Slashdot Mirror
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."
Will they really provide that in prison?
No offense to transpeople, but why is this on Slashdot? I don't give a fuck if he wants to be a man or a woman in jail.
Didn't see this one coming.
is SO clearly behind this.
As I transition into this next phase of my life, I want everyone to know the real me. I am Anonymous Cowardess, I am a female.
Getting popcorn - I fully expect this discussion to be mature and informative.
Who cares if he wants to live as a woman, a man or a chipmonk?
This inane crap belongs on Digg not here.
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
Sounds like they thoroughly broke him. First apologizing and then this. Doesn't look like he is going for insanity (trial is over), seems like he got insane for his time in solitary. Not saying that because he self identifies as a woman (something that happens to some people naturally) but because of the timing of the whole matter.
This was from before. His defense (I assume) even released photos of him in a wig and lipstick.
"For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert"
The idea is that sex and gender are not the same thing - one is, as you said, biological, and the other is psychological. Yes, in the end it's all biology, but you can't argue that gender dysphoria is not a real phenomenon. So, the question you have to ask, is what's the best way to treat this condition? Is it to say, "Deal with it, you were born this, you are this," or, is it to give them therapy and open the door to procedures that do, in fact, seem to lessen the psychological suffering of such individuals?
Saul: A man has the right to change his name to vatever he vants to change it to. And if a man vants to be called Chelsea, godammit this is a free country, you should respect his vishes, and call the man Chelsea!
Morris: His mamma call him Bradley, imma call him Bradley.
Saul: Then you're a putz. All of you are putzes. They should change the sign outside from My-T-Sharp to 'ze Three Putzes.
I do believe he was struggling with gender identity issues before this whole ordeal.
Didn't work for Klinger in MASH, won't work for him either.
Much to his distress.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
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"
His gender identity issues were visible in the chat logs with Lamo: http://boingboing.net/2010/06/20/was-alleged-wikileak.html
I read about this on WaPo about half an hour ago, where I noticed they did an incredibly intelligent and thoughtful thing: they disabled comments. Now if only that were possible on /.
Why is the gender choice or alignment or preference or whatever of Manning even relevant to any of the current discussions, and why of all things it it relevant here? Sigh....
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:
--------
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.
They already are. A lot of conservative blogs and news sites have long been claiming that Manning is proof Teh Geys are a threat to national security and condemning liberals for endangering the country by letting them serve in the military. This is just going to revitalize their old gay-panic angle.
Kind of an absurd turn of phrase, isn't it? It's a bit like saying that someone "suffers from" being an asshole.
(Whether Manning deserves to be called a narcissist at all... that is, of course, a whole other question).
unless they involve prison. Am I politically correct yet?
Speaking as a straight, cisgendered ( transgender people's word for "normal" ), white, and quite handsome man.........please lets not make fun of Manning.
He is a human being, some who consider to be a hero, who just happens to have problems.
Bradley Womanning?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I'd ask to be put in a woman's jail as well.
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
With this timing, I had to re-read the headline in my RSS reader 3 times to be sure it wasn't from The Onion. Apparently this isn't new information but it was the first I'd heard of it.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
... 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.
That's clearly untrue. There was just an AMA on reddit recently by someone who changed their sex and then desperately regretted it.
If there is a mismatch between the gender of your physical body and its guts and what you feel you are in your head -- then there is something wrong SOMEWHERE. It isn't some magical ethereal thing compelling you to have this mixup. That isn't to say "if you have balls and no uterus, but you feel like you are supposed to be a woman, then you are mentally fucked up and need to have your head fixed". It's just to say that may sometimes be the case. Sometimes it may not be. I'm sure there are multiple potential catalysts and many are probably even a simple case of "mother nature screwed up and made me one thing but made me feel like another thing".
It would be a disservice to the health of people, I believe, to instantly treat everyone as either clearly the physical sex they seem to be but with a fucked up brain *or* as a perfectly normal person who just needs to whack off some bits and install some others.
To further counter your point that there's supposedly nothing wrong and it isn't a disorder or illness and has nothing to do with the brain -- you can not have a gender reassignment surgery without an IMMENSE amount of psychological counseling.
I think it is wrong to judge people with gender identity issues. I am sure that, whatever causing them, it is fucking awful to deal with (not to mention coping with society, along with it). We are definitely a long way from clearly understanding everything about it, though. Once we do, I'm sure we will be very far along the path to society being able to cope with it more rationally.
Honestly,
It seems like this tidbit of info, coming when it has, is pitch perfect to make people stop listening to the Bradley Manning situation and turn the whole fiasco into a bad joke.
Isn't that just TERRIBLY convenient for the government?
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
The timing seems... odd to me. Right when people are using this guy as a hero and poster boy for whistleblowing and BAM. Try to make him look "a little off in the head" instead.
Just seems rather PSYOP-flavored story. I'm probably wrong, but it feels that way.
I'll just chime in that while it's probably 45% of jobs TOTAL, a BCD(Bad Conduct Discharge) is different and actually better than a Dishonorable. Most of them fixed on the point that people with one are felons, so any positions that ban felons also ban DDs.
A BCD is a misdemeanor level discharge, a DD is a felony level. I'm not a military lawyer, but that's how I understand it.
I don't read AC A human right
What, 600 comments and nobody says how friggin' lopsided this is? A person with big personal issues -- but not a war criminal -- gets 35, while war criminals walk the streets unmolested, get thousands for speaking engagements and even get in our Face the Nation. Bradley, Chelsea, whatever. Not fair.