Why Elon Musk’s re-shared post about ‘gendered’ pelvic bones is misleading
Elon Musk has yet again shared misinformation about trans people. (Getty)
Elon Musk has again shared false information about trans people, this time after reposting a post on X about male and female pelvises.
The right-wing tech billionaire and anti-trans pundit shared a post on his X/Twitter account, responding to a museum exhibit showing the presumed difference between a “female” and “male” pelvis.
In the post, which shows a metal ball the size of a baby’s head moving through the hole of the pelvis, Musk, who has been said to have concerns about trans people’s fertility, wrote that “sex/gender is literally true down to the bones”.
However, attempts to identify a person’s sex based on skeletal structure have historically been labelled “misleading” by anthropologists.
Furthermore, there is little evidence about how hormone replacement therapy – a treatment trans people can undergo as a method of transition – affects bone structure.
The myth became popularised by so-called gender-critical individuals following claims of a physical disparity between pelvic bones of those assigned male at birth and those that were assigned female.
But several experts, including Caroline VanSickle, an associate professor and biological anthropologist at Des Moines University, in Iowa, noted that professionals in the field never try to identify the sex of skeletons during their work.
Not only is it unreliable, and often attributed to “inconclusive” results, but there is also no way to identify intersex individuals, who make up a portion of the population.
The sexual dimorphism – the biological or physical differences between the sexes of species – is so slight in humans that a margin of error can be exceptionally high, making it less reliable.
The idea that so-called “female” pelvic bones are specifically designed to give birth is also not strictly true. As others pointed out to Musk, Caesarean sections often have to be performed during birth because of complications related to pelvic structure.
One person responded on X: “Our first child had to be delivered by C-section because her head wasn’t fitting through my wife’s pelvis.”
They went on to joke: “Now I realise my wife is actually trans.”
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