"... were to see whether perchance she were to love me. If only she came nearer and took my soft hand, immediately I would become her suppliant"
Alkman, in the First Partheneion

As documented by George Catlin in Sac and Fox culture:
'Dance to the B----, 1835'

“…a feast is given to the ‘B-----’, as he is called in French, who is a man [sic] dressed in woman’s clothes, as he is known to be all his life, & for extraordinary privileges which he is known to possess,...

Herodotus: "There are many diviners among the Scythians, who divine by means of many willow wands as I will show. They bring great bundles of wands, which they lay on the ground and unfasten, and utter their divinations as they lay the rods down one by one;.... (1)

Unnamed masc-leaning gender diverse people in Brazil (encountered by Jesuit missionaries in 1500s/1600s) (took offense when called women)

(if anyone has an excerpt of this, I'd be so happyy if you could share it🥺🌸 it was mentioned in an essay I read but i forgot the namee so can't find the source😭)

"they have priests & priestesses who are principal persons of their ceremonies, rites & omens, to whom all the important affairs are entrusted, paying them well for their labor. Ordin. dress as women, act like prudes & are so effeminate that one who does not know them would believe they are women"(3

This administration really is speed-running the greatest hits of the 19th and 20th century that gave rise to the Great Depression. Today, they’re bringing back the conditions of transmission of the deadly 1917 flu!

Kleokritos the kinaidos: "He was lampooned as a weakling, a kinaidos, a foreigner, of low birth, and a son [sic] of Cybele, since effeminate men were present at the mysteries of Rhea (Cybele). He also looked like a bird. Thus goes the saying about kinaidoi" (The Suda)

The Trump administration wants to take an ax to the East's last great forests The fight over the roadless rule has long focused on the West, but its repeal could fragment some of the last pristine forests in the East.

"As the Trump administration moves to dismantle the policy and open those lands to logging and mining, the future of these forests — and the communities that rely on them — is in question"

grist.org/regulation/t...

", and then had grown a beard and developed masculine attributes and had married a wife; and that he had also seen a boy with the same record at Smyrna. I myself saw in Africa a person who had turned into a male on the day of marriage [in] Thysdritum…"
-Pliny The Elder (b ca 23 CE & died 79 AD)

"... as their parents watched, and at the order of the augurs was transported away to a desert island. Licinius Mucianus has recorded that he personally saw at Argos a man named Arescon who had been give the name of Arescusa and had actually married a husband,...

Pliny The Elder in his natural history, citing Annals of the Pontiffs: (Roman lens obv) "Women transforming into men is not an idle story. We find in the Annals that in Publius Licinius Crassus and Gaius Cassius Longinus [171 BCE] a girl at Casinum was changed into a boy,....

& also 'In Memoriam: Trans+ Remembrance Day 2025', which I will not link directly because it contains VERY triggering, sensitive, graphic topics & text on self harm, suicide, hate crimes of gender diverse & gnc people from colonial history to the 1940s; But it is available on my Substack also(⚠️)

This is my belated Christmas gift (frogot) to the 2SLGBTQIA+ community of Substack—a contemporary 1894 news article about Columbia Hall, or as it was more known 'Paresis Hall’, aswell as an illustrati... This is my belated Christmas gift to the 2SLGBTQIA+ community of Substack—a contemporary 1894 news article about Columbia Hall, or as it was more known 'Paresis Hall’, aswell as an illustration.

I have also written more about Columbia Hall, people who frequented the bar, aswell as some of Jennie June's friends & acquaintances in these two essays:

(1) A Contemporary 1894 Newspaper Article On Columbia Hall or Paresis Hall (aswell as more elaboration & deets)
open.substack.com/pub/lilliand...

2SLGBTQIA+ activist Jennie June notes in her 1921 book, The Female-Impersonators meeting ca 40 ultra-androgynes in total (term roughly synonymous with transfem+) in few years she frequented the area... Jennie had travelled much of the world & noted that 'the underground' existed in every major city.

Darker history with the Hall is how the gangs would lure in destitute queer kids, young adults & ess. coerce them into becoming prostitutes, a 'service' which catered to older men; Most were 'fairies', broad term for sexually promiscuous gender nonconforming people (queer cis & transfem+)

...aswell as general targeting & police brutality, the former of which they often had to bribe the police with to avoid being arrested... which happened a lot.

The New York police department was then particularly vile against 'Inverts' & 'sexual intermediates'— Jennie June tells many accounts in her books of how violent crimes against LGBT+ folks back then were often neglected or treated as some fetish gone wrong, or otherwise given little effort to solve.

Police rarely dared venture here, but it was raided around 1895, and that was seemingly the end of Cercle Hermaphroditos aswell, since Jennie speaks of it as having its members scattering then. It is not known for sure when the club itself shut down, but seemingly no longer active by the 1900s

1894 article & illustration on Paresis Hall or Columbia Hall itself, as featured in The Evening World, New York newspaper that prided itself in brigading against, getting several 2SLGBTQIA+ establishments shut down
Not once did they condemn the gangsters' vile deeds, only patrons' dispositions.

A floor above sat Cercle Hermaphroditos, informal organisation of around 20 people—all ultra-androgyne—, its quasi leader the pseudonymous Roland Reeves.

They kept storage of feminine clothing they'd don together whilst conversing about actualities & injustices against those 'sexually intermediate'

Columbia Hall / Paresis Hall was a bar & club active in the 1890s at 32 Cooper Square or Bowery, New York.
Run by gangsters, it was frequented by lesbian & bi women, gay & bi men, aswell as transfem & transmasc+ folks.

Read more: en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Fem...

(of the 3 small, it's the middle)

'I had no-one to talk to': The 92yo trying to save his dying language Peter is the last living speaker of the First Nations language Thiinma. When he met linguist Rosie, they used music to help keep his knowledge alive, and formed a beautiful friendship along the way.

"Peter and Rosie use power of song and an appearance on The Piano to save endangered language"

www.abc.net.au/news/2026-04...

And another terrible fact is how we live more crowded & compact than ever before! And also that far more children children go to school & daycare nowadays than they did in the era before widespread vaccines, which isn't a bad thing on its own, but is when we add unvaccinated children to the mix! 😵‍💫

Welcome back, 'so, how many of your children have died from measles, Gertie?' - 'oh, two in the last seven years, Marguerite; another from the pox'

Will we really have to be given a lesson in familial death once again, as our ancestors were & thus after sprinted to vaccinate their children as soon as they became available? Learning the history of mortality & disease should be enough to deter anyone from rejecting what would save lives ;_;

Total opposite goes on in South America / Abya Yala—there, some conservation areas have had their protections stripped, with logging & mining threatening with extinction, pollution; displacement & death of native people, as it has before.
Deforestation has slowed, but injustice perseveres

"He came back home late and drunk, veins full of nectar and on unsteady feet. Then, half-asleep and with drunken confusion he fitted the virginal [part?] to the masculine type and added masculine members to women. So now desire is enjoyed with depraved joy"

", which as soon as it offends fortune is broken, the natural parts which shame hides, when he had made them individually over an entire day, he was soon able to fit each one to its own body, when he was suddenly invited by Bacchus [Libero] to a feast....

Phaedrus / Phaeder (b. ca 15 BC) in his Fables on LGBTQ+ folks through a Greco-Roman lens:
"Another person asked what system had produced tribads and soft men, and the old man explained: that same Prometheus, the creator of [our] common clay,...

"... They rush, as if victims of continual intoxication, to new forms of lust, and sustained by this disgraceful mode of life, they rejoice in the abuse of their sexual powers"
-Soranus of Ephesus