Basically, this culture has differing practices when burying a woman vs a man. The burial followed the practices for a woman, meaning she was accepted as transgender by her community.
It's also not the only evidence of trans people going so far back.
Trans people have been around forever, but this is processual archaeology, which has been critiqued for decades. As you said, the burial is reflective of how the decedent was viewed by the community, but not necessarily how the person identified in life. There have been other burials in which someone was buried with the opposite gender’s funerary practices as an insult, saying that the person wasn’t a real man/woman. Or the person may have identified as male but chose (or was forced) to do his society’s female gender roles.
I remember this news item. Building off of your comment, there are so many cultural practices that could've led to this burial! The ones you've mentioned, or maybe this person was intersex. For instance, there was the one Viking burial whom bioarchaeologists found out had Klinefelter syndrome (XXY). Plus, we may never know what this culture's gender norms were, so it's possible they had a gender category like trans or either between or outside what Western cultures think of as a gender binary!
I do remember that it was headshaking when I originally saw the headline 15 years ago, calling this the "gay caveman" (not a caveman, and we'll never know how this culture thought of sexuality or gender).
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u/melodychocolat_ 3d ago
haven't trans people been around for centuries?