Elon Musk, the billionaire who built his reputation on being a tech innovator, is once again proving his lack of scientific knowledge. This week he repeated transphobic claims about the ‘gender’ of pelvis bones, claims scientists have long since debunked.

On Monday, Musk shared a video from a museum showing the pelvis from a female skeleton. In the video, a metal ball representing the size of a baby’s head fits through the pelvis bone.

“Sex/gender is literally true down to the bones,” Musk tweeted. Literal anthropologists and archeologists disagree with him.

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The ‘gendered’ pelvis bone is a long harbored obsession for terminally online transphobes. Images like these are so often shared that the international news agency AFP issued a fact check last year, in which multiple scientists described the whole claim of gendered skeletons as “misleading.”

“We cannot say definitively what sex an individual was based on looking at the shape of their bones,” explained Caroline VanSickle, a biological anthropologist and assistant professor at AT Still University. “We can offer a fairly educated guess, but even then we sometimes get the answer wrong or end up with inconclusive results.

“We also lack methods to identify intersex individuals, who make up around two percent of the population, and have limited data on how modern gender-affirming hormone therapies might affect the skeletal features traditionally used to estimate sex.”

Rebecca Gowland, an archaeology professor at Durham University, said that archeologists often use five categories for sex identification in skeletons: “male, probable male, unknown, female or probable female.”

“The ambiguity is based on a number of different factors … [including] poor preservation, or it could be that some of the skeletal traits used to estimate sex are ambiguous … in that particular skeleton,” she said.

According to Pamela L Geller, Department of Anthropology associate professor at the University of Miami, sexual dimorphism (the physical differences between sexes in biology) is “not very pronounced in humans.”

“Humans and non-humans exhibit a range of intersex conditions … So recognizing that there is a tremendous range of human variation, really, what we identify are ideals about male-ness and female-ness,” she said. “And then we try to cram the majority of people into those ideals even though they might not fit so well.”

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