New concept: Lets support all trans people and not just the ones we find attractive.
oh big mood
Large. Fucking. Mood. You can’t consider yourself an ally if you just support hot trans people. That’s just being a fetishist. Your ability to pass or even just your general looks hold no bearing on your right for human love and support.
Also another dandy concept don’t misgender or deadname a trans person just because you don’t like them.
I walked away cold from a long time friend when he dead-named someone as a joke. Have not spoken to him since. That shit? NOT funny.
The earliest known book-length biography of an African woman, a 17th-century text detailing the life of the Ethiopian saint Walatta Petros, has been translated into English for the first time.
Walatta Petros was an Ethiopian religious leader who lived from 1592 to 1642. A noblewoman, she left her husband to lead the struggle against the Jesuits’ mission to convert Ethiopian Christians to Roman Catholicism. It was for this that the Ethiopian Orthodox Täwaḥədo Church elevated her to sainthood.
Walatta Petros’s story was written by her disciples in the Gəˁəz language in 1672, after her death. Translator and editor Wendy Laura Belcher, an associate professor at Princeton University, came across the biography while she was studying Samuel Johnson’s translation, A Voyage to Abyssinia. “I saw that Johnson was fascinated by the powerful noble Ethiopian women in the text,” said Belcher. “I was speaking with an Ethiopian priest about this admiration and he told me that the women were admired in Ethiopia as well, where some of them had become saints in the Ethiopian church and had had hagiographies written about them.”
Ten years later, Belcher still remembers how “thrilling” this revelation was. “What? Biographies of powerful African women written by Africans in an African language? And to be able to pair European and African texts about the same encounter? I knew then I wouldn’t rest until I had translated this priceless work into English.”
Belcher learned Gəˁəz in order to translate Walatta Petros’s biography, working first with the Ethiopian priest, and then with the translator Michael Kleiner. “As a biography, it is full of human interest, being an extraordinary account of early modern African women’s lives — full of vivid dialogue, heartbreak, and triumph. For many, it will be the first time they can learn about a pre-colonial African woman on her own terms,” she said.
The biography has now been published in English by Princeton University Press as The Life and Struggles of Our Mother Walatta Petros. It has only been translated into two other languages before: Amharic and Italian, the latter in the 1970s.
While researching the text, Belcher discovered that the biography contained the earliest known depiction of same-sex desire among women in sub-Saharan Africa, an element she said was “censored” from the manuscript that the 1970s Italian edition was based on.
Belcher writes in the book’s preface that while she and Kleiner were translating the story from the Italian edition, they came across a “perplexing anecdote about a number of community members dying because some nuns had pushed each other around”. Kleiner suspected the manuscript had “been miscopied, perhaps deliberately, in order to censor the original, or merely by accident”, and speculated that “the nuns were not fighting but flirting with each other”.
After consulting with several Ethiopian scholars and looking at digitised copies of the original manuscripts, Kleiner and Belcher found the uncensored manuscript concurred. They translated the line as Petros seeing “some young nuns pressing against each other and being lustful with each other, each with a female companion.”
“This is the earliest anecdote we know of in which African women express desire for other women,” writes Belcher.
The academic also pointed to Walatta Petros’s relationship with her fellow nun Eheta Kristos, describing their first encounter with each other as “rapturous”. The text says that “love was infused into both their hearts, love for one another, and… they were like people who had known each other” their whole lives. Walatta Petros and Kristos “lived together in mutual love, like soul and body. From that day onward the two did not separate, neither in times of tribulation and persecution, nor in those of tranquillity, but only in death”.
“There is no doubt that the two women were involved in a lifelong partnership of deep, romantic friendship,” Belcher writes.
Identifying them as lesbians would be “anachronistic” partly because Walatta Petros was “deeply committed to celibacy”, she told the Guardian.
“Many Ethiopians are quite upset about my comments about the saint, my interpretations of her relationship with Eheta Kristos,” she said. “Part of this upset is due to not understanding my point. I think she was a sincere, celibate nun, but that she also felt desire for other women and that she was in a life-long celibate partnership with Eheta Kristos.”
I just kept smiling wider and wider the more I read.
Pride month is coming up, so here’s a reminder that the Stonewall riots (in which trans women of color fought for us to have rights) wasn’t about marriage equality, it was about police brutality.
and that the fight for marriage equality wasn’t about being heteronormative it was about lgbt couples being able to have the same legal rights as straight couples regarding their relationship especially during the aids epidemic. it was so that lgbt people could be with their partners while they died.
This will always remain my favorite vintage lesbian art… Do I even have to break it down for you?
I just thought it was a mermaid trapped under ice
the caption says “Are Parisian women becoming more thrifty? Seeing a lot of different types of panties this year!”
presumably half those girls are commando or wearing thongs. this is totally lesbian pinup ads.
If it were just a mermaid trapped under ice, there would be no reason all the skaters above the ice are wearing skirts and are presumably women. also look at that mermaid’s smile she knows what’s up.
I feel the need to correct the French translation, primarily because I’m garbage, but also because the actual translation has a significantly different meaning than what is written above.
The French says, “La Parisienne deviendrait elle économe ? … On voit beaucoup moins de pantalons, cette année ?” “Are Parisian women becoming thrifty? Seeing much fewer pant(ie)s this year!”
I know I’ve reblogged this 5000x before but 1. Never with that corrected translation and 2. I don’t care
this is a great ad but how is she smoking under water?
Lesbian mermaid magic
The cigarette indicates it’s sexual too.
Although I agree that it being usable underwater is a baffling detail
I think the cigarette is to make damn sure you know it’s sexual.
Cigarettes were often used in movies and art to indicate that that woman is a lesbian!
Also see how she has 2 fins not one? It symbolises trousers instead of a skirt, another way to hint at the woman being a lesbian in artwork at the time.
I’m just incredibly relived for the corrected translation, the nonsensical-ness of ‘thrifty = more pants’ has troubled me for a while now.
GUYS.
Although it is made to look like a cigarette–look at the box next to her. It’s a sardine box. She is holding her last sardine like a cigarette. So it actually makes more sense than a cigarette under water….
(Obviously the sexy cigarette imagery is still there, it’s just a clever way to work around the water bit)
this post is just the gift that keeps on giving.
I can’t even imagine being SO STRAIGHT that I’d think this was “just a mermaid trapped under ice” smh
Let nonbinary people define themselves as much or as little as they want.
Let nonbinary people use 10 obscure labels that pinpoint exactly what their gender feels like to them, let nonbinary people just identify as “nonbinary” or “genderqueer” and leave it at that, or let them not use any labels!
Nonbinary people label their gender for the comfort of themself and no one else.
I’m still an Orthodox Jew. I have faith. I keep kosher, I wear a kippah to work, and I pray every morning. I put on phylacteries, because that’s what my father does and what my grandfather did when he was hiding out in an attic during the Holocaust. I’m at synagogue on Saturdays, but if my pager goes off, I drive in to the hospital, because saving a life supersedes the Sabbath. Many people I meet believe that my faith is at odds with my career. But my work allows me to practise the medicine that interests me while helping a marginalized community. I deal with patients who, by and large, have had negative experiences with hospitals and the health care system, and I give them the care they deserve. That is very much in line with my religious practice.
My parents are observant yet socially progressive, and religious practice for me has always been associated with social justice and activism. I love my Jewish traditions. I believe they’re important tools to help navigate the ethics of contemporary life. And the values we read about in the Bible—that we’re obligated to help the immigrant and the stranger and the convert—are fundamentally consistent with helping people with gender dysphoria.
Steel Phoenix Studios 