Not at all - I'm asserting that it's the people who virulently oppose homosexuality / lesbianism/transsexuality who believe it's a bad thing that they secretly have similar yearnings. If they weren't so hung up about their own inner sexuality, they wouldn't be so eager to show the world that they aren't by attacking others. "He can't be gay. Look at how much he hates gays." Psychiatrists have testified to this as part of the motivation in killings of gays and trans.
The army refused to release the video that became known as "Collateral Damage", claiming that they probably didn't even have it. Manning said otherwise. Killing reporters and civilians indiscriminately is criminal even in the military.
Manning started transitioning back in 2000. That's well before this mess started. He abandoned it after being treated like shit, same as many others do when confronted with jerks and assholes harassing them on a daily basis. Now she is going forward with it.
There's a HUGE difference between total sleep deprivation and only getting 4 hours of sleep a night. After 3-4 days with no sleep, you start seeing things that aren't there, stop at stop signs waiting for them to turn green, all sorts of fun stuff. Even a couple of hours sleep is enough to fix that for the next day, so don't brag about "only getting 4 hours of sleep" as being the same as no sleep.
Language works the way people use it. "He" is the correct pronoun to use for someone born with a penis. That has not yet changed, despite your attempts to make it so.
Fortunately, the courts disagree with you. Here continuing to refer to someone as "he" after they've started to transition (before or after surgery) is classified as sexual harassment. You're harassing someone based on their previous sex.
There are a few trans judges around. Why don't you give it a try and see if you can avoid contempt of court.
It also doesn't mean that it's right, so your argument sucks. You don't care for your manager, and there would be no ethical problem reporting him or her for illegal activity. Don't want the whistle blown on you, don't treat people like sh*t and don't do illegal sh*t.
The Olympics also banned a couple of XY women who later on gave birth to children. All those who like to shout "but chromosomes" don't really have a clue. Then again, so many of them are guided by religion, not science, that they don't dare question what they have been led to believe.
And it's not like there aren't animals that spontaneously change sex, becoming fully functional in their new sex, including being fertile. It's part of nature, and it highlights that we just cannot take such a complicated subject and reduce it, and the people affected, to a throw-away line about chromosomes. It's not justified by science or ethics.
I never tried to "explain the causes" of female-to-male trans, because we just don't have enough information (and it's irrelevant to the discussion of Chelsea Manning anyway).
Also, your figures for spontaneously deciding against it are based on fraudulent studies, including those at CAMH, where one of the leading proponents of "reparative therapy" was fired and his clinic shut down. He (Kenneth Zucker) made quite the killing over the years milking parents financially by interpreting ANY behaviour that was even slightly outside gender norms as "your kid needs therapy or else". Of course they "grew out of it", they were never properly diagnosed as transsexual in the first place.
Zucker and those like him played upon people's fears, and with support from the religious right that reparative therapy could "fix" someone who might be gay or lesbian or trans. His techniques are now under government ban in many places, including the province he practiced in (Ontario). In New York, such crap was banned under consumer protection laws because it doesn't work as claimed (it doesn't work at all). Many researchers and practitioners who wanted to believe that they could "repare" people (for a buck, of course) did everything to try to justify their actions, which have a long history of fraudulent claims about being able to change people's gender identity. Probably the worst was John Money of Johns Hopkins, who faked all his research, and was only caught out after a post-doc did a review, and his "success" had never actually been happy living as a girl despite Money's claims that he had succeeded in changing David Reimer's gender identity after Reimer lost his penis in a botched circumcision. Reimer detransitioned as soon as he found out what had been done to him, got married, and eventually killed himself. Some success. The gender you identify with simply isn't mutable.
Unfortunately, it took a long time for people to realize that.
Way more than 90% of those who get a sex change don't revert back to their birth gender. The pressure from society, the lack of acceptance, is why some do. Others may do so, or delay, to preserve contact with their minor children. Still others may because of money - m2f trans take a real pay hit, to the point that it's either go back to presenting as male or selling sex, and while many go into the sex trade for this reason, not everyone is willing to risk HIV/AIDS. All this in no way means that they wanted to detransition, just that society doesn't accept them, so they pay the price.
If you read the above link, you'll find that Manning was one who detransitioned at one point because of the inability to fit in in her new role, but finally decided that if you're going to be miserable anyway, might as well be your true self.
Sweden doesn't charge you unless you are present to defend yourself.
Why can't idiots learn that?
And they've been given ample opportunity to question him before deciding whether or not lay charges, which they should be doing as part of their investigation, but aren't, because this is politically motivated.
Once it's been legally changed, not addressing someone with their real name is insulting. It's like back in the days when women took their husband's last name. Referring to them as Miss #OldLastName# even after they correct you is just wrong.
It's a pretty small consolation that you're finally the gender you want when you're rotting away in a cage
To a transsexual, it might seem worth it rather than being a prisoner in the wrong-gendered body. Besides, the knowledge that you did the right thing by blowing the whistle on illegal government activities is better than the guilt of being too chicken-sh*t to do something when you had a chance.
That's pretty much it. It would be the same if you went to a clinic for a prostate exam and found out that the guy with his finger up your ass wasn't a doctor, but an impostor. You didn't consent to being fondled by someone who wasn't a doctor, even though they could argue that you consented when they asked you to "assume the position" so they can examine you. Doesn't change the fact that they are guilty of sexual assault on your person.
Ditto for someone who lies and tells you they don't have AIDS, or who knows they have it and don't inform you.
Being pissed off at the system in general is a valid motivation for blowing the whistle on the portion of it that you can affect. Just because you can't fix everything doesn't mean you shouldn't try to fix something.
Transsexualism is not a mental illness. 40 years after the APA decided that being gay or lesbian is just a manifestation of who you are, they came to the same conclusion with transsexualism. Or are you going to argue that gays and lesbians are also mentally ill and need to be hospitalized for psychiatric evaluation and care? Good luck with that.
Because it's what's between the ears that counts. Your brain governs everything you do. It's who you are. And when your brain has developed (in the 1st trimester) to be atypical, with some structures and signalling behavior that leans towards the opposite sex, what would you expect? And yes, prisoners are entitled to orthodontic care. That's part of good health for everyone, no controversy there whatsoever. When you have control and custody of someone, you're supposed to act as a good custodian. It's not like the prisoner has the freedom to take care of themselves the way that they would wish.
Think of it - even when you're "thinking with your little head", it's the big head that's being influenced. Dicks do NOT have a mind of their own, despite what Barf says in Space Balls. It's your brain that's acting, and it is influenced by the structure of the brain. (How it) function(s) follows form. This is obvious when people have brain damage, tumors, dementia - in all three cases there's an underlying altering of the brain that can change the individual's personality - often drastically. Same with the unborn male fetus, when the testes fail to produce enough testosterone at the 12th week, or when the receptors fail to react. In both cases, we can see the effects in the development of other structures that are growing at the same time - the finger bones. Just look up 2D:4D digit ratio. Kind of hard to deny something is going on differently when there's easily visible proof. To think that it wouldn't influence the rapidly developing brain at the same time is pretty much not believable.
SRS (Sex Reassignment Surgery), GRS (Gender Reassignment Surgery), GAS (Gender Affirming Surgery), they all mean the same thing. The newer terms came to the fore to de-emphasize the "sex" part. And no, gender is not a psychological construct. It's embedded in the physical - otherwise there would be no need for SRS. The perception of being wrong-gendered is due to the development of the brain before birth, and that's controlled by the expression of the genes of the fetus, same as everything else.
The attempt to separate gender and sex is a bit of political correctness. The term "sexual identity" is more appropriate - the sex you identify with. There's no need to abuse words to be politically correct, to try to make an artificial difference between the sex you identify as and the gender you identify as - ask a transsexual and both questions get the same answer, male (female-to-male) or female (male-to-female). Not "agender", not "cross-dresser", not "gender-fluid", not "gender-fucked". The rest of the lgbtqiiac-whatever alphabet soup is not dealing with a person who identifies as a sex other than what they physically are that can be fixed by hormones, therapy, surgery, etc. Theirs is simply not a medical problem, and as such, there's no cure and no need for one, any more than a "cure" for being straight or gay.
The proper term for lgb-whatever would be sexual expression - straight, gay, etc. How you express your sexuality. But we don't live in a perfect world. As one example, transgender and transsexual used to mean the same thing - someone who identified as the opposite sex. Then a cross-dresser going under the name of Victoria Prince appropriated "transgender" to describe male cross-dressers, and published a monthly magazine targeted at the lgbt community to push the term. His idea (I use "he" because he always identified as male) wrote that even when dressed as the opposite sex, transvestites don't lose their maleness, which is "part of the thrill". Now we have everyone being unclear of what individual terms mean.
For example, most people assume that male-to-female transsexuals would become lesbians if they were straight before. It doesn't work that way - 1/2 are straight as females, 1/3 are bisexual, and only 1/6 are lesbians. But such has been the appropriation of transsexuals by the lgbt community (because if you blur the line between transsexuals and cross-dressers, the cross-dressers, many of whom are gay and btw really enjoy beating up on transsexuals on-line) benefit from the "halo" of medical approval transsexuals enjoyed long before being gay became acceptable, that people are surprised to find this out.
Like everything else in life, it's complicated. More complicated than it needs to be.
The point was that abuse doesn't turn someone trans, any more than it turns them gay or straight, contrary to the excuse that rapists use to rape lesbians - "for their own good."
Solitary confinement for an extended period of time is torture, and people who have tried it as part of an experiment to see the effects for only 1 week report hearing voices that aren't there and worse.
When you have someone in custody, you are obliged to take care of their health. This is how bad parents lose custody. It's the same with any person - if they are in your control and custody, you are responsible for their well-being because they cannot act freely to take care of themselves. And this is why the military is going to have to pay for her sex change surgery (and no, this is not the first person in custody that the government has had to shell out for).
Slashdot Mirror
For many, death would be better than the prospect of 35 years in solitary.
Not at all - I'm asserting that it's the people who virulently oppose homosexuality / lesbianism /transsexuality who believe it's a bad thing that they secretly have similar yearnings. If they weren't so hung up about their own inner sexuality, they wouldn't be so eager to show the world that they aren't by attacking others. "He can't be gay. Look at how much he hates gays." Psychiatrists have testified to this as part of the motivation in killings of gays and trans.
The army refused to release the video that became known as "Collateral Damage", claiming that they probably didn't even have it. Manning said otherwise. Killing reporters and civilians indiscriminately is criminal even in the military.
Manning started transitioning back in 2000. That's well before this mess started. He abandoned it after being treated like shit, same as many others do when confronted with jerks and assholes harassing them on a daily basis. Now she is going forward with it.
He had already been on hormones before this all started (2000).
Believe it or not, US courts have already ruled that an usolicited finger in the anus is not a crime.
They've also ruled many times that any unwanted penetration, successful or not, with a body part or an inanimate object, is a crime.
There's a HUGE difference between total sleep deprivation and only getting 4 hours of sleep a night. After 3-4 days with no sleep, you start seeing things that aren't there, stop at stop signs waiting for them to turn green, all sorts of fun stuff. Even a couple of hours sleep is enough to fix that for the next day, so don't brag about "only getting 4 hours of sleep" as being the same as no sleep.
The poster I was replying to claimed otherwise. I was just correcting them.
Language works the way people use it. "He" is the correct pronoun to use for someone born with a penis. That has not yet changed, despite your attempts to make it so.
Fortunately, the courts disagree with you. Here continuing to refer to someone as "he" after they've started to transition (before or after surgery) is classified as sexual harassment. You're harassing someone based on their previous sex.
There are a few trans judges around. Why don't you give it a try and see if you can avoid contempt of court.
It also doesn't mean that it's right, so your argument sucks. You don't care for your manager, and there would be no ethical problem reporting him or her for illegal activity. Don't want the whistle blown on you, don't treat people like sh*t and don't do illegal sh*t.
The Olympics also banned a couple of XY women who later on gave birth to children. All those who like to shout "but chromosomes" don't really have a clue. Then again, so many of them are guided by religion, not science, that they don't dare question what they have been led to believe.
And it's not like there aren't animals that spontaneously change sex, becoming fully functional in their new sex, including being fertile. It's part of nature, and it highlights that we just cannot take such a complicated subject and reduce it, and the people affected, to a throw-away line about chromosomes. It's not justified by science or ethics.
I never tried to "explain the causes" of female-to-male trans, because we just don't have enough information (and it's irrelevant to the discussion of Chelsea Manning anyway).
Also, your figures for spontaneously deciding against it are based on fraudulent studies, including those at CAMH, where one of the leading proponents of "reparative therapy" was fired and his clinic shut down. He (Kenneth Zucker) made quite the killing over the years milking parents financially by interpreting ANY behaviour that was even slightly outside gender norms as "your kid needs therapy or else". Of course they "grew out of it", they were never properly diagnosed as transsexual in the first place.
Zucker and those like him played upon people's fears, and with support from the religious right that reparative therapy could "fix" someone who might be gay or lesbian or trans. His techniques are now under government ban in many places, including the province he practiced in (Ontario). In New York, such crap was banned under consumer protection laws because it doesn't work as claimed (it doesn't work at all). Many researchers and practitioners who wanted to believe that they could "repare" people (for a buck, of course) did everything to try to justify their actions, which have a long history of fraudulent claims about being able to change people's gender identity. Probably the worst was John Money of Johns Hopkins, who faked all his research, and was only caught out after a post-doc did a review, and his "success" had never actually been happy living as a girl despite Money's claims that he had succeeded in changing David Reimer's gender identity after Reimer lost his penis in a botched circumcision. Reimer detransitioned as soon as he found out what had been done to him, got married, and eventually killed himself. Some success. The gender you identify with simply isn't mutable.
Unfortunately, it took a long time for people to realize that.
Way more than 90% of those who get a sex change don't revert back to their birth gender. The pressure from society, the lack of acceptance, is why some do. Others may do so, or delay, to preserve contact with their minor children. Still others may because of money - m2f trans take a real pay hit, to the point that it's either go back to presenting as male or selling sex, and while many go into the sex trade for this reason, not everyone is willing to risk HIV/AIDS. All this in no way means that they wanted to detransition, just that society doesn't accept them, so they pay the price.
If you read the above link, you'll find that Manning was one who detransitioned at one point because of the inability to fit in in her new role, but finally decided that if you're going to be miserable anyway, might as well be your true self.
Sweden doesn't charge you unless you are present to defend yourself.
Why can't idiots learn that?
And they've been given ample opportunity to question him before deciding whether or not lay charges, which they should be doing as part of their investigation, but aren't, because this is politically motivated.
"objective" in the same way that TIOBEs ranking of most popular languages is "objective." In other words, not much :-)
Wouldn't the world be a better place if this was universally the case?
Gitmo wasn't on US soil expressly because neither US law nor the Constitution apply there. Ditto Abu Ghraib, etc.
Once it's been legally changed, not addressing someone with their real name is insulting. It's like back in the days when women took their husband's last name. Referring to them as Miss #OldLastName# even after they correct you is just wrong.
It's a pretty small consolation that you're finally the gender you want when you're rotting away in a cage
To a transsexual, it might seem worth it rather than being a prisoner in the wrong-gendered body. Besides, the knowledge that you did the right thing by blowing the whistle on illegal government activities is better than the guilt of being too chicken-sh*t to do something when you had a chance.
That's pretty much it. It would be the same if you went to a clinic for a prostate exam and found out that the guy with his finger up your ass wasn't a doctor, but an impostor. You didn't consent to being fondled by someone who wasn't a doctor, even though they could argue that you consented when they asked you to "assume the position" so they can examine you. Doesn't change the fact that they are guilty of sexual assault on your person.
Ditto for someone who lies and tells you they don't have AIDS, or who knows they have it and don't inform you.
Russia is far from being part of the 3rd world. China too. Times have changed.
Being pissed off at the system in general is a valid motivation for blowing the whistle on the portion of it that you can affect. Just because you can't fix everything doesn't mean you shouldn't try to fix something.
Transsexualism is not a mental illness. 40 years after the APA decided that being gay or lesbian is just a manifestation of who you are, they came to the same conclusion with transsexualism. Or are you going to argue that gays and lesbians are also mentally ill and need to be hospitalized for psychiatric evaluation and care? Good luck with that.
Because it's what's between the ears that counts. Your brain governs everything you do. It's who you are. And when your brain has developed (in the 1st trimester) to be atypical, with some structures and signalling behavior that leans towards the opposite sex, what would you expect? And yes, prisoners are entitled to orthodontic care. That's part of good health for everyone, no controversy there whatsoever. When you have control and custody of someone, you're supposed to act as a good custodian. It's not like the prisoner has the freedom to take care of themselves the way that they would wish.
Think of it - even when you're "thinking with your little head", it's the big head that's being influenced. Dicks do NOT have a mind of their own, despite what Barf says in Space Balls. It's your brain that's acting, and it is influenced by the structure of the brain. (How it) function(s) follows form. This is obvious when people have brain damage, tumors, dementia - in all three cases there's an underlying altering of the brain that can change the individual's personality - often drastically. Same with the unborn male fetus, when the testes fail to produce enough testosterone at the 12th week, or when the receptors fail to react. In both cases, we can see the effects in the development of other structures that are growing at the same time - the finger bones. Just look up 2D:4D digit ratio. Kind of hard to deny something is going on differently when there's easily visible proof. To think that it wouldn't influence the rapidly developing brain at the same time is pretty much not believable.
SRS (Sex Reassignment Surgery), GRS (Gender Reassignment Surgery), GAS (Gender Affirming Surgery), they all mean the same thing. The newer terms came to the fore to de-emphasize the "sex" part. And no, gender is not a psychological construct. It's embedded in the physical - otherwise there would be no need for SRS. The perception of being wrong-gendered is due to the development of the brain before birth, and that's controlled by the expression of the genes of the fetus, same as everything else.
The attempt to separate gender and sex is a bit of political correctness. The term "sexual identity" is more appropriate - the sex you identify with. There's no need to abuse words to be politically correct, to try to make an artificial difference between the sex you identify as and the gender you identify as - ask a transsexual and both questions get the same answer, male (female-to-male) or female (male-to-female). Not "agender", not "cross-dresser", not "gender-fluid", not "gender-fucked". The rest of the lgbtqiiac-whatever alphabet soup is not dealing with a person who identifies as a sex other than what they physically are that can be fixed by hormones, therapy, surgery, etc. Theirs is simply not a medical problem, and as such, there's no cure and no need for one, any more than a "cure" for being straight or gay.
The proper term for lgb-whatever would be sexual expression - straight, gay, etc. How you express your sexuality. But we don't live in a perfect world. As one example, transgender and transsexual used to mean the same thing - someone who identified as the opposite sex. Then a cross-dresser going under the name of Victoria Prince appropriated "transgender" to describe male cross-dressers, and published a monthly magazine targeted at the lgbt community to push the term. His idea (I use "he" because he always identified as male) wrote that even when dressed as the opposite sex, transvestites don't lose their maleness, which is "part of the thrill". Now we have everyone being unclear of what individual terms mean.
For example, most people assume that male-to-female transsexuals would become lesbians if they were straight before. It doesn't work that way - 1/2 are straight as females, 1/3 are bisexual, and only 1/6 are lesbians. But such has been the appropriation of transsexuals by the lgbt community (because if you blur the line between transsexuals and cross-dressers, the cross-dressers, many of whom are gay and btw really enjoy beating up on transsexuals on-line) benefit from the "halo" of medical approval transsexuals enjoyed long before being gay became acceptable, that people are surprised to find this out.
Like everything else in life, it's complicated. More complicated than it needs to be.
The point was that abuse doesn't turn someone trans, any more than it turns them gay or straight, contrary to the excuse that rapists use to rape lesbians - "for their own good."
Solitary confinement for an extended period of time is torture, and people who have tried it as part of an experiment to see the effects for only 1 week report hearing voices that aren't there and worse.
When you have someone in custody, you are obliged to take care of their health. This is how bad parents lose custody. It's the same with any person - if they are in your control and custody, you are responsible for their well-being because they cannot act freely to take care of themselves. And this is why the military is going to have to pay for her sex change surgery (and no, this is not the first person in custody that the government has had to shell out for).