Delhi Queer Pride 2017 🏳️🌈
Tag: LGBTQIA
Earliest known biography of an African woman translated to English for the first time
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.
❤ She sounds amaaaaaazing ❤
Earliest known biography of an African woman translated to English for the first time
omfg this explains my feelings so much
FUCKING THIS
reblog this to give every trans kid strength for the holidays
to all trans kids: i love you and the world would be much worse without you
Canadian malls add gender-neutral washrooms to promote inclusivity
Shoppers at one of Canada’s biggest and busiest malls can now use the same bathroom regardless of whether they identify as male or female as Yorkdale Shopping Centre opened its first gender-neutral bathroom.
The Toronto mall is the latest public space to offer such washrooms as schools, restaurants, community centres and other institutions move to be more inclusive.
“The new washroom provides an inclusive option for anyone, including transgender people, people of diverse gender identities and those who may require accompaniment of some kind,” reads a statement from the mall.
Canadian malls add gender-neutral washrooms to promote inclusivity
9 Tips For Chest Binding As A Plus Size Person
(AUTO POST)
I’ve had people asking me about plus-sized binding tips, and I’ve been at a loss because I’m, like, the toy version of a transgender?? So these r for u!
I would like to invite you all to embrace the ancestors you never knew.
As members of the queer community, we are in a unique space in that our marginalization is not always shared with our biological family. So we are often left with a feeling of separation to our community and our history, and I want to take a moment to encourage you all to try and bridge that gap within your minds. Think of the queer people who came before us as your family, because so many of them lived their lives so that yours could exist in the way it does.
Think of Oscar Wilde standing in court admitting his love and rejecting the idea that is was shameful in front of his peers. Think of Magnus Hirschfeld collecting data and research so that he could find a path to freedom paved with facts. Think of Marsha P. Johnson, giving out cookies to other sex workers and transgender people on the street and her rage as she threw that shot glass and ignited a revolution.
These people are your family, they are your history, and they built a world so that you could live in it. You may not be related by blood but you are related by history, their lives are irreversibly connected to ours and I encourage you all to take time to hold that in your minds as you move forward today.
‘Trans bodies are safe here’: Students drown out small anti-transgender demonstration (at the University of British Columbia)
Today, students drowned out a small anti-transgender demonstration that took place mere steps from UBC’s Pride installation outside the Nest.
Two individuals not affiliated with UBC came to campus this afternoon with materials denying the existence of transgender people, while stressing conservative Christian values.
“I’m protesting censorship on university campuses and human rights commissions, and the imposition of transgender ideology and the inability to be able to freely speak out on this topic, as evidenced by some of the responses,” said Bill Whatcott, a demonstrator and well-known anti-LGBT activist.
This is not the first time Whatcott has hosted an anti-LGBT demonstration on university campuses, having appeared at the University of Calgary and theUniversity of Regina in 2016.
Around a dozen UBC students responded by chanting “trans rights are human rights” and “trans bodies are safe here.” Some carried large Pride flags to block the demonstration from view.
We Don’t Do That Here
> The college I attended was small and very LGBT friendly. One day someone came to visit and used the word “gay” as a pejorative, as was common in the early 2000s. A current student looked at the visitor and flatly said, “we don’t do that here.” The guest started getting defensive and explaining that they weren’t homophobic and didn’t mean anything by it. The student replied, “I’m sure that’s true, but all you need to know is we don’t do that here.” The interaction ended at that point, and everyone moved on to different topics. “We don’t do that here” was a polite but firm way to educate the newcomer about our culture. […]
> It turns out talking about diversity, inclusion, and even just basic civil behavior can be controversial in technical spaces. I don’t think it should be, but I don’t get to make the rules. When I’m able I’d much rather spend the time to educate someone about diversity and inclusion issues and see if I can change how they see the world a bit. But I don’t always have the time and energy to do that. And sometimes, even if I did have the time, the person involved doesn’t want to be educated.
> This is when I pull out “we don’t do that here.” It is a conversation ender. If you are the newcomer and someone who has been around a long time says “we don’t do that here”, it is hard to argue. This sentence doesn’t push my morality on anyone. If they want to do whatever it is elsewhere, I’m not telling them not to. I’m just cluing them into the local culture and values. If I deliver this sentence well it carries no more emotional weight than saying, “in Japan, people drive on the left.” “We don’t do that here” should be a statement of fact and nothing more. It clearly and concisely sets a boundary, and also makes it easy to disengage with any possible rebuttals.
> Me: “You are standing in that person’s personal space. We don’t do that here.”
> Them: “But I was trying to be nice.”
> Me: “Awesome, but we don’t stand so close to people here.”> Them: Tells an off-color joke.
> Me: “We don’t do that here.”
> Them: “But I was trying to be funny.”
> Me (shrugging): “That isn’t relevant. We don’t do that here.”I really really do want to endorse this. Making a person’s behavior about capital-M Morality is a great way to get people to dig in their feet and escalate situations. By going “Hey, that behavior doesn’t fit in this context.” it removes a ton of the resentment and toxicity on both sides of the interaction.
Lee says:
- The word “transgender” is an umbrella term that covers anyone who identifies as a gender they were not assigned at birth.
- Both binary people and non-binary people are equally transgender.
- Being trans without dysphoria is possible.
- Gender expression ≠ gender identity, as shown on the genderbread person
- Again, if you don’t fully identify as the gender you were assigned at birth 100% of the time, you can call yourself trans. That’s it, there’s no other criteria you need to meet to be trans.
- More info: Trans resources masterpost or Ally resources for cis people
Followers, feel free to add on!
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Queer Fiction Writer 