Ahh, thanks for the shout-out!
Yeah, this fragment is really intriguing in its ambiguity, and has been approached in different ways by different translators and classicists. It's something I'm increasingly interested in, Sappho's use of the word "pais" (and its genitive form "paidos") throughout her work. For example, in another poem, she uses "pais" to refer to her own daughter! So it's far from cut-and-dry. Someday I will either find an article about that or write it myself, but for now, I can say about fragment 102 in particular, that a lot of ink has been spilled about these two little lines by different analysts from different backgrounds. And I think the popularization of one particular translation, the one by Diane Rayor that goes "slender Aphrodite has overcome me with longing for a girl," does a disservice to the ambiguity of the lines as well as the statement Rayor is making with her translation choice!
I happen to have two books about Sappho on hand, and this is what they say about it:
Introduction by Pamela Gordon to Sappho: Poems and Fragments, translated by Stephen Lombardo and edited by Susan Warden, 2002, p. xix. (This book uses a different numbering system for the fragments for reasons I'm not fully clear on, ignore that.)
from Sappho’s Sweetbitter Songs: Configurations of Female and Male in Ancient Greek Lyric by Lyn Hatherly Wilson, 1996, pp. 118-119.
Two very different approaches to the fragment, but both use the assumption that "paidos" here should be translated as "boy." Gordon problematizes Lombardo's choice to do so; Wilson takes a different interpretation entirely. Simple heteronormative assumptions on the part of the translators almost certainly play a part, but it's neither deliberate erasure nor complete obliviousness. However, many translations translate this word as "boy" in this fragment.
So Diane Rayor's choice to translate "paidos" in the fragment as "girl" is extremely deliberate and pointed! She's saying, you all are choosing to interpret the object of the speaker's affections as a boy, but it is also equally correct to translate this word as 'girl.' It's pointed, it's intentional, it's a deliberate pushback against common translation practice to point out that the choice to say "boy" is making just as much of an assumption as the choice to say "girl." And that point gets lost when the fragment is presented as an uncomplicatedly straightforward or objective reflection of what's in Sappho's original text - in either direction!
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