#pretty western-centric bc i don't know enough about non-western cultures especially precolonial

[jaybarou]

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Unpopular opinion maybe, but recently I have been thinking about queerness, history and how to mind the gap that it seems to open in the LGTBI+ community.

I have made peace with myself in a way, but I need to write it down.

I first felt the gap when reading about doctor Eleno de Céspedes; I made the all too frequent mistake of reading the comments after the article, on twitter. It was full of people who had read the headline and decided which was the hill they would die on.

There were angry lesbians saying that calling him a trans man was erasing lesbian representation. There were angry feminists (dangerously close to terfs) claiming that calling him a trans man was wrong because this was a clear case of a woman dressing as a man to be freeer. There were angry people claiming there was no way of knowing and that neutrality should be preserved. And angry people claiming this was clearly a trans person.

So I investigated by actually reading the article and googling a little bit.

(I made up my mind pretty soon, because a person who sews himself a penis to pass a medical exam... During his trials, he could have been given a lesser sentence if he retracted and admitted to being a woman. He never did, he chose 200 leashes and 10 years recluse working free as a nurse to being considered a woman again, so, read on your own and make up your mind)

But what really stayed with me is how this case is well documented because there were judges involved, but many other queer figures are barely mentioned in other's stories, many live hidden, and some don't fit our modern labels.

The point of all these labels we have now is us labelling ourselves instead of letting others do it for us with insults. Dead people can't do that. Retroactively adding labels is necessary, to study history, of course, but when we call historical events by modern terms we may make a mistake.

Catalina de Erauso, for example, was a scoundrel (appreciative) who used male regalia when she wanted to duel, kill, conquer, and female habits when she wanted to avoid justice in a nunnery.

Trans? Who knows?

Boston marriages are predominantly known as a somewhat visible form of lesbians, same as confirmed bachelors. But can we be sure? Are we sure it is not asexuals who don't want to go through conventional hops? Trans people with a friend who loves them platonically? Neurodiverse people who found solace in someone who understood them? Two foreigners unwelcome in a western world who are leaning on each other? Feminist women who chose to be spinsters instead of married, in a way? Or the opposite! Prude women who despised "brutish men" and choose to live together in purity to avoid the issue? (not my beliefs, just some historically relevant tends that unfortunately resurface in terf trends) Abused women supporting each other? Three people under the same roof, a friend of the family or a poly relationship?

We can make more or less educated guesses in each personal case, we can only study it as general trends, follow the whispers and accusations. It is not worth fighting over a few scraps. We don't know which letter of the intersectional LGTBI+ they were, we know what we know.

We know the very few things that remained, a few thoughts and a few things they did.

And that is the point.

Whatever they did, however they labelled themselves in their heads, the important thing is what they did. They chose to live by the way they felt and thought, in unconventional ways, that is the whole reason why they are in some history books, because the way they did thing was unconventional enough to be written down (denounced, accused, written about...)

In other words, to their society, they were queer.

And YES, YES, some of the options I said are technically straight, by our modern standards. The fact remains, that their behaviour made them stand out among their peers.

They can still be lesbian icons, or bi icons, or trans figures, or ace idols, simultaneously, because they still represent people who dared to (or had to) live queerly. Who saw their contemporary role models, genders, sexualities, traditions, practices... and they said, well, I'll have none of that.

(There is a sad argument to make here about the people who were queer but assimilated or hid well enough to never make it into judicial ledgers and whose diaries never reached us. The quiet stories that were mislabeled straight and we will never be able to learn or distinguish from straight stories. But that's rambling for a different post)