Riley Black is a “trans dinosaur expert” not only in the sense of being a dinosaur expert who is also transgender. He is also an expert, or so his credentials say, on trans dinosaurs.
Here is an excerpt from Riley’s 2019 treatise on “transgender dinosaurs” in 2019, via Nature (emphases added):
Most official forms give you the binary demographic choices of ‘male’ and ‘female’, but I don’t feel comfortable assigning myself to one or the other for my gender. I was born physiologically male, but have come to realize that I’d feel more comfortable in a more feminine body. That’s why I identify as both non-binary and trans without any sense of contradiction. Sex, gender and sexuality are inter-related, but not synonymous, which makes me all the happier that Chicago’s Field Museum in Illinois ended the ‘boy or girl?’ discussions about the Tyrannosaurus rex specimen ‘Sue’ and opted for gender-neutral pronouns in March 2017. We don’t know the dinosaur’s sex, and we’re 66 million years too late to interrogate that T. rex about its gender.
This is, of course, pseudoscientific gibberish in the service of advancing radical postmodern gender theory. Paleontologists have many tools for assessing the sex of fossilized dinosaur remains, as explained by the known transphobes over at Scientific American:
Living animals have primary sexual characteristics, such as genitalia, that differ between males and females. These are soft-tissue organs that generally do not leave marks on the skeleton and are therefore not preserved in the fossil record. There may be features associated with reproduction that do leave bony traces, however. For instance, in the female human pelvis, the angle of the bony arch beneath the pubis is much wider than it is in males and the sacrum is usually is flatter as well. Both of these features relate to the need for a larger pelvic outlet for birthing infants and are thus reliable sexual markers for forensic scientists and hominid paleontologists.
Similarly, in the dinosaur Tyrannosaurus rex, some individuals have pubic bones angled farther away from the back vertebrae, a feature that experts believe created additional abdominal space to help eggs pass through in females.
Dinosaurs, like humans, are sexually dimorphic species. In laymen’s (laythem’s, to accommodate Riley’s stated pronouns of they/them) terms, there are gentleman dinosaurs and lady dinosaurs. All fossil remains are of either a male or a female dinosaur. One doesn’t need to “ask” a dead T-Rex what its gender identity is to find its sex out just like one doesn’t need to ask Riley about his sexual identity to conclude that he’s a man.
Source: The Geological Society of America
Nonetheless, Riley doesn’t allow reality to prevent him from smuggling his nonsense into children’s books. The groomers never do.
This book is fantastic! Follow the link to read my review of Did You See That Dinosaur? by Riley Black! 🦖🦕https://t.co/LOKGsHR6JS…#blog #blogger #dinosaur #kidsbooks #bookreview #kidsbookreviews #dinosaurbook #books #blogpost #Review #timetravel #fossils #prehistoric pic.twitter.com/m23xwIShsQ
— Uncrated (@uncratedtheshow) November 22, 2020
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