This seriously happened in 1726😭 During planned executions of Catherine Hayes(for being complicit in a murder), and Gabriel Lawrence, William Griffin, and Thomas Wright, all three for "sodomy"... Three latter were what folks called "mollies", a term that encompassed gay men and gender nonconforming people.
Read more about Margaret Clap's or Mother Clap's mollie house here and some court cases: (a bit graphic at times, beware)
May 9th, 1726. Nine men and one notorious women died at Tyburn on this date in 1726 at a more than usually raucous execution-day.“At the Pla
1. The Day of the Doctor
2. Deep Breath
3. Robot of Sherwood
4. Listen
5. Prequel to The Magician’s Apprentice
6. Before the Flood
7. The Girl Who Died
8-10. The Woman Who Lived.
#OTD in 1750 – Death of highwayman, “Captain” James MacLaine.
#OTD in 1750 – Death of highwayman, “Captain” James MacLaine.
Born in Co Monaghan, MacLaine was a notorious highwayman with his accomplice William Plunkett. He was known as the “Gentleman Highwayman” as a result of his courteous behaviour during his robberies. He famously robbed Horace Walpole, and was eventually hanged at Tyburn. The film Plunkett and Macleane was based loosely on his exploits.
MacLaine was the second of two sons of an Irish Presbyterian…
King of Martyrs by Lawrence OP
Via Flickr:
25 October 2020 is the 50th anniversary of the canonization of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales. It is also, in the Extraordinary Form, the feast of Christ the King. My sermon for today can be read here. This photo is of the Altarpiece with some of the forty martyrs in the crypt of Tyburn Convent, built on the site where many of them were executed by the State.
Marylebone Lane follows a narrow winding course to connect Oxford Street to Marylebone Street – a course which is at odds with the grid layout most of the surrounding streets were built to. This is because the lane once followed the River Tyburn, one of the “lost” rivers of London. It was once the main source of water for the City, but like many of the other tributaries of the Thames, it was culverted as London expanded.
At one point the culverted river was still used as a water supply; one of the few remaining traces of the river can be seen thanks to this, in the form of a small plaque built into a wall on Marylebone lane, stating that the conduit somewhere beneath your feet belongs to the City of London.
Again: Inspired by this post here and also general fandom discussion post-Lies Sleeping
I don’t think we are thinking about the Rivers quite right yet, and that’s why this conversation is confusing. This isn’t really a headcanon but more me-using-a-queer-concept/queer-reading-to-explain-confusing-metaphysics.
My Hot Take: All the Rivers are trans, actually.
And we keep talking about them in cis-terms, and as cis-people, and that’s why Bev and Beverley are so confusing, because they fundamentally do not fit in that concept.
0. Preamble (because this got long wtf)
This is from the lyrics of Laura Jane Grace’s ‘The Ocean’, which she wrote while she was questioning her gender and before she publicly transitioned, and I’m going to quote it here because it’s a) FANTASTIC and also b) an eternal Bev and Lady Ty Mood (and I hope you’ll agree or at least understand why I read them like this by the end of this):
‘If I could have chosen where god would hide his heaven,
I’d wish for it to be in the sound and smell of the ocean,
(...)
And if I could have chosen, I would have been born a woman
my mother once told me she would have named me Laura
I’d grow up to be strong and beautiful like her,
One day I’d find an honest man to make my husband.
(…)
There is an Ocean
in my soul
where the waters
do not curve.
(...)’
1. How Peter thinks the Rivers work and what they actually work like in-universe (presumably)
In RoL, we are introduced throught Peter’s eyes to Beverley Brook and Tyburn as women who have magical powers and who are also, in some nebulous ways, magically connected to a specific river each. But Peter Is An Unreliable Narrator, and never more so then when it comes to the rivers. Beverley has to correct him almost immediately (orishas, not goddesses) but he never quiet catches on.
And I think the problem is that Beverley and Tyburn aren’t women connected to rivers, they are Rivers. They are their River first, and then they are magical beings, and only then are they also manifested as women.
You know that post that goes around sometimes, about Jesus being Gods ‘humansona’?
I think that’s pretty much exactly what’s happening here. Hilariously.
There’s a river, first, a geological feature, and a River, secondly, a magical being tied to that geological feature. And under specific conditions these Rivers create Personas, most (but not all, remember King of Rats) of them vaguely human-shaped, and some of them, presumably, vaguely (cis-)woman shaped. So saying that Bev and Tyburn are woman who are also Rivers is … like really, really going at this the wrong way around.
2. Interlude: cis and trans are kinda dumb concepts to apply to non-human people, actually, so let’s talk about that
But when we read RoL we default to reading them as cis, because they are women who have, presumably, conventionally female bodies, and our society always defaults to cis-ness. So obviously, when there was no further elaboration, we defaulted, as a fandom, to reading the Rivers in the context of cis-ness.
But the Cis-Trans-Dichtomy presumes that Identity follows Body. You have a Body, and you cannot choose it – you can change it, but not pre-select it, and there comes a pre-selected societal identity with it, and you can reject that thrust-upon-you identity, and you can change that body, but you cannot pre-choose your body to fit your actual gender identity from the beginning, and you cannot pre-choose your actual identity, either. But your Identity in a Cis-Trans-Dichtomy context always follows Body, because whether you are sorted as trans or cis by society depends on whether our actual gender identity matches societies presumed identity. Does this make sense? I don’t know if this makes sense.
But along come’s THT, and we learn something incredibly important about the Rivers, from Lady Ty: They’re Personas change based on their self perception. Lady Ty felt younger, so she became younger. And she did this subconsciously. And then she didn’t want that (was, even, disturbed and distressed by that) so she changed back, but not all the way/in all ways.
Thus, for Rivers, BODY follows IDENTITY.
They literally cannot be cis.
Like, the Rivers’ Personas weren’t born. The Rivers created a body for themselves. ‘If I could have chosen’ - they can. They did. And apparently, that body follows identity. Assuming that Lady Ty and Bev are woman right now, and thus their Rivers picked bodies that would be percived as ‘woman’ by society is textually more logical then to assume that all these shape shifting river-ladies just happen to be ‘cis’ by human standards.
(Bodies aren’t gendered. They are gendered by society, and they are gendered (or de-gendered, in some cases) by their ‘inhabitants’. I don’t know where to put that, so I’m putting it here)
This isn’t the best explanation I can give of this, and I’m sure there are other concepts or models to explain the same thing, but it boils down to this: If a Being exists that can mold it’s body based on it’s identity, and that identity changes over the course of it’s life, and that, presumably, can pre-select it’s body, and can pre-select it’s body multiple times throughout it’s life, applying a Cis-Trans-Dychtomy model to it is useless.
But we don’t have a different model at the moment, and a lot of the rivers experiences map onto Trans-Experiences the second we stop thinking of transness only in relationship to cisness (as in, ‘cis as default’ and ‘trans as devination from default’, ‘trans as not cis’, which is exactly what we have been doing until now.) and start thinking about transness as a thing itself (as in ‘transness is all the things where ‘I have a body and then society decided that body was such-and-such gender and I went with it because they were right’ doesn’t cut it’).
4. Tyburn is confusing so we all just pretended there were actually two of them
Lady Ty and Sir Tyburn are not the same person, we said, because how could they. Except the Tyburn used to be Sir Tyburn, and now she is Lady Ty. Sir Tyburn isn’t a different person, but a previous version of the same entity. She doesn’t like to be reminded of that. She doesn’t want to be called Tyburn or be confused with or compared to Sir Tyburn. They have gendered titles. I genuinely don’t understand how I only caught this now, but, as tumblr likes to say, there’s nothing cis about this.
Tyburn reads honestly … like a kinda bad binary-trans-metaphor written by a clueless cis guy from here. But hold on! I’ve got more hot takes! Non-binary spectrum here we coooooome.
Hot Take Two: The Rivers don’t fit into our concepts of gender, but the closest equivalent is that they are all Genderfluid.
Let’s talk about Beverley Brook the River.
Beverley Brook, on the other hand, didn’t change her name when she came back, and unlike Lady Ty doesn’t have a clear cut-off between her Identities, as it seems. Peter meets Guy!Bev in the past and Guy!Bev is dtkiss and calls him babes. Admittedly we had very little pagetime for Guy!Bev, but from what we can see, there’s no big difference between their core identity traits. They share memories and relationships. Almost as if they are actually the same person (It’s because they are. They are the same person.).
And like. That’s not how genderfluid humans work, but also like. Eldritch-River-Partner.
Coda
Bonus: Peter is Very Definitley Bi.
(Implicitly this would also mean they changed their race, ------- which I’m not gonna touch with a ten-foot-pole and a hazmat-suit tbh. Let’s sort this under ‘unfortunate coding because the author Did Definitely Not Think Of This’)
(This is extremely Death-of-the-Author)
(Laura is great go listen to her shit.)
I am confused. Like, pls weight in on this. I don’t know what I’m doing here, most of the time, and I’m not good at explaining these things, especially not in a second language. So this is also low-key the appeal; If any of this is atrocious, wording wise, or you just plain don’t understand what I mean, hmu and I might be able to explain differently. But I think shifting the discussion from ‘How are these two people metaphysically interacting’ to ‘this is the same entity in two subsequent bodies with two different genders’ has some value as a technique and as a theory. Plus, ‘the Rivers are all fluid’ is a terrific pun.
