Pick up almost any forensic anthropology textbook and you’ll find the same illustration: a gracile female pelvis on one side, a robust male pelvis on the other. The images are clean, didactic, and misleading. They teach a binary that the human body has never actually respected.
A new review article in the Annual Review of Anthropology,1 authored by Sean Tallman and colleagues at Boston University, examines why this gap between what skeletal biologists know and what they practice has proven so durable. The answer, they argue, is not primarily methodological. It is cultural, historical, and in some respects ideological.
The standard workflow in forensic osteology asks analysts to produce a biological profile from skeletonized remains: age at death, stature, ancestry or population affinity, and sex estimation. For the sex component, practitioners examine the pelvis, the skull, the long bones, and other features, then render a judgment: female or male. The methods are presented, and largely taught, as though the underlying biology were reliably dimorphic. It mostly is. But “mostly” is doing a lot of work in a field that feeds into medico-legal determinations about real people.
Sex in living humans is not a two-position switch. Hormonal profiles vary. Chromosomal patterns vary. External anatomy varies. So does internal anatomy, and so does the skeleton that develops under the influence of all of the above. Intersex conditions, transgender individuals whose bodies have been shaped by hormone therapies, and people who fall outside expected morphological ranges for their chromosomal sex all present complications that the binary framework handles poorly, or does not handle at all.
