Sacha Coward, an education activist focusing on gender and sexuality, told the London Times that it can be “hard for us to look at the 8th and 11th centuries in Scotland without a strong cisgender and heterosexual bias.” Coward said, “It is possible that we are talking about people who would today identify as transgender or nonbinary.” And he concludes that “queer theory is an important part of archaeology and can help us understand the complexity and diversity of past societies.”
Perhaps it’s Coward who finds it difficult to look at the 8th and 11th centuries in Scotland without projecting his own biases.
In the Times article, the evidence Coward cites for these supposedly transgender Vikings is that some of their warriors were female, as evidenced from skeletal remains found at a warrior burial site in Sweden. What this actually tells us is that some of their warriors were female — and, of course, that biological sex is an immutable characteristic discoverable in DNA even a thousand years after death.
What we now mean by “transgender” first appeared in academic circles as recently as 1990. It only entered the mainstream, via the Internet, around ten years ago. Moreover, “queer theory” does not help us understand the “complexity and diversity of past societies” because it is only interested in furthering its own assumptions. Rather, history helps understand the past. At least it does when it’s not corrupted by ideologues.