha/sis/sis08.htm
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cumquat may will not be commenting further on the allegations, Tue 10 Aug 2021, 16:00,
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I looked up what a "modo socratis" relationship was , as Ive never heard the term
but the only thing google threw up was that same paper (which was pretty well cited of late, i'm assuming because it supports many current agendas) and b3ta links itself which is pretty fast indexing. So I reckon she meant to say platonic but it's just a typo, unless its some rare archaic term only used by 19th century polish anthropologists
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cumquat may will not be commenting further on the allegations, Wed 11 Aug 2021, 3:45,
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I like the following sentence from the original paper:
"The archaeological literature is full of men and women."
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Mudface The web isn't callipygian, Tue 10 Aug 2021, 9:38,
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It's been peer-reviewed, so we're just going to have to trust that's true
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cumquat may will not be commenting further on the allegations, Tue 10 Aug 2021, 14:12,
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What a load of utter
bobbins.
Gender identity is what historians call an 'actor's category.' This means that it can only be said to exist if there is positive evidence that the people of the time and place concerned both believed it to exist, and discussed their lives in these terms. There's no indication whatsoever that there was even such thing as gender at this time, let alone non-binary identity.
Sex on the other hand is a physiological category, not a cultural one. My guess is that this female was good at killing with swords, and was recognised as such by their fellow killing-with-swords brethren.
(, Tue 10 Aug 2021, 13:40, Reply)
well, this was a male with Klinefelter syndrome, so there goes that narrative, hagar
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cumquat may will not be commenting further on the allegations, Tue 10 Aug 2021, 13:50,
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theres some DNA evidence, and certainly none saying it's a woman
but it's probably as likely as their own speculation, and yours sounds way cooler
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cumquat may will not be commenting further on the allegations, Wed 11 Aug 2021, 3:26,
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Gender might not have been a concept that most were aware of, but we've always had 'queer' people
and lots of people demonised, tortured and killed for behaviour outside of their established norms and values, and rarer cases of people celebrated for the same.
I mean that's just super obvious.
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brb man-child cuck corporate supplicant fuck, Tue 10 Aug 2021, 17:02,
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"Might not have been a concept that most were aware of"
So you can have a gender identity without knowing it?
What is it, then?
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Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Tue 10 Aug 2021, 17:15,
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Concepts can apply to you without your knowledge.
'That's just the way things are' is how you might think about things which, as it turns out later, just aren't.
Traditional gender roles existed even if they were not identified at the time. This should be super obvious to anyone with a passing interest in, say, language for example.
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brb man-child cuck corporate supplicant fuck, Tue 10 Aug 2021, 17:44,
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did you know
that in 20 years' time it'll turn out that you were a 'knob' all along?
More seriously, how do you know that social roles really were gendered - couldn't females just as easily have been thought in terms of 'property', with their clothing etc as signifiers of this?
(, Tue 10 Aug 2021, 18:00, Reply)
Yes of course. But just as the progressive policies of 20 years ago are the conservative policies of today, some of us will still be less wrong than those clinging to the norms and values of the past.
I'm not saying they were gendered; the verbing of that term implies some kind of structural entity imparting gender, a concept that would not be in fashion for centuries. I'm saying that there were norms, values and expectations made of people on the basis of their sex, and that those who did not fit those roles were called queer, and perhaps burned at the stake, drowned in a river, crushed with rocks, pulled apart by horses, or all of the above.
I think the roles existed because of the universal(?) depiction of men and women having separate roles, use of gender pronouns, the existence of feminine/masculine words, and from a passing knowledge of literature and history. The division of the sexes comes up in a lot of origin myths and legends, for example.
The culture we find ourselves in evolved, no one generation's culture is radically different from that of their grandparents, and I think that rule probably holds over most of our history.
Culture ultimately emerges from biology, so the culture of our pre-human ancestors probably didn't radically change much either.
If women were thought of as property, they must have first been thought of as women. Their designation as property comes from their sexual identity.
The concept of woman is culturally loaded for us, and it would have been for our ancestors. We can point to that and describe it in terms of gender. They did not have the benefit of human and civil rights, science, freedom from religion, and magical technology to let them do that.
tl;dr: other ape cultures have roles based on sex/gender, we've probably been the same for a billion years.
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brb man-child cuck corporate supplicant fuck, Tue 10 Aug 2021, 19:20,
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'Queer' is a gender and/or sexuality-related term
it has nothing to do with physiological sex. 'Pointing' to the past and saying 'it was gendered' is hugely unhelpful in that it naturalizes values that should be understood as fluid. What if it turns out gender is just a completely unhelpful way of perceiving the world? We'd have to go over the whole of history and start again. If you're interested in understandinng the past on its own terms, you will appreciate that projecting present-day values onto it is a ridiculous thing to do. It's a sign of ideological inflexibility.
Also, I personally think that culture emerges from the interaction of biology with technology. So there.
(, Tue 10 Aug 2021, 20:38, Reply)
Technology is an aspect of culture, IMO. I'm not sure how you could have technology arising without culture, but I can easily imagine culture without technology.
Physiology as it was understood then? Or as it's understood now? Surely it's unhelpful to project present day scientific norms, and it's better to accept that the world really was flat, epicycles were real, and that mice and flies spontaneously generated from inanimate matter. It's just ideological inflexibility to believe that physical, chemical and biological functions as we understand them today applied to people in the past. :eyeroll:
Yes, everything we think we know will be better explained later. We will always have to keep reappraising everything as more information comes in, just like we always have done.
Queer has your definition today, but as recently as a few decades ago it had a broader meaning. I'm using it in the broader sense to describe people who are ostracised or 'othered' for behaving outside of the norm. That's not limited to whatever equivalents of the LGBT+alphabet who were around at the time, it also includes women who thought they could do more in life than what their sex determined, and men who didn't belong in the roles assigned to them either, and of course people who we'd probably diagnose with all kinds of disorders today as well.
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brb man-child cuck corporate supplicant fuck, Tue 10 Aug 2021, 21:40,
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whatever
"the world really was flat" - to all intents and purposes, it was. Until long-distance navigation became a thing.
"epicycles were real" - again, they were actually real. The stars went around in little circles across the sky. Without the need to think of the world as a globe it made perfect sense.
"mice and flies spontaneously generated" - not quite. Flies, yes. If you looked very carefully, even the smallest pieces of food were full of worms.
I think you'll find that queer meant sexual deviant in the time you're referring to. Max Nordau is the reference point really. You have to realize that anything out of the ordinary was seen as a transgression of christian morality, not some kind of optional cultural novelty.
(, Tue 10 Aug 2021, 22:20, Reply)
Your kind of relativism is silly and I poke my nose at it and blow a raspberry like so :¬P
The universe does not care how you think it works. Physical, chemical and biological 'laws'* apply without regard to the ignorance of any observer. To a MUCH, much, much, much, much MUCH lesser extent, so too do anthropological and sociological 'laws'**, even if one is not inclined to accept what we have now as true sciences.
*Whatever they truly are; the absolute truth (which may forever elude human understanding), which is wise to assume exists.***
**As above, with the assumption that the absolute fullest understanding of the hard sciences would, by inference, reveal*** and, by scientific method, confirm the truest possible understanding of the soft sciences.
***Not in a fucking religious or spiritual way, obviously.
Oh and no, queer didn't mean that at the timeS I refer to. It meant, as I say, odd, strange, peculiar, abnormal. And you will accept that that is how I'm using the word, damn you.
:)
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brb man-child cuck corporate supplicant fuck, Tue 10 Aug 2021, 23:01,
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"Odd, strange, peculiar, abnormal" *was* sexual deviance
or at least moral deviance. I admit the sexual element only really came to predominate in the early C20th. The point is that it wasn't a cultural choice then, it was a moral one.
The point I'm making is that any scientific vision that doesn't see itself a temporary stopgap until something better comes along is a bunch of hooey.*
*not that kind of hooey, you pervert.
(, Wed 11 Aug 2021, 3:15, Reply)
Moral relativism is one thing, scientific/factual relativism is just Republican Party level insane.
The word I chose includes sexually 'deviant' people, but is not limited to it.
One's sexuality is widely understood to not be a choice.
The scientific method incorporates your strangely redundant point about scientific vision.
We can't seem to agree on matters of fact, or even agree on a common lexicon, so this conversation is going nowhere!
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brb man-child cuck corporate supplicant fuck, Wed 11 Aug 2021, 14:42,
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90% of archeology seems to be trying to get your shitty research in the papers
(, Tue 10 Aug 2021, 20:16, Reply)