#(tiresias is in the bracket later by the way with adjacent logic. i will have the same biology = gender problem there)

[classicslesbianopinions]

sorry if someone has asked this already but curious about your thought process in choosing iphis for the woman poll

well, the short answer is that someone put the name in the suggestion form and enough people voted in the preliminary round and i went with it.

actually though--i didn't use pronouns in the bio for iphis, and that was deliberate. but i kept them in because i think what matters about a story like this is the effect it has throughout the years, and i think the story of iphis and ianthe can resonate both with wlw and with trans people, in different and similar ways. so i didn't feel right excluding that story when this is a blog with "lesbian" in the url and the story resonates with me as a lesbian, even though i know people will also resonate with iphis as an ancient depiction of a trans man. i do think both of those experiences can coexist. so in deciding to keep iphis in the poll i was mostly thinking about how i felt like the story of iphis and ianthe probably resonates with the audience of this blog. and personally i also don't feel comfortable assigning gender labels to ancient figures, so i didn't want to say "this character can't be part of the poll because they're definitely 100% a trans man" when i don't think anyone can say that.

but it's a fair question! i'm sure some people disagree with iphis's inclusion, and that's understandable. personally i'm also happy to play a little fast and loose with gender here, especially given that the polls aren't all that serious anyway.

(i did have trouble writing the bio, too, because the way the story is told sort of requires you to engage on the assumption that biology = gender, which of course i do not believe. but then i couldn't write a bio that didn't rely on that assumption because of how the story is written. it would have felt like overinterpretation to say that iphis had definitely been a man the whole time--and of course if i believed that iphis had definitely 100% been a man the whole time, they would not be in the poll.)