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Bradley Manning Wants To Live As a Woman
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Reuters reports that Bradley Manning, the U.S. soldier sentenced to 35 years in military prison for the biggest breach of classified documents in the nation's history, says he is female and wants to live as a woman named Chelsea. 'As I transition into this next phase of my life, I want everyone to know the real me. I am Chelsea Manning, I am a female,' Manning, 25, said in the statement read by anchorwoman Savannah Guthrie on NBC News' "Today" show. 'Given the way that I feel and have felt since childhood, I want to begin hormone therapy as soon as possible,' Manning said. 'I also request that starting today you refer to me by my new name and use the feminine pronoun.' A psychiatrist, Navy Reserve Captain David Moulton, testified during Manning's trial that Manning suffered from gender dysphoria, or wanting to be the opposite sex, as well as narcissism and obsessive-compulsive disorder."
Self-identifying as a woman is not a sign of insanity. There are quite a number of transgendered people in the world today, from young to old, pre-op or post-op, leading perfectly normal lives.
While we used to refer to the condition as Gender Identity Disorder in the DSM-IV, it was replaced with Gender Dysphoria in the DSM-V because we now don't think of it as a disorder. In fact, the general "treatment" is not to make the mind match the body, but to make the body match the mind. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_identity_disorder .
Koans and fables for the software engineer
No. But if they keep you in solitary confinement long enough, torture you, taunt you, threaten you, fuck with your head, and then promise you 35 more years of the same, generally turning you into a raving lunatic (which suits their purposes perfectly)--it is just the kind of crazy shit you'll ask for.
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
Yes. So as to avoid cruel and unusual punishment at a constitutional level, prisons have to provide adequate health care. Hell, it's worth it, you can get free chemo therapy, heart surgery, etc. Just recently, a judge struck down a law in Wisconsin that prohibited hormone therapy for inmates because it was unconstitutional.
http://www.todaystmj4.com/news/local/89751122.html
Previewing comments are for sissies!
No. The Armed Forces do not provide Gender Reassignment therapy or surgery. For at least the next 7 or so years, he/she's S.O.L. And then he/she's going to have to find a way to pay for it: it's not cheap (I have a friend who went f->m ) and he/she's going to have problems getting a job with a Dishonorable Discharge. . .
All accounts I have seen indicate that he was starting to feel this way long before any of this happened. I have some Tranny friends (will be camping with them this weekend in fact) and it isn't something one just suddenly one day decide, or that people go crazy and decide to do....its usually accompanied by lifelong feelings of not really being "right".
Hell, I met one woman who lived as a man for years, never felt right, transitioned, and not till the age of about 50 did doctors find some small ovaries inside her. Had apparently really been part woman the whole time, never knew it.
This transition creates an odd conflict. Bradley Manning is a household name. He leaked secrets, he is either a hero of villian. He is a symbol.
Who is Chelsea Manning? She is just a woman going to jail. Nobody knows her. She is not a household name, not a symbol.
Maybe that works out in her favor in the long run? I don't really know, it is a bit of a toss up.... but we have been talking about the plight of Bradley Manning so long, I wonder that maybe this is bad timing, but, maybe there is no good timing.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Associated Press — FORT MEADE, Md. — The text of U.S. Army Pfc. Bradley Manning’s statement that will be sent to the president, as read by defense attorney David Coombs following Manning’s sentencing Wednesday, below:
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Manning's statement, in full:
The decisions that I made in 2010 were made out of a concern for my country and the world that we live in. Since the tragic events of 9/11, our country has been at war. We’ve been at war with an enemy that chooses not to meet us on any traditional battlefield, and due to this fact we’ve had to alter our methods of combating the risks posed to us and our way of life.
I initially agreed with these methods and chose to volunteer to help defend my country. It was not until I was in Iraq and reading secret military reports on a daily basis that I started to question the morality of what we were doing.
It was at this time I realized that (in) our efforts to meet the risk posed to us by the enemy, we have forgotten our humanity. We consciously elected to devalue human life both in Iraq and Afghanistan. When we engaged those that we perceived were the enemy, we sometimes killed innocent civilians. Whenever we killed innocent civilians, instead of accepting responsibility for our conduct, we elected to hide behind the veil of national security and classified information in order to avoid any public accountability. In our zeal to kill the enemy, we internally debated the definition of torture. We held individuals at Guantanamo for years without due process. We inexplicably turned a blind eye to torture and executions by the Iraqi government. And we stomached countless other acts in the name of our war on terror.
Patriotism is often the cry extolled when morally questionable acts are advocated by those in power. When these cries of patriotism drown out any logically based dissension, it is usually the American soldier that is given the order to carry out some ill-conceived mission.
Our nation has had similar dark moments for the virtues of democracy — the Trail of Tears, the Dred Scott decision, McCarthyism, and the Japanese-American internment camps — to mention a few. I am confident that many of the actions since 9/11 will one day be viewed in a similar light.
As the late Howard Zinn once said, “There is not a flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.”
I understand that my actions violated the law; I regret if my actions hurt anyone or harmed the United States. It was never my intent to hurt anyone. I only wanted to help people. When I chose to disclose classified information, I did so out of a love for my country and a sense of duty to others.
If you deny my request for a pardon, I will serve my time knowing that sometimes you have to pay a heavy price to live in a free society.
I will gladly pay that price if it means we could have a country that is truly conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all women and men are created equal.
He says he's felt this way since childhood, seems to have discussed the issue at length with a psychologist while in the military, and even suggested that he had joined the military in the hopes that it would somehow cure him.
Narcissistic Personality Disorder is narcissism taken to unhealthy extremes; it describes only about 1 percent of the population. One might argue that "being an asshole" affects a far, far larger percentage.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissistic_personality_disorder
Koans and fables for the software engineer
It happens.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Saw this on imgur yesterday - worlds worst prisons.
http://imgur.com/gallery/gndRs
Only two US prisons were on it.
No prison thinks much of human dignity.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
when you get the Big Chicken Dinner you become flat out ineligible for something like 45% of all jobs in the US. thats just the ones where its basically flat out regulated because they have ties or are involved with the government in some way. then theres the corproations where HR is going to see it say "nope", thats probably another 30-35%.
The best options for people with the BCD basically boils down to small companies or friends without government ties/contracts, or entrepenaurship (which is itself hard, cause you gotta get customers, and some of them (such as against the governemnt and some big corps) have rules against who they will source from).
the dishonorable discharge is no joke and very real burden to -anyone- who gets one.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
I know you're trolling, but attraction to women is fairly common in trans women. However, the desire to "be a lesbian" doesn't factor into the decision to undergo gender transition for the vast majority of trans women. All of the trans women I know have a horrible time of dating women and pretty much have to give up hope of finding a girlfriend after beginning transition. Additionally, they typically lose their current relationship if any in a spectacular explosion of drama.
That's not to say that all trans women find women attractive. Some like me prefer men, which actually means additional soul searching before beginning transition and weighing alternatives such as adopting a homosexual identity.
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part of humor is taking controversial things and making fun of them
Another important part of humor is originality and creativity. Prison-rape jokes lost all hope of either many years ago. The GP was not making fun of rape, he was making fun of the rape victim.
In a democracy, We The People are responsible for the ethical treatment of inmates. It's one thing to laugh at a random "FAIL" video on YouTube, quite another to laugh at the horrid abuse of people who could EASILY be protected if we took a few simple measures to change how our prisons are managed.
http://www.justdetention.org/
Don't forget, a quarter of the prison population is there for non-violent drug offenses. It's not the rapists who get raped in prison (ie: people who might justifiably deserve it), it's the weak ones who get victimized.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
No, he's eligible for parole in 1/3 of 35 years. He's eligible for pardon in 7 years.
Yet when they ask to have their genitals mutilated and hormones thrown so far out of whack to the point of permanently handicapping them to a degree, it is viewed as a human right
So delicious.
Because she (Manning) was presumably born in the USA, her genitals were likely already mutilated at birth. Secondly, the organ between your ears also has gender just the same as the organ between your legs. The process of HRT brings one's hormone levels in line with normal female levels, so I don't understand why you think anything is going "out of whack."
I used to experience very painful headaches on a weekly basis before I started estrogen HRT. Apparently, that's not an uncommon experience. There's definitely something going on, although research is admittedly lacking (there was a study I can't seem to find again that was able to use MRI to determine brain sex in 75% of individuals in the study).
Worse is that today there is very little in the way of counseling done, and some half of them end up regretting it after the fact.
Sorry, a link to Experience Project isn't evidence, and there have been many flawed, biased studies on the subject to boot, sort of like the studies that back up the practice of routine infant male genital mutilation in the USA.
I'm not taking issue with transsexualism BTW, I'm taking issue with the idea that surgery is the answer.
Yes, you are, because not all trans women undergo bottom surgery. Bottom surgery is a personal choice and not a requirement to live as a woman or get an ID as a woman, although it may be a requirement in certain states in order to amend or change one's birth certificate.
If you're really as rational as you're trying to present yourself as being, I'd recommend the book Whipping Girl by Julia Serano.
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Only two US prisons were on it.
I think you need to work on your counting skills. I counted 4 current US prisons and one closed (Alcatraz) out of a total of 20.
25% is extremely bad given the US's self perceived high ground in all things moral. Remember this includes the entire world, most of which is comparatively very poor and lacks the resources to do much better.
That said, imgur is hardly a reputable source and the list has clearly been skewed by US prison's notoriety in the west. I'm sure there are far worse out there.
No prison thinks much of human dignity.
I refer you to Norway: http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1989083,00.html
Only fools support prisons that ignore the dignity of the prisoners. If you actually want to help society, you support and protect those that need it the most.
some deep rooted psychological scar from being in the armed forces.
I'm going to say that he was screwed up before ever entering the military; being in the military certainly didn't help though. One of the signs was that he was placed in a discharge unit. If his commanding officers had made the call he would have been kicked out and be free to transition today.
Please note: I'm active duty and have an openly gay married* commander. I won't say that he hasn't had problems in his career, it having very much started during 'don't ask don't tell', but he hasn't been having problems with us.
But at the same time I'm NOT going to make like the military is some utopia for trans people. It's much better for gay people, but I would state that as a category the US military is currently NOT a place you want to be if you want to transition. Bradley Manning will probably not be allowed to transition during his time at Leavenworth. The DoD just doesn't have any measures to allow it, which means that people would have to take the effort to do so.
As a general matter, if you want to transition and you're in the military, your best option is to keep quiet and let your enlistment run out. If you're really desperate, there are a number of ways to get out quicker. A bit tougher since DADT ended, but there are still ways. You might lose some benefits, but there's plenty of things you can do where the military will decide to discharge you to be rid of you and not do much else.
(BTW, I go by a '2 out of 3' standard: mental, physical outward, and DNA; he hasn't started transition yet so he's still a he).
*I wrote it this way because I've known gay people who married the opposite gender for various reasons.
I don't read AC A human right
Just lots of suicide because of complete isolation.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
... There's a mismatch between his physical sex and his gender identity, but that doesn't mean it's his brain is at fault.
Actually, the brain may in fact be at fault. There's been several small studies that show that certain areas of the brain are different in volume and number of nuerons between males and females. Transsexuals (MTF), in the study, had a volume (and number of neurons) consistent with females. Gay males were consistent with males. Gay females were consistent with females.
This study was small, and was conducted by sectioning the brain of cadavers. However it has been replicated by a different group of researchers, with a different group of cadavers, and arrived at the same results. Co-factors such as any prior hormone use was accounted for in the study.
The chances are pretty good that transsexuality, at least in male-to-female transsexuals, is the result of a brain that developed with some female attributes, in a male body.
The situation with transsexuality is not that you desire to be the opposite sex, but that you "know" that you are not the sex your body is. So, to use myself as an example, I knew from an early age I was not a male. It didn't matter what my body was, I knew, just as surely as anyone else knows their own gender, that I was not a male.
Just thought I'd add a bit of real information to the transsexuality discussion.
As for Chelsea Manning...we'll just have to take her word.
And that's just a Bad Conduct Discharge, which isn't actually a Dishonorable. An actual Dishonorable is much, much worse. Assuming you didn't get it as a result of a felony, you might as well have committed a felony for all the trouble you are going to have making a living when you get out. With a BCD, you forfeit benefits, with a DD, you are equivalent to an actual civil felon in many states AND you are not permitted to own a firearm by Federal law.
Still, Manning is probably going to have a few more options than most DDs get based on what he did to get there, I expect a book deal at the very least. His real problem is going to be the next seven, sixteen, or thirty-five years he is stuck in Leavenworth and how that affects him when he does get out. Depending on how well he can turn his life around afterward, he may be better off not owning a weapon anyway.
The sad thing about all of this is that, as much as people want to portray him as a heroic whistleblower or a nefarious traitor, he was also in all sorts of emotional turmoil at the time. I'm not so sure he would have made the same decisions if he was in a more stable frame of mind.
In any case, I am really, really annoyed with the military for not removing clearance from someone who was doing things like violent outbursts and who had a history of instability all the way from boot camp on. I am also annoyed with, although not surprised by, about his commanders' reactions to his attempts to express his issues and both their failure to not take it seriously or even to just get him the hell out of work where your lifestyle is supposed to be considered fair game for whether you get a clearance. Manning was clearly an obvious security risk.
What the hell is wrong with teaching people acceptance?
You really should look at the scientific evidence. Your 'solution' was repeatedly tried for many years *and failed badly*. Current methods are more successful. Do you not agree with evidence-based medicine? Or do you only agree with it when it fits your pre-conceptions?