Introducing Contextual Observations in Support of All Gender Expressions ( <scp>COSAGE</scp> ): A Crowdsourced Guide for Documenting Assigned Sex at Birth and Gender Expression in Human Identification Efforts
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVES: Forensic practitioners will encounter unidentified decedents who are transgender and gender diverse (TGD) in their casework. While gender identity cannot be estimated from the skeleton, nor known until a decedent is positively identified, physical and contextual evidence of gender expression may inform biocultural identification efforts. The Contextual Observations in Support of All Gender Expressions (COSAGE) form is introduced as a tool meant to mitigate cognitive biases and guide a biocultural approach for considering evidence of gender expression in unidentified persons cases. MATERIALS AND METHODS: COSAGE was developed through a crowdsourcing approach with input from anthropologists, TGD community members, and authors' positionality. The form allows users to document gender-affirming personal items and medical procedures alongside more traditional skeletal sex estimation and contextual evidence in unidentified decedent cases. The form is a "living" document designed to evolve with changes to skeletal methods, gender-affirming personal items, medical procedures, and terminology. RESULTS: The COSAGE form is a four-part guide for documenting (1) the analyst's decision-making process for estimating skeletal sex and assigned sex at birth (ASAB), (2) skeletal evidence of gender-affirming care, (3) nonskeletal evidence of gender-affirming care and other aspects of physical appearance, and (4) associated personal items. Examples of potentially gender-affirming items and skeletal modifications are embedded within the form and suggestions are presented for reporting this evidence within unidentified persons databases. DISCUSSION: The COSAGE form contributes to a growing call to apply biocultural approaches in forensic anthropology casework. Practitioners can use the form to better document contextual information that may aid identification efforts in cases involving TGD decedents.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.012 | 0.036 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.054 | 0.028 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".