Anglo-Saxon Burials Are Challenging Our Understanding of Gender Identity

[Warpy]

(Geez, whis will make quite a few patriarchal heads explode)

There are a significant number of Anglo-Saxon burials where the estimated anatomical sex of the skeleton does not align with the gender implied by the items they were buried with.

Some bodies identified as male have been buried with feminine clothing, and some bodies identified as female have been found in the sorts of "warrior graves" typically associated with men.

In the archaeology of early Anglo-Saxon England, weaponry, horse-riding equipment and tools are thought to signal masculinity, while jewelery, sewing equipment and beads signal femininity. And, for the most part, this pattern fits.

So far though, no convincing explanation has been put forward for the burials which appear to invert the pattern. My PhD research asks whether looking at these atypically gendered burials through the lens of trans theory and the 21st-century language of "transness" has the potential to improve historians' understanding of early Anglo-Saxon gender.



https://www.sciencealert.com/anglo-saxon-burials-are-challenging-our-understanding-of-gender-identity

Extremely interesting article about people who seemingly let their sons and daughters do what they were best at instead of assigning them rokes they were unsuited to. There are great pictures of their bling, mostly excavated at Sutton Hoo.

[Chainfire]

1. You have to be wrong. Trans and gay people were invented during the Nixon administration...

It was a Communist plot to undermine our society.

[imaginary girl]

2. Perhaps our earlier assumptions about strict gender roles said more...

...about our society than the ones we were studying?

[wnylib]

3. I wonder if some of those burials have

have a connection with clan membership identification with the person's mother or father if they came from a royal or noble line on one side of the family. A kinship designation instead of an individual gender role identity.

Or, it could be evidence of a fluidity of individual gender roles and identification.

Although the Scandinavian Vikings were a different culture, we know from the Icelandic sagas that Greenland's Viking women took part in battles against the "Skraelings" (Native Americans) that they encountered in North America.

[Farmer-Rick]

4. Strict gender roles were never really all that strict

In many societies. Not quite what the Evangelicals and Nazis want you to believe.

[Warpy]

5. Funny you should say that

The rights of women in various cultures took a huge hit when they were Christianized. While Christianity offered them the theoretical right to say no to marriage, any young girl who tried it would be thrown out of her father's house and the clergy would applaud.