In the 1990s, researchers exhumed a set of human remains from a Savannah, Georgia, monument believed to belong to Casimir Pulaski, the swashbuckling Polish cavalryman who fought for the Americans during the Revolutionary War. The circumstances surrounding Pulaski’s death and burial in 1779 were murky, and for more than 150 years, doubts had swirled over whether his body was, in fact, the one that had been interred at the monument built in his honor. The researchers hoped to finally put the debate to rest. But what they found only deepened the mystery surrounding Pulaski’s identification.
The skeleton unearthed from the site appeared characteristically female—particularly the pelvic bones and delicate facial structure. It was possible, the researchers theorized, that the body buried at the monument was not Pulaski’s, as some had suspected. But many of the skeleton’s traits were consistent with Pulaski’s known features: the age of death, the height of the skeleton, a healed injury on the right hand, changes to the hip joints common in frequent riders. So the team came up with another theory: perhaps Pulaski was intersex.
Two decades ago, this hypothesis was difficult to prove. But a new investigation into the DNA of the contested remains, recently chronicled in a Smithsonian Channel documentary, suggests that the skeleton does indeed belong to Pulaski. This, in turn, leads experts to conclude that the Revolutionary War hero was intersex—a general term that the Intersex Society of North America writes applies to people who are born with “a reproductive or sexual anatomy that doesn’t seem to fit the typical definitions of female or male.”
In Pulaski’s case, Ms. Zieselman said that the discovery highlighted the intersex community’s fight against invisibility — first, by history, when it was common for people not to know they were intersex, and more recently, by surgeries that she said erase intersex traits and identity.
“Just imagine if Casimir Pulaski were born today,” Ms. Zieselman said. He may have been raised as a girl, she said, making it unlikely that he would have joined the military and helped Washington.
“Arguably, if urologists had tried to ‘fix’ Pulaski’s body, the U.S. could still be a British colony.”
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Posts: 38096 | Location: Somewhere in the middle | Registered: 19 January 2010
Originally posted by Bernard: My old neighborhood of Greenpoint has both a Kosciusko Bridge and a Pulaski Bridge so both names are familiar and often heard in Greenpoint.
Indeed and I got the two bridges confused... the Kosciusko bridge is on the BQE, the Pulaski is on McGuinness Blvd.
There is also the Pulaski Skyway, that big ugly structure across the river in New Je4sey.
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Posts: 33809 | Location: On the Hudson | Registered: 20 April 2005
I saw a documentary about Kosciusko. He was an important figure in the Revolutionary War as a military engineer, designing fortifications in clever ways to give Americans the advantage.
He was also unusual for his time in hiring American blacks and giving them positions of high responsibility.
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Posts: 13842 | Location: The outer burrows | Registered: 27 April 2005
