i was very sleep-deprived

Source One is Burchard of Worms' Decretum, Book XIX. The Decretum was a collection of canon laws compiled in the early half of the 11th Century. Book XIX, or The Corrector, was a penitential: basically a guidebook for confessors. Here's a sin, have u done it, here's your penance.

One of the questions for women was, essentially, "Did you make a dildo, strap it to yourself and fuck someone with it?". The original text is in Latin, and there's a few translations floating around of what it said. Here's one, which I spent the past three days looking for, because I wanted a direct source:

Have you done what women are wont to do: to make a certain device in the form of a male member to the measure of your will, and to tie it to your own or another woman's genitals with some ties, and commit fornication with other women, or others with the same instrument, or with another with you? - Translated from Latin, taken from "Die Bussordnungen der abendländischen Kirche nebst einer rechtsgeschichtichen Einleitung", F. W. H Wasserschleben

Pretty cut and dry re: the use of strap-ons. And dildos, because the next question is "and did you use this device on yourself?"

The second source is from the trial of Katherina Hetzeldorfer, specifically Female Sodomy: The Trial of Katherina Hetzeldorfer (1477) by Helmut Puff, which has an analysis of the trial as well as a translation of the trial texts.

Katherina is the first recorded woman to be executed for homosexuality. There's a lot to be said about her and the way she performed gender but what I'm interested in today is the strap. So, from the court text itself:

...She made an instrument with a red piece of leather, at the front filled with cotton, and a wooden stick stuck into it, and made a hole through the wooden stick, put a string through, and tied it round; and therewith she had her roguery with the two women...

This thing has been out of print for like, 26 years and some of us want to make chubby classic pikachu so uh... I figure it's okay to share bc it's kinda hard to get your hands on the remaining physical copies.

Bonus points: Aelith made some embroidery/applique files for it too

Poster warning of slave hunters searching for Ellen and William Craft. Love the inclusion of a date at the bottom - including the year! - because who knows how long a poster has been up?

They emerged from a courthouse in Boston to behold a vast, multiracial army of men, women, and children — about 2,000 people, by John Knight’s estimate — together shouting the refrain that Knight had come to loathe: “Slave hunters! Slave hunters! There go the slave hunters!” Some called for feathers and tar.

A hackney coach soon drove up with a pair of white horses, wild with excitement. With the sheriff pushing through the crush, Hughes managed to jump inside, but “not without losing his hat and getting somewhat hustled about.” Knight, meanwhile, was caught behind and forced to retreat, as protesters hissed and jeered, and tried to break the carriage doors. Eyewitnesses would vividly recall the scene: The crowd became like one body, single-minded, with long, strong arms, as it covered the coach and rocked it from side to side, intent on taking the passenger. One man, a journalist wrote, smashed open a window, aimed his weapon, and, for a quivering moment, had Hughes within his sights. But another protester pulled him down. The driver raised his whip and cracked it high, and with that, the coach convulsed forward, doors akimbo, people hanging off all sides.

The carriage clattered over the Craigie Bridge, speeding through the toll, driver and rider hoping that the fare would deter the protesters, who clung hard. Above all the others, one “colored man” straddled the roof, riding “in triumph through the streets of Cambridge.” It was protest in motion.

Only many miles later, in a landscape of cattle markets, slaughterhouses, and racetracks, did the carriage at last outrun the protesters, rolling to a stop at Porter’s Tavern in North Cambridge. But the driver, spooked by the ordeal, refused to continue service, leaving Hughes to find his own way back to Boston, where he finally reunited with Knight at the United States Hotel, their Boston headquarters.

(from Ilyon Woo's Master Slave Husband Wife, excerpted in the Boston Globe)

Yam sausages, you see? You grill them… And then slice them and eat them hot. Sounds good, doesn’t it? I would have loved to eat them with you.

The trans men and mascs of Transexspress— or TransSexPress— Issue #1 (1996), a 90s UK trans and gender bend zine from Leeds.