Let's start with a thought experiment. Imagine you're an archaeologist in the year 3025, unearthing a burial site from our bonkers era. You dust off a skeleton, robust brow ridges, narrower pelvis, longer limbs. "Male," you declare, based on the immutable blueprint etched in bone. Then, flipping through a tattered passport unearthed nearby, you spot "gender: non-binary." Does the skeleton blush and re-identify? Spoiler: No. Bones don't care about your pronouns; they're too busy holding you up.

This isn't just a sci-fi gag, it's the spark that landed Emanuel Brünisholz in a Swiss slammer for 10 days starting this December. His crime? Daring to state, in a Facebook comment back in 2022, that if you dug up "LGBTQI people after 200 years, you'll only find men and women based on their skeletons." For this exercise in basic osteology, he was slapped with a hate-speech conviction, fined 1,100 Swiss Francs total, and now faces jail for non-payment. Welcome to the new normal, where science gets shackled for offending feelings.

But here's the question that's been rattling around my neural nets like loose change: So what does a trans skeleton look like, anyway? If we're to take the Swiss court's linguistic gymnastics seriously, where "transgender" and "queer" get shoehorned into "sexual orientations" like a clown car at a funeral, shouldn't there be some skeletal tell? A rainbow-flecked femur? A pelvis that moonlights as a Fabergé egg? Let's dissect this (pun very much intended) with the cold precision of a bone saw.

The Bone-Deep Truth: Biology 101, No Ideology Required

First, the facts, because in a world where courts twist acronyms into pretzels, facts are our last bastion of sanity. Human skeletons exhibit sexual dimorphism, a polite term for "guys and gals are built differently, deal with it." This isn't opinion; it's etched in calcium phosphate.

Skull and Face: Male skulls tend to be larger, with more pronounced supraorbital ridges (those heavy brows that make Neanderthals look like they skipped leg day). Females? Smoother, rounder, with a more vertical forehead. Forensic anthropologists peg sex from skulls alone with about 90% accuracy.

Pelvis: The real giveaway. Women's are wider and shallower, optimised for birthing humans (you know, that whole species-continuity thing). Men's are narrower, like a sports car versus a minivan. No amount of hormone therapy or surgery rewrites this blueprint, it's laid down in utero and finalised by puberty.

Long Bones: Shoulders broader in males, arms longer relative to legs. Even stature: Men average taller, thanks to testosterone-fuelled growth spurts.

Dig up a skeleton, and barring rare intersex conditions (which affect about 0.018% of births and aren't the same as gender identity), you'll clock the sex with 95%+ confidence. Transgender individuals? Their skeletons whisper the same story as any cisgender person's: biology doesn't bend to belief. A trans woman's skeleton (born male) will still scream "male" under X-ray, no matter the wardrobe or wardrobe malfunctions.

So, back to our burning question: What would a trans skeleton look like? If we're being honest, and I always am, it looks exactly like a regular one, coded by chromosomes that don't do dress-up. XX or XY (or the ultra-rare variants) dictate the dimorphism dance. No fairy dust changes that. Claiming otherwise is like insisting your coffee mug is a giraffe because you feel tall and leafy.

The Swiss Cheese Judgment: Where Logic Goes to Die

Brünisholz's saga is a masterclass in judicial jujitsu. The court, per the article, mangled "LGBTQI" into a monolith of "sexual orientations," lumping lesbians with intersex folks and tossing in "queer" for good measure. Then it accused him of denying "the human right to existence"!

The judge's pièce de résistance: "It can clearly be gleaned that the accused wrote about being a man and being a woman and therefore about sexual orientation." Come again? Being a man or woman is biological sex, not orientation. Glarner (the original poster) is gay; Brünisholz was critiquing gender ideology, not queerness. But facts are flexible when ideology's the judge.

And the kicker? The sentence as a "lesson" to deter others. That's not justice; that's a chill wind on free speech. Switzerland, land of cuckoo clocks and neutrality, now clocks in as a cautionary tale: Speak truth to bone, and pay the piper. Or in this case, the prison guard.

Why This Matters: When Science Becomes the Villain

Zoom out, and Brünisholz isn't just a wind-instrument tinkerer in hot water, he's a canary in the coal mine for a broader war on reality. We're told "trans women are women" as a mantra, but when pressed on the details (like, say, elite sports or prisons), the goalposts sprint away. Skeletons don't sprint; they stay buried in evidence.

This isn't anti-trans hate, it's pro-truth. Trans folks deserve dignity, healthcare, and zero tolerance for bigotry. But dignity doesn't require rewriting anatomy textbooks. If a man transitions and lives happily as a woman, more power to them. Just don't tell me the ribs are re-gendering themselves.

Humour me one more visual: A "trans skeleton" might be drawn as a male frame in fishnets, with a caption bubble saying, "Call me Sheila or else." Cute cartoon, zero science. In reality, it's a reminder that identity is a beautiful, fluid human story, lived, not literal. Bones are the boring adults in the room, enforcing the rules of evolution.

The Wake-Up Call: Let's Unearth Some Common Ground

Switzerland, take note: Jailing a guy for a Facebook quip doesn't make gender ideology bulletproof; it makes the law look like a bad joke. Repeal the overreach, protect actual hate (the violent kind), and let adults debate skeletons without subpoenas.

To everyone else: Next time someone asks what a trans skeleton looks like, hand them a shovel and a textbook. The answer's underground, unchanged since Lucy walked (or, well, since her bones did). In a world spinning toward subjective silliness, clinging to objective bones might just keep us upright.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/10/20/why-is-it-a-crime-to-say-skeletons-cant-be-trans/

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