Reading a perfectly good speculative fiction novel, and then the main character identifies the 'gender' of the skeleton of a seven-year-old??
Archaeology nerd rage time

I've stopped eyerolling enough to explain why for people who don't work with skeletons. I'll start showing some drawings of human remains two tweets from here to illustrate. #archaeology 2/6

First, you don't identify gender from a skeleton, you estimate biological sex. This is a common mistake, conflating 'gender' and 'sex' 3/6

If you *do* want to estimate sex from the skeleton, you have options, mostly looking at the skull and pelvis. Skulls have some pretty big differences, mostly a result of larger muscle attachments in males. This graph shows the gradient in common landmarks between fem and masc 4/6

The pelvis is even more accurate for estimating sex as shape differences in the pelvis are more a result of reproductive anatomy. A lot of it boils down to the fact that males don't need to push out babies, so their pelves are narrower 5/6

In a seven year old? None of these skeletal changes have occured because sex-based differences don't really manifest until after puberty. Bioarchaeologists would never estimate sex in a 7yo
Unless this character was walking around with a portable DNA lab I'm not buying it.
Fin.