Iphis

So the mother goes to the temple to pray to the goddess Isis, who promises to make things right, and Iphis is transformed, just in time, into a boy.

Girl Meets Boy « Tales from the Reading Room 2009

Iphis is born a girl to a family who cannot afford one, and so her mother brings her up as a boy.

Girl Meets Boy « Tales from the Reading Room 2009

It’s good material in the first place – as opposed to all the more gory and disastrous metamorphoses that Ovid recounts (the fact that Ted Hughes chose Ovid for a collection of poems should tell you something), the story of Iphis is an optimistic winner.

Girl Meets Boy « Tales from the Reading Room 2009

Whilst I was at Chambery I had composed an opera entitled Iphis and Anaxarete, which I had the good sense to throw into the fire.

The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1782

She falls in love with her childhood friend, Ianthe and the pair are engaged to be married, only Iphis and her mother are inevitably concerned as to how this marriage might turn out.

Girl Meets Boy « Tales from the Reading Room 2009

Lo! the aged Iphis, thy father, draweth nigh to hear thy startling speech, which yet he knows not and will grieve to learn.

The Suppliants 2008

Lo! the aged Iphis, thy father, draweth nigh to hear thy startling speech, which yet he knows not and will grieve to learn.

The Suppliants 2008

It would be necessary to have tried all conditions, to have been man and woman like Tiresias and Iphis, to decide this question; still more would it be necessary to have lived in all conditions, with a mind equally proper to each; and we must have passed through all the possible states of man and woman to judge of it.

A Philosophical Dictionary 2007

She bears a girl and attempts to conceal her gender by giving her a name that is of ambiguous sex: Iphis.

Postcard 2006

Ovid, particularly Heroides XV (basically having Sappho call female homoerotic relationships shameful) and also in the story of Iphis and Ianthe in his Metamophoses (in which he shows some sympathy but ultimately has Iphis magically changed into a boy).

Archive 2006-06-01 2006