[Agent 47]

http://news.yahoo.com/bradley-manning-sa...00028.html

The man known as releasing the largest set of classified military documents to the public is planning to become a woman....




God help us all...

[Kid Strangelove]

Thats actually a smart move, considering everything

[The Beast1]

Saw this on slashdot

Quote:

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.

Whouda thought! Narcissism!

Poor guy, he was in solitary for that long. I'd go crazy too.

[Rutting Elephant]

I don't feel threatened at all by this news. In fact, I don't really care if he's a she, a he, or a shemale; he stuck it to the surveillance/propaganda state in historic fashion. To me, that's alpha.

[Bad Hussar]

Given that female circumcision is, rightly, illegal in all civilized countries I don't know how sex change operations are allowed.

If psychiatric pharmacology is unable to help him, then by all means let him wear women's clothing and call himself whatever he wants (though this is inadvisable in prison - where it seems he will be spending the rest of his life). But an operation (or even hormone treatment) is a barbaric procedure performed on a mentally ill person who doesn't have the capacity to give consent. And in any event people are not allowed to consent to other procedures that inflict harm. I truly don't understand how it can be allowed. I understand that people have psychological problems, but the medical establishment shouldn't be facilitating their self-harm.

[RawGod]

Characterising dangerous political dissidents and subversives as mentally unstable is standard procedure for authoritarian states. Soviet Russia excelled in this, and there are numerous cases in US history. Don't be fooled, it's a distraction.

[Eirykr]

I wonder just what military prison culture is like, if there even is any. Was this a result of becoming someone's bitch, or was it always latent in his psychology?

[Sombro]

I guess he's not Manning up, is he?

[haywire]

I guess he's doing this to save himself from getting raped, and rather trying to turn it around and getting on with the female prisoners.

[Dr. Howard]

This is an interesting move...life in a women's prison would be much easier I'd think

[Cattle Rustler]

(08-22-2013 05:09 PM)wiscanada Wrote:  

This is an interesting move...life in a women's prison would be much easier I'd think

Military prison, brig/etc, is still a crap hole even if you're a woman. Although I'll say this, it's a more secure crap hole than civilian prison.

[bw220]

http://www.gannett-cdn.com/-mm-/847c515d...g00002.jpg


Here's a photo of him in 2010, dressed as a woman. He has always claimed to be a transgender, I don't think this is just a ploy to get out of going to a men's prison. Although the timing isn't very good, it's just one more thing for the media to talk about instead of discussing the actual issues.

[Starke]

Looks like Snowden's escape has been proven to be the smartest course of action.

Stay: Go nuts after 3 years in solitary, give a forced apology, demand to be called Chelsea and eventually opting to have one's Johnson torn off.

Escape: Live out the rest of your life in a 2nd-tier Russian city, lapping up the cream of Slavic trim.

[Wadsworth]

If our sexual identity is merely a social construct, why should surgery/hormone therapy be necessary?

[MikeCF]

(08-22-2013 10:29 AM)RawGod Wrote:  

Characterising dangerous political dissidents and subversives as mentally unstable is standard procedure for authoritarian states. Soviet Russia excelled in this, and there are numerous cases in US history. Don't be fooled, it's a distraction.

But don't we have a free press that exists as a check and balance against government overreaching?

[jaakkeli]

(08-22-2013 07:41 PM)Wadsworth Wrote:  

If our sexual identity is merely a social construct, why should surgery/hormone therapy be necessary?

Well duh. Perhaps the answer is that all those nutty liberals and Jesus freaks are wrong and that sexual identity actually isn't a social construct. Male homosexuality seems to be some sort of partial brain feminization during early development (probably in the womb) and it's not at all incomprehensible if the most effeminate men actually find living as a woman more comfortable. Manning is even physically effeminate, if you add some surgery to that photo of him dressed as a woman you can't tell the difference.

Given that it's much easier to modify the body than the brain (we can do basically nothing about brains, much less reverse whatever some flood of female hormones during fetal development has done to a man's brain), surgery is likely a much better resolution for a very effeminate man like Manning. Everyone would have likely been better off if he had sought gender reassigment in the first place instead of trying to make it in a hyper-masculine place like the military.

[MikeCF]

(08-22-2013 07:41 PM)Wadsworth Wrote:  

If our sexual identity is merely a social construct, why should surgery/hormone therapy be necessary?

Hah. I like that one. Going to use it to troll feminists.

[Wutang]

(08-22-2013 09:28 PM)jaakkeli Wrote:  

(08-22-2013 07:41 PM)Wadsworth Wrote:  

If our sexual identity is merely a social construct, why should surgery/hormone therapy be necessary?

Well duh. Perhaps the answer is that all those nutty liberals and Jesus freaks are wrong and that sexual identity actually isn't a social construct. Male homosexuality seems to be some sort of partial brain feminization during early development (probably in the womb) and it's not at all incomprehensible if the most effeminate men actually find living as a woman more comfortable. Manning is even physically effeminate, if you add some surgery to that photo of him dressed as a woman you can't tell the difference.

Given that it's much easier to modify the body than the brain (we can do basically nothing about brains, much less reverse whatever some flood of female hormones during fetal development has done to a man's brain), surgery is likely a much better resolution for a very effeminate man like Manning. Everyone would have likely been better off if he had sought gender reassigment in the first place instead of trying to make it in a hyper-masculine place like the military.

I thought the Jesus freaks would be the first to agree that gender is not just merely a social construct. I'm guessing most of them are not fans of transexuals.

[Ensam]

http://www.sfgate.com/news/crime/article...754050.php

[Glock]

If he had done this before he got charged, he would have gotten a lighter sentence, according to academic research (see study abstract below):

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?a...id=2144002

Estimating Gender Disparities in Federal Criminal Cases

Sonja B. Starr
University of Michigan Law School

August 29, 2012

University of Michigan Law and Economics Research Paper, No. 12-018

Abstract:
This paper assesses gender disparities in federal criminal cases. It finds large gender gaps favoring women throughout the sentence length distribution (averaging over 60%), conditional on arrest offense, criminal history, and other pre-charge observables. Female arrestees are also significantly likelier to avoid charges and convictions entirely, and twice as likely to avoid incarceration if convicted. Prior studies have reported much smaller sentence gaps because they have ignored the role of charging, plea-bargaining, and sentencing fact-finding in producing sentences. Most studies control for endogenous severity measures that result from these earlier discretionary processes and use samples that have been winnowed by them. I avoid these problems by using a linked dataset tracing cases from arrest through sentencing. Using decomposition methods, I show that most sentence disparity arises from decisions at the earlier stages, and use the rich data to investigate causal theories for these gender gaps.

[AnonymousBosch]

(08-22-2013 10:29 AM)RawGod Wrote:  

Characterising dangerous political dissidents and subversives as mentally unstable is standard procedure for authoritarian states. Soviet Russia excelled in this, and there are numerous cases in US history. Don't be fooled, it's a distraction.

Exactly. Two women at work were pointing this out in the paper this morning. I said "He's ready for a glass of Victory Gin at the Chestnut Tree Cafe." They didn't get the reference.

MiniLove got to him: "he's crazy, ignore anything he says, go back to Candy Crush."

[jaakkeli]

(08-22-2013 10:08 PM)Wutang Wrote:  

I thought the Jesus freaks would be the first to agree that gender is not just merely a social construct. I'm guessing most of them are not fans of transexuals.

They won't use the words "social construct", of course, since that's leftie academic speak, but they tend to believe the same thing, that you can somehow choose orientation. It's just that they believe you can do it with the power of Jesus instead of leftist ideology.

I have a crazy relative in a Jesus freak group that keeps trying to heal gays. Their founder and former leader is this flaming guy who just kept getting caught with a cock in his mouth. They'd get together and this dude would confess all his latest dirty gay deeds in front of everyone and they'd all announce that God has forgiven and Jesus has healed him. That would never last long and he'd get caught with a guy again and again and he'd confess and get healed and go through all that again. For years and years. (It only ended when he got busted by the police. The camps he ran to fix gay youths were about having sex with the boys as some sort of therapy...)

This is all *amazingly* similar to the nonsense I see from the social constructionist loonies, endlessly trying to get their daughters interested in toy soldiers and their sons into nail polish only to find nature reasserting itself over and over again.

[alphabeta]

I hate to go all tinfoil hat on this one, but his actions are not congruent with his best interests. This has happened nearly identically before.

http://www.trueactivist.com/the-chelsea-...-fall-for/

[kbell]

I think they are using drugs on him and or brainwashing/blackmailing him to do this.

[Cattle Rustler]

(08-23-2013 08:48 PM)kbell Wrote:  

I think they are using drugs on him and or brainwashing/blackmailing him to do this.

The guy had tranny tendencies before getting locked up. From an article a while back, he identified himself as gay around 16 and tranny a few years later.