Various higher education activists have urged researchers to stop identifying human remains as male or female.
Trans Doe Task Force calls anthropologists to "explore ways in which current standards in forensic human identification do a disservice to people who do not clearly fit the gender binary."
"We propose a gender-expansive approach to human identification by combing missing and unidentified databases looking for contextual clues such as decedents wearing clothing culturally coded to a gender other than their assigned sex," the Trans Doe Task Force's website reads.
"We maintain our own database of missing and unidentified people who we have determined may be Transgender or gender-variant, as most current database systems do not permit comparison of missing to unidentified across different binary sex categories."
University of Kansas associate professor Jennifer Raff says there are "no neat divisions between physically or genetically 'male' or 'female' individuals."
Raff's paper Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas is a best-seller "has been featured on various news outlets like MSNBC," ZeroHedge reports.
Other scholars have called for researchers to stop classifying the ancestral heritage or race of human remains.
Professors Jonathan Bethard (University of South Florida) and Elizabeth DiGangi (Binghamton University) argue that racially classifying human remains (a.k.a. "ancestry estimation") "contributes to white supremacy."
"Tackling these failures seems overwhelming at times; however, changes can be enacted with candid and reflexive discussions about the status quo," Bethard and DiGangi wrote in a letter to the editor of the Journal of Forensic Sciences in July 2020. "In writing this letter, we direct our comments to the forensic anthropology community in the United States in hopes of sparking a discussion about the long-standing practice of ancestry estimation and changes that are frankly long overdue."
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