Originally a comment by Army Ant on People became slotted.

This isn’t surprising at all. Anthropologists are very in love with all types of quackery (cultural relativism, post-structuralism, etc). It isn’t even a new phenomenon, BTW – they’ve been like this for several decades now. They also often seriously say things like (paraphrased, of course) “there’s no objective reality”, and basically that a cultural group’s emotional truth about its past/history is objective truth or at least should be treated as such.

This bullshit claim that sequential hermaphrodites (like clownfish and some arachnids) somehow “prove” biological sex isn’t real or that there aren’t just two of them is so utterly asinine. It’s akin to one of those “age sliders” claiming that since many organisms (including us) change from pre-pubescent child (juvenile, immature) to adult and then to old person/individual (senescence), biological ageing doesn’t exist – and we should totally accept that creepy 50-year-old who claims to be a 6-year-old as *~valid~* and let him play with the real 6-year-olds unsupervised. *facepalm*

A little history lesson…

All of the ancient cultures that used the oldest writing systems we’ve found and deciphered* (cuneiform script, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Linear B, oracle bone script -Chinese-) had terms/words for male and female (animals and humans). In fact, some ancient languages (notably Sumerian; sort of) used the same word to designate human females and their non-human counterparts. Others lacked an adult/non-adult distinction for human females (that is, no separate terms for “woman” and “girl”; IIRC Old Tamil was such a language, young or old, human or animal, everyone female is just called “pen”).

Anyway, none of the earliest cultures that wrote and whose writing we’ve deciphered were under the delusion that we’re a single-sex species, or that there are more than two sexes – or that people are whatever they say they are. The Sumerians especially (I’ve read a lot of the private letters they wrote) would have absolutely no patience for things like someone wanting to be addressed only by special snowflake pronouns that person just invented.

Most of these ancient scripts had symbols for “male” and “female” and/or “woman” and “man” that were completely unambiguous (case in point: Sumerian’s stylized penis and stylized vulva symbols, or the oracle bone script’s “seated person with protruding breasts” symbol). The same is true of the ancient languages written with those scripts/systems: in most of them, the terms for male and female were biologically descriptive (in contrast, the Nahuatl term for woman means “skirt and huipil”, the Mongolian one means “beltless”, and the one most Tibetan languages use means something like “a person of low birth”).

So, as a whole, the most ancient cultures with deciphered writing were a bunch of binarist, trans-excluding, heteronormative, allonormative** fucks.

* One of the scripts we haven’t yet deciphered (the Indus script; y’know, Harappa/Mohenjo-Daro) almost certainly had a specific sign/hieroglyph to refer to males.

** A term the asexual community uses to refer to people who aren’t under the delusion that everyone is asexual.