So Bradley Manning wants to be called Chelsea Manning, with feminine pronouns. Call me skeptical. His lawyer intends to fight, and it’s my understanding there are mixed court rulings about whether sexual-reassignment surgery is a “medical treatment” that a prison (and in particular, a military prison) is required to provide, but I suspect that this is largely connected to aiming at better conditions in prison, whether it’s perceiving a woman’s prison as offering better living conditions or just being removed from the general (male) population. (And I get it — whether he is a “woman inside” or not, I can certainly understand him preferring to be among women than among men, given what we read of the violence and sexual assault in a men’s prison.) He won’t be able to “live as a woman” in any case — even in a woman’s prison, he wouldn’t be permitted to wear make-up or dresses or, really, do anything that makes him feel affirmed in his proclaimed femaleness.
I admit to being quite skeptical over the entire issue of transsexuals/transgender people. The news articles about transgender children leave me most suspicious — when a child is at an age where sex is binary and determined by external characteristics (girls have long hair and like pink, boys have short hair and play with cars), its entirely understandable that a boy who likes pretty things would announce, and truly believe, that he’s a girl. One gets the impression that the parents and other adults around these children are more comfortable having a “transgender” child than letting their boy remain a boy, who just happens to like pretty things and decorate his room with princesses.
And rulings such as the recent one out of California, where children identifying with the opposite sex are allowed to “be” that opposite sex in all ways — including boys (you know, the ones with penises) using girls’ locker rooms and being on the girls’ sports teams (regardless of their physical advantage)?
In any case, there are adults who of their own free will make the choice to “transition.” (Apparently, some re-transition — I’ve read some links to suggest that, for many, the sex reassignment process is not the “instant cure” that it’s promoters claim, but I don’t know how isolated these instances are.) What seems “off”, at least as far as the men-becoming-women are concerned, is that they become exaggerated caricatures of women, heavily made up, always wearing dresses, rather than “natural” women. In Manning’s case, of course, we’ve only ever seen the one picture, in a wig, but even the name — Chelsea — seems to fit with this exaggeration.
But I’m most likely preaching to the choir.
In this case, what’s striking is that it’s become something of a litmus test of whether you’re right-thinking on social issues as to whether one complies with this request/demand. What if he had announced his name was Peter Pan? Other than celebrities, whose names are basically stage names and, in a sense, the name of their act (e.g., Lady Gaga), we generally use an individual’s legal name in reporting. Bradley Manning is his legal name, and I can’t imagine a judge approving a name change in the middle of a prison sentence, regardless of the reason. He certainly won’t be able to begin the process of “transition” as experts have defined it, wearing women’s clothes for a year before any treatment is started. (In similar cases of imprisoned transgender people with legal cases, they’ve already started the process — a man with artificial breasts, for instance.)
As for the he vs. she, by convention, regardless of one’s opinion, it’s reasonable to use the pronouns corresponding to the individual’s legal sex. If that makes me a Neanderthal, so be it.
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