I'm sure a lot of us of the LGBTQIA persuasion have seen the somewhat sensationalist article about the "gay caveman" that was found in the Czech Republic. If you haven't seen it, find it here.
Here are my thoughts. Unfortunately, there are numerous fails in this article. If anything, this skeleton reflects the existence of non-gender conforming people, not necessarily gay people. Gay does not equal "more like the gender not assigned at birth." Sometimes the two go hand in hand, of course, but it's an important distinction. Katerina Semradova says in the article that she believes it might be a "transvestite" (note: the preferred term is "crossdresser" if you're talking about someone who wears clothes not traditionally worn by hir own gender, unless Semradova was trying to say that the skeleton was transgender, in which case she could simply have said that) or a third-gender person. Neither being third gender or crossdressing is mentioned in the headline of the article; instead, the Daily Mail decided to arbitrarily assign a sexual orientation to a caveman whose sexual preferences we will never know anything about.
This could have been an extremely important news article for third-gender/non-gender conforming/genderqueer/trans* people. I hope to see this story and others like it covered in a proper light in the future.
No comments:
Post a Comment