God fucking dammit these right wing dumbasses are really returning to scientific racism? Fucking hell any first year anthro student could tell you that while there is a measure of sexual dimorphism present in the human skeleton it varies wildly based on population/life history, it's very common to have robust skeletons that belong to females & more gracile skeletons that belong to males! That's why it's called a goddamn sex estimate! It's an educated guess at best! You just can't use the skeleton alone to "determine" someone's sex, that's not how it works!!

[–] BabyTurtles@hexbear.net 18 points 23 hours ago

Bigoted phrenology has always been popular in incel/redpill/blackpill forums, gradually all of this slop is leaking into the mainstream.

[–] Cat_Daddy@hexbear.net 12 points 1 day ago (4 children)

I was under the impression that the space between the hip bones was a pretty reliable estimate? I may be dumb (probably).

[–] ThermonuclearEgg@hexbear.net 20 points 23 hours ago

I think even the best methods are still only like 90% accurate, which could still easily hide lots of categories even of cis people in that remaining 10%

[–] FALGSConaut@hexbear.net 6 points 19 hours ago

The hip bones are one of the more reliable methods of sex estimation, but it's still exactly that, an estimation.

Anyone who claims to be able to determine with certainty someone's sex from their skeletal structure is either misinformed/not properly educated on the subject or knowingly misrepresenting the facts to fit into their agenda. Responsible anthropologists will always treat it as an estimate/guess and never a concrete determinism.

[–] pinkapple@lemmy.ml 14 points 23 hours ago

Needs to be estimated in a context of several skeletons belonging to the same group of people that died during the same period in that location. And it could still be a marginal difference or a (normal) exception. These differences can be minimal and too volatile to make certain estimates with just one sample and no population data to compare to.

[–] Infamousblt@hexbear.net 13 points 23 hours ago

What I have come to understand is for bones, it's a game of averages. So amab bones on average might be bigger, or differently shaped or whatever than afab bones across some statistically significant sample for specific bones in specific cultural groups, as an example. Which does NOT mean that any individual bone on any individual person always fits within the expected norms of that statistical sample. That's not how statistics work.

For example if you're digging up bones and you find one bone, that doesn't probably tell you much about who that bone belonged to. If you find a complete skeleton that might tell you more about that one person because you have a bunch of bones, but still isn't 100% accurate. You can't know everything about them with a full skeleton. If you find a pile of bones or a whole city of bones then you can probably tell something about an area or a population group for example but that doesn't mean you can guarantee much else about any individual bone or individual set of bones either. So basically yeah we're all different and just because you can use statistics to derive some useful information it doesn't mean you can use those statistics to derive everything all of the time.

It's the same shit that racists do with crime statistics or economic statistics or whatever. They look at the statistic of a group, they take it out of context for that group, and then they apply it to an individual instead of a group. It's taking data and removing it many steps from reality to intentionally draw wrong conclusions.

So of course they'll do it with shit like bone size or facial proportions or literally anything you can think up. It's not science but since it is "backed by data" it feels legitimate to people who refuse to think about it.