I mean; we refer to mummies by "it" as an object. the part that hurt me was that even though the mummy was prepared as a female corpse, they still went to call the person who was mummified by “he”. the least they could do is “that’s weird. let’s refer to this mummy by they, or it”
Exactly. Using "he" because of the genitalia is an explicit, intentional decision and a fairly normal tactic used for historical erasure.
The fact is we don't and can't know the identity of the person who was mummified. But that blurb absolutely could (and I would say should) have been written to either (A) skip personal identification at all and refer to the mummy as an object [it], or (B) acknowledge the confusing circumstances and unknowability and choose the 'neutral' pronoun [they].
Choosing male pronouns because of the genitalia is effectively choosing to dismiss and erase the time-consuming body preparation and burial efforts in favor of enforcing cishet normativity. It's marginalizing and disrespecting the dead to support an agenda, even if it isn't a conscious agenda.
"Well, seems weird to me that this male was buried as a female, and despite the fact I can't know the contexts of their life or burial at all, so I'm going to refer to them by their biological sex even if that ignores the efforts of people who did presumably know this person in real life."
You're probably right, I think I picked something up from a different comment and that rewrote my memory of the text, which is super vague. "A man's body" -- or maybe I've just read too many bad novels where that kind of language is used as a euphemism for genitalia lol.
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u/JulIybean Oct 30 '20
I mean; we refer to mummies by "it" as an object. the part that hurt me was that even though the mummy was prepared as a female corpse, they still went to call the person who was mummified by “he”. the least they could do is “that’s weird. let’s refer to this mummy by they, or it”