Once upon a time there was a poor farmer, Ligdus, who was married to a terribly patient and rather ingenious woman named Telethusa. They were a very typical peasant couple and didn’t have a pot to piss in which is why when Telethusa got pregnant for the first time Ligdus told her it better be a boy! He didn’t have the money to pay a dowry for any future daughters to get married and he sure as hell wasn’t going to support their spinster asses for life either, so unless the new baby was sporting a dick, he was going to kill it. As horrible as that sounds this was not considered murder at the time. In fact if your children disappeared when they were young no one really asked questions…

Obviously Telethusa was not happy with this and was determined to keep her child which was born a girl. She had an idea. She’d name it Iphis, a gender-neutral name carried by the little tot’s grandfather, and just pretend it was a boy. It’s not like the poor dear’s father would be changing any diapers anytime soon. This was something she could totally hide for the ten or twenty years necessary to come up with a dowry.

So little Iphis was brought into the world, dressed in boys clothing, and for all intent and purposes was treated like a boy. There’s no way that could ever backfire… until that is s/he grew up and hit puberty. Obviously her/his father was all uppity about marrying off his son and fetching a nice dowry so he found a suitable woman and promised her his son’s hand in marriage. That would have been Lanthe, who thinking Iphis was a man fell deeply in love with him/her. Now Iphis was in for it! She was up shit creek without a paddle. Should she continue on with the secret and only tell her betrothed on the honeymoon and hope for the best?! Should she spill the beans now and risk being murdered by her enraged father? Fuck, fuck, fuckity, fuck. You can better believe the conversations with mom would have been awkward!

“Maybe you can just hope she’s a virgin and only fuck with the lights out??”

“MOM!”

So Iphis did what anyone would have – she prayed desperately to the Egyptian Goddess Isis to settle the situation and then continued to pretend nothing was off. Finally, after making her nearly die of a panic attack she noticed something a little strange as she was walking up the aisle to get married. She suddenly found herself growing some extra bits and bobs and she married Lanthe, as a reborn man, with no one the wiser.

This story is fascinating as it’s the opposite of Achilles’ childhood. He was born a boy and swaddled in a dress to live incognito as a girl for his childhood. In the end his rearing did not change him into a girl and after his rouse was broken he went on to live quite a life as a somewhat swooshy war hero. Iphis on the other hand, despite being a girl, doesn’t appear to dislike being raised as a boy and in the end turns into one. What can these two stories tell us about living in ancient Greece? Maybe that it paid to be a boy and no one in the right mind would chose to be anything else? In a staunchly patriarchal society that seems fair enough! Also unclear is whether or not this is a story of lesbianism, transgenderism, or something in between. Personally I say love is love and don’t really care to split hairs on the issue…. as for you…. do as you will.