Bradley Manning wants to live as a woman

[tik 🪀✨]

Isn't it enough that she will lose 35 years of her life in prison? Why should she also be forced to also endure being psychologically unwell by being forced to live as a man? I'm biased, of course, but it makes sense to me. Yes, it costs the state money - but disallowing it amounts to cruel and unusual punishment. If you happened to have a chronic but not life threatening disease when you entered prison, would the services and medication you need remain unavailable? Only because people struggle to empathise with her specific condition do they question her. Some of you need to grow up.

[tik 🪀✨]

Link, it's just common courtesy. That's it. Obviously there is a whole process that needs to happen to make sure everything is legitimate and that will take place in privacy over time. But here, now, it's simply the polite thing to do. You lose nothing by using the other pronouns. By not using them, you are actually encouraging psychological distress for no reason besides your own stuffy, legalistic smugness. Again, it requires basically no effort and costs you nothing and is polite.

This pronoun argument is so dumb. Whether or not the burden for her treatment should be carried by the state is so much more interesting.

[tik 🪀✨]

Thank you for giving an example of stuffy, legalistic smugness. You can always count on memphis when you need it.

[tik 🪀✨]

It's not about what either of us believe. It's just being polite, and it costs nothing. You don't gain anything by basing which pronoun you use on their chromosomes. If you believed you were Jesus Christ I'd call you Jesus to avoid needlessly upsetting you and let a professional actually challenge your identity delusions.

[tik 🪀✨]

I wrote that and wondered if anyone would misinterpret it as me saying Manning is delusional. Then, I thought, nah, I should give memphis more credit than that. No, I don't think she is delusional. I was just drawing up a comparison with another sort of identity issue and how I'd treat them.

But yes, I know to you it's "pretending," and that's.. better than nothing, and does no harm.

[tik 🪀✨]

A couple people have said that prisoners get better medical care than most Americans.  I doubt that's actually the case, though it may be more true in a prison run by the military for American soldiers than it is typically.

Nathan mentioned a "social-constructivist" view. One thing I don't get is: if a person is trans because of that person's social self-concept of their gender, that seems to suggest there's no set gender identity that corresponds to one's bodily sex.  But if that is the case, why would changing one's body be a medical necessity?  I can understand if the idea is that there are male brains and female brains that are different and require the appropriate body to go along with it or else there is dysfunction, but that's not constructivist.

I'm also desperately unqualified to answer this question, but I'll take a stab:

You basically have two competing ideas. Your own self perception and society's perception of you. In our culture I assume by default that your gender identity is one way because of physical characteristics and other things, whereas you have your own gender identity independently formed from your biological characteristics. Society's pressure on you in this way causes distress and dysfunction so a need arises to change the physical characteristics so that all three mesh: physical sex, gender identity, and social perception.

Pass or fail?

[tik 🪀✨]

I wrote that and wondered if anyone would misinterpret it as me saying Manning is delusional. Then, I thought, nah, I should give memphis more credit than that. No, I don't think she is delusional. I was just drawing up a comparison with another sort of identity issue and how I'd treat them.

But yes, I know to you it's "pretending," and that's.. better than nothing, and does no harm.

To anybody, it's pretending. Just like if it were me claiming to be the J man. You need some facts or evidence if you're going to claim that a man has changed into a woman. That's a very bold claim! Otherwise, all you have is a reality denying transubstantiation based religion for the purpose of making people better about themselves.

Facts that a man has "changed" into a woman:

1. They identify as a woman psychologically
2. They have struggled with their assigned gender role since childhood because they knew or felt they are the opposite
3. They are distressed because they are not perceived as the gender to which they identify or, because of their identity, cannot cope with their physical state as the opposite

These are facts in a person's history and psyche. You and I cannot perceive these facts. Nevertheless, facts they are. Evidence is provided with their history of gender identity crises.

These facts are not tactile. You cannot feel them yourself in any physical way because they exist outside of your physical perception. I do not know what it felt like for you when you were a child. I do not know what it means to you that you are male. I'm sure in your brain "I am a man" means something abstract and utterly indescribable. It's written into you. I cannot feel it, myself, at all - all I have is your portrayal of yourself. But it is still a fact. Its evidence, socially, is displayed in your personal history. It is a fact that you identify as whatever your name is. I do not know how it feels to you when someone says your name. But it is a fact that that is your name, and you identify with it.

When someone else feels at the utter core of their being "I am a woman" that is just as factual as your innate feeling that "I am a man." Sometimes, this is at odds with the way their body has formed. And sometimes that causes distress. How do we treat it? Either way you have to alter the mind or the body. Either way you have to alter a fact. If the abstract fact of personal gender identity can somehow be altered, great. If it cannot, we alter the physical as a last resort.

In the meantime, what do the pronouns "he" and "she" actually correspond to? When you see someone on the street, can you sense their chromosomes? Of course not. You don't even know what Chelsea Manning's chromosomes actually are. For all you know she could be XX and have some medical condition that makes her seem like a man. So all you're really doing is basing which pronoun you use based on what you think you perceive anyway.

All people who continue to refer to her as male are doing is admitting that they cannot admit that the way their own brains have registered or categorized someone may have been completely incorrect. They are fooling themselves.

[tik 🪀✨]

There is no chance she'll be pardoned. Some people's lives boil down to the dichotomy of being remembered as a hero or serving as a warning to others. It's clear which side the government chose.