class-isnt-the-only-oppression:
Happy Pride Month Eleanor Roosevelt was queer, the Little Mermaid is a gay love story, James Dean liked men, Emily Dickinson was a lesbian, Nikola Tesla was asexual, Freddie Mercury was bisexual & British Indian, and black trans women pioneered the gay rights movement.
Florence Nightingale was a lesbian, Leonardo da Vinci was gay, Michelangelo too, Jane Austen liked women, Hatshepsut was not cisgender, and Alexander the Great was a power bottom
Honestly just reblogging for that last one
Probably not historically backed but fuck yes
Eleanor Roosevelt wrote love letters to Lorena Hickok
Several people who knew James Dean have talked about his relationships with men
Letters and poems allude to a romance between Emily Dickinson and at least two women
Freddie Mercury is well known for his attraction to men but was also linked to several women, including Barbara Valentin whom he lived with shortly before he died. Friends have talked about being invited into their bed and walking in on them having sex (documentary Freddie Mercury: The Great Pretender)
Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera are two of the best-known activists who fought in the Stonewall riots
Leonardo da Vinci never married or fathered children, was once brought up on sodomy charges, and a sketch in one of his notebooks is 2 penises walking toward a hole labeled with the nickname of his apprentice
Condivi said that Michelangelo often spoke exclusively of masculine love
Jane Austin never married and wrote about sharing a bed with women (Jane Austen At Home: A Biography by Lucy Worsley)
Hatshepsut took the male title Pharaoh (instead of Queen Regent) and is depicted in art from the time the same way a male Pharaoh would have been
“Alexander was only defeated once…and that was by Hephaestion’s thighs.” is a 2,000 year old quote
I want to hire you to follow me around and defend my honor with meticulous research
Louisa May Alcott(who wrote Little Women):
“I am more than half-persuaded that I am a man’s soul, put by some freak of nature into a woman’s body … because I have fallen in love in my life with so many pretty girls and never once the least bit with any man.”(from an 1883 interview with Louise Chandler Moulton)
The Hatshepsut fact is incorrect and I really hate to do this. I’m all for raising the profile of LGBT individuals in the historical record (looking at you James I), but Hatshepsut isn’t one of them.
For starters, when she becomes ruler of Egypt she can no longer carry the title Hmt nswt wrt (Great Royal Wife – there’s no such thing as ‘Queen Regent’ in Ancient Egypt) as that is a lesser title to the one of Pharaoh. She was married to Thutmose II before she came to the throne thus making her title ‘Hmt nswt wrt’ and when she ascended to the throne as regent in place of her infant son Thutmose III, she could take the title ‘nsw’ ‘King’ as a woman.
Note at this point in Egyptian history, the title of pr-aA (the word we all know as Pharaoh) was not yet in use, in fact it doesn’t come into use until c.1200 BC (I think Akhenaten is the first one to use it…). Hatshepsut is a good 200 years before this point (c.1473-1458 BC).
However, in Middle Egyptian (the form of Egyptian Hieroglyphs at the time) when writing a noun that is specifically gendered (as ‘nsw’ is male) the pronoun, regardless of the gender of the person using it, must agree with the noun (unless you’re saying something like nsw=s ‘her king’ in which case it doesn’t). So when Hatshepsut describes herself as the ‘nsw’ she uses the =f pronoun which is male. These are the grammar rules of Middle Egyptian. Elsewhere, when the word isn’t as specifically gendered she uses =s ‘she/her’ and uses that more often than not. People also overestimate how much of the decision making regarding texts used on temple walls were dictated by Pharaoh. 99% of the time they had very little input in the types of texts that went on the walls as it’s standard and formulaic language and texts (Pharaoh really only did the design layout kinda thing and said who they wanted it to be dedicated to) so the architects would just instruct the artisans to inscribe them. Hatshepsut would in no way dictate the usage of pronouns in specific religious texts. These are set things, having been written hundreds of years before. She’s not altering them, they’re just copying up texts that already exist onto the walls. This is also why they’ve got male pronouns.
Take for instance the text where Hatshepsut is spoken of as being born of Ra and thus has divine right to rule Egypt. This was done a) to shut up those who would seek to overthrow her because she was a woman and because her son was 4 years old (seriously if you don’t think the nobles were super excited at an opportunity to get on the throne because they can discredit the widow and kill the only son of the last king you need to do some more reading on Egyptian political intrigue. It’s like Game of Thrones but with more sand and about the same amount of incest) b) sA rA (son of Ra) is another formulaic phrase that is set in gender. All kings are ‘sA rA’ so she isn’t going to rock the boat and suddenly change all the religious rules as well as being a woman on the throne. Oh boy is that a sure fire way to get yourself assassinated. She wants to present herself as a legitimate ruler not a ‘hey let’s change all the things’ (If you know of Akhenaten then you’ll know exactly what happened to him with regards to changing stuff. It didn’t end well.)
As for being depicted as male, there’s one thing people need to understand about Egyptian art; it’s extremely rigid in its conventions. This is why Akhenaten (whom I’d actually more seriously lean towards as a Genderfluid individual) and his art style was so shocking to the Egyptians. They had very set ideas of how someone should be portrayed. So when it comes to the ‘nsw’ there are set rules that have to be followed: must be portrayed as a fit young man (regardless of age. Ramesses II was still depicted this way even when he was 80+ years old), must have the iconography of kingship (nemes headdress, crook and flail, bulls tail, false beard), must never be depicted as old or dead (oohhhh boy this is a no no). People like to jump on the false beard thing, but in truth no king of Egypt had a beard. They all had the false beard as a sign of ‘wisdom’ so this being unique to Hatshepsut isn’t really a thing. It’s a universal Pharaonic art convention. Just like they all have the nemes headdress.
I don’t like taking down posts like this because it makes me seem like a joyless killjoy that wants to stomp all over LGBT individuals in history because they deserve to be heard and spoken about. Too long have we ignored them in history. But this is not the intent here. When there is an LGBT individual, like Alexander the Great, I’ll yell it from the rooftops. What we see with Hatshepshut is a misrepresentation of the narrative by those who have very good intentions, but do not understand the context they’re working with. Time and again Historians warn of modern bias and the application of modern sociological terms to the historical record. We should try to avoid it because it distorts the record and the voices of the people in the past. We can say ‘Evidence suggests that Akhenaten may be what we’d term today as a genderfluid individual’ but we can’t say ‘Akhenaten is genderfluid’ because that’s a certainty and without direct evidence to say he was that’s a misrepresentation of the data. Hatshepsut appears to change gender pronouns, which in modern sociolinguistics would suggest that she was not cisgender. However, context, which unfortunately most people will not have because they don’t actually read Middle Egyptian (yeah yeah I’m a nerd) won’t know of the specific grammatical rules that govern the language and therefore see the evidence presented before them as ‘not cisgender’ rather than ‘Middle Egyptian is an absolute dick when it comes to set genders and formulaic language and you must always assess the context before making a definitive conclusion’
tl;dr: Hello I’m an Egyptologist and I’m sorry to say her pronoun change is actually a consequence of formulaic language and grammar rules and not because she wasn’t cisgender.
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