The Case of SUE, the Woke Dinosaur

How Chicago’s Field Museum involved a 67 million year old reptile in culture war activism that harms science and degrades the gender non-binary

SUE, a 40 foot long Tyrannosaurus rex whose fossil remains presided over the the magnificent Stanley Field Hall at Chicago’s Field Museum from 2000 to 2018, has attained social justice enlightenment. Never mind that she died millennia ago in what is now South Dakota, then an area of balmy flood plains abutting an inland sea.

Taking a page out of the Creation Museum’s playbook, the Field’s administrators have decided to distort scientific understanding in pursuit of a political goal. In recent years, through her social media persona, SUE has asserted her gender identity. It all started on Twitter in March 2017. Reacting to a comment, SUE tweeted that her sex was unknown and that, like human gender non-binary people, she uses “they/them” pronouns.

While it is true that her sex is indeterminate, this move conflates the exclusively human concept of gender and the incontrovertible reality of binary sex.

SUE was either male or female. We just don’t know which. This purposeful misunderstanding has now made its way into her new exhibit, opened on the museum’s upper level in December 2018. In a world where even some scientists claim — erroneously — that there is no such thing as biological sex, this sets a dangerous precedent.

In addition to misinforming visitors, the museum’s patronizing move in deeming SUE non-binary disrespects and misunderstands the very non-binary individuals it purports to help. The legitimacy of their identity need not rest on inaccurate interpretations of science, and it’s degrading to imagine that it should. The very concept of gender identity as distinct from sex was created to assert that human male, female, and other identity expressions were facts which were mental and social, not genital. With apologies to SUE and her reptilian cousins, they simply don’t have enough going on in their minds to express gender non-binary identity. Not to mention, we do not know anything about the mind of an animal whose brain rotted away maybe a million years before the Chicxulub asteroid event wiped out the rest of the T. rex species anyway.

Tyrannosaurus Sex

I say “she” and “her” because for many years the specimen was believed to be female. Named after explorer Susan Hendrickson — who spotted the dinosaur’s fossilized bones poking out of a bluff in August 1990 near Faith, South Dakota — there is some indication that SUE was of the fairer sex. Though some of that research has been unproven, a few hypotheses have stood up to scrutiny.

SUE was the largest of the T. rex specimens found in the deposit from which she was unearthed. She is in fact one of the three largest anywhere, and also the most complete of the 50 or so T. rex skeletons discovered. Female dinosaurs are often thought to have been the bigger of the two sexes — as in some living birds, which are believed to have descended from theropod dinosaurs like SUE. This is, however, somewhat speculative.

One of the most promising and exact methods of dinosaur sex determination involves the identification of medullary bone, a type of bone present as a source of calcium to egg-laying females, apparent in nearly all birds. While one paper did find medullary bone in a T. rex — a large specimen to boot — SUE doesn’t have any. That may mean that she was male, or simply that she was not carrying eggs at the time of her death.

So, given the lack of conclusive evidence either way, it is most parsimonious to hold off on formally assigning SUE’s sex. There’s a perfect pronoun for that already: it.

Where Activism Belongs and Where it Does Not

Let me be clear: I have no problem using those pronouns with humans. There is clear linguistic precedent for this, as articulated in this excellent Boston Globe article. I find it a bit cumbersome, but so what? “They/them” seems like a reasonable accommodation to people uncomfortable with using traditional gendered pronouns.

Here’s the thing, though: gender really is a concept exclusive to humans. When the word “gender” is used in the scientific literature to refer to non-human animals, what is meant is “sex.” Hendrickson, who found the bones that started all of this, is sure that her discovery didn’t concern herself with it. “SUE never worried about the proper nomenclature for various descriptions of sexual preferences,” she said.

Taking Science Seriously

There are, to be sure, plenty of fascinating cases of deviation from sex norms in the modern birds, descendants of dinosaurs. Same-sex couples have raised chicks in many bird species. And, occasionally, gynandromorphic birds appear: see for example this startling cardinal. It is suspected that the bird is physically half male and half female.

No such evidence has been found in the dinosaurs, behaviorally or anatomically. In fact, some are skeptical that any of the proposed methods of sexing dinosaurs are remotely definitive, a notion asserted in a 2017 survey of nine species. When I spoke to famed paleontologist Kevin Padian, he stated:

“I can only tell you that, despite all the size ranges and plates and spikes and crests and horns and frills and bumps and knobs and whistles that adorn various dinosaurs, there is absolutely no evidence to establish sex/gender differences in any dinosaur or pterosaur. Any statements to the contrary are anecdotal, speculative, or based on faulty analogies, according to thorough quantitative and ontogenetic evidence.”

University of Chicago paleontologist Paul Sereno doesn’t think that we have any business applying human characteristics to animals at all, gendered or otherwise. In an emailed statement, he argued that:

“…we humans and the folks at the Field Museum insist on personifying all of Nature. It’s an egoistic practice that Homo sapiens has applied to all of existence and continues to do so, from an Earth-centered universe to a man-centered evolutionary ladder, to a still-most-advanced (yet completely unjustified, illusory) evolutionary position. Personifying this individual skeleton starts by giving it human nickname — SUE.”

Sereno instead prefers a less culturally loaded approach to popularizing the dinosaurs he has painstakingly extracted from sediments around the world. “I do not play this all too narcissistic game with any of the many creatures I have created by discovery,” he notes. “Instead I rejoice in the features and biology that they display in their bones, and create vulgar popular names that match the Latin/Greek stems of their proper names. So “Eoraptor” is the ‘dawn raptor.’”

Mark Norell, paleontology chair of the American Museum of Natural History, similarly eschews the anthropomorphic urge. “We usually use “it” when referring to a specific dinosaur, or “them” when used as a plural,” he explained. “We also don’t name our fossil specimens. We refer to them by number. Hence, our T. rex is referred to as 5027. There have been some calls to name it “Barnum” after its discoverer Barnum Brown. However, we have resisted this.”

Taking Science… Less Than Seriously

Anthropomorphism aside, SUE’s sly Twitter persona would seem to be a fantastic marketing ploy for a museum that has seen some harrowing risks to its funding in recent years. Hendrickson, the fossil’s namesake, agreed, saying by email, “…I understand that the museum has decided to embrace the uncertainty for marketing or outreach purposes. It sounds clever, as far as that goes. If the public responds favorably, then they will have reason to pat themselves on the back.”

SUE’s Twitter account can be bitingly acerbic and is surprisingly well-versed in hominid pop culture. It’s mostly good, engaging fun — notwithstanding the usage of the cloying term “murder bird,” a cutesy coinage used by some to highlight the fact that dinosaurs are ancestors of the modern taxonomic class Aves. The account is not always rife with the burbling tweeness that passes for humor in the infantilized corner of the Internet where identity politics activism finds a home. So when I first heard SUE identifying as a “they,” it seemed to me a joke-y reference to the current gender obsession.

I should have been more suspicious. Tweeting about her gender identity might have been excusable: misguided perhaps, but pretty clearly separated from the Field’s presentation of SUE as a scientific specimen. However, in her new suite, some of the signage describing the fossil has adopted non-binary pronouns as well. One sign does make the distinction between SUE the museum ambassador/Twitter star and the fossil itself, noting that the fossil is properly referred to as “it.” But some of the rest of the signage uses “their” pronouns and seems more interested in teaching museum-goers about the trendy movement for acceptance of non-binary identity than it does about paleontology. This is, at best, a solipsistic tribute to PR acumen.

According to an an alarming interview with online magazine Them, docents and other museum representatives now must refer to her using “they.” In that piece, the museum’s public relations director and social media manager lay out their case for SUE as a “non-binary icon.”

Field paleontologists and PR team members declined to answer questions when reached for comment.

The article goes on to cite one museum-goer who advocated for the change as saying, “It’s so difficult to push back against people who cloak their anti-trans sentiment in intellectualism […] so having the consistency in just talking about a pseudoimaginary majestic murderbird’s pronouns gives me another piece of data that I can hold up to those people.”

Such statements illustrate all too vividly the problems with this tactic, for all of its laudable intent to destigmatize non-traditional gender identity. This animal was not imaginary. Its identity is. And the inappropriate application of a pronoun that has nothing to do with its natural history is not data.

Yet, well-intentioned initiatives like this one give the misguided museum-goer every indication that it is. This is the paternalism of an emergent brand of popular science. It seeks to exploit weak understanding of the scientific lexicon to grant legitimacy to a group that — rightly — is seen as struggling. In doing so, those who promote this nouveau conception of biology fail to realize that they ultimately achieve the opposite of their goal. By predicating the legitimacy of a movement on misrepresentations, they both condescend to those they are trying to help and contribute needlessly to the notion that a more expansive gender spectrum is purely a function of magical thinking.

Peter Larson, a paleontologist and fossil hunter who led the team that discovered SUE, concurred, saying, “I kind of empathize with using [non-gender specific pronouns]. But to me personally it’s a little bit irritating because it isn’t as if something has never been written on the subject [of dinosaur sex]… I’m a little disappointed that social reasoning took over for science.”

Dinosaurs and Culture Wars

So what, you might reasonably ask? If it were a casual analogy, you might have a point. But, the people who most fervently promote this new conception of gender take it one step further. It’s not that gender and sex are distinct concepts. They deny that there is a biological basis for sex in the first place. With that increasingly mainstream idea in mind, a tenuous analogy verges into false equivalence.

Gender identity is socially constructed, the line goes. Did T. rexes have such a thing as a culture? No, of course not. But instead of taking pains to disambiguate human, culturally-conceived notions of gender from the science of reptilian sex and its basis in reproduction, the Field appears happy to trade on the popular confusion that currently defines discussions about this subject.

In that Them interview, public relations and science communications manager Kate Golembiewski is quoted as saying, “Science is for everyone […] If [using gender-neutral pronouns] makes one person more comfortable in our museum, if it helps people get more accustomed to using they and them pronouns, then it’s worth it.”

Thus is born the world’s largest (and deadest) comfort animal.