NEWS

Gender as a Tool of Control

While cultures around the world hold varying understandings of the non-binary nature of gender, the Western world clings to the colonization mindset that anatomy is the same as gender, and that despite voluminous scientific, anthropological, psychological, and anecdotal evidence, it continues to demand that only two genders exist.

A fascinating article in The Conversation raises questions about how historians should respond when items associated with male gender performance are found with skeletons which align anatomically with females, and vice versa. The piece is titled The burials that could challenge historians’ ideas about Anglo-Saxon gender by James Davison, a PhD Candidate in Medieval History at the University of Liverpool. The author states that in the past, researchers have deemed such findings as “outliers,” or “discrepancies,” but eleven examples of these crossovers were found in just one pre-Christian cemetery in Dover.

While cultures around the world hold varying understandings of the non-binary nature of gender, the Western world clings to the colonization mindset that anatomy is the same as gender, and that despite voluminous scientific, anthropological, psychological, and anecdotal evidence, it continues to demand that only two genders exist. It’s not surprising therefore that historians fall into the same thinking. We humans are pre-disposed to transform what we see into what we think we should see…