US v. Bradley Manning: Being transgender doesn’t mean you’re unstable

I’ve usually avoided talking about the trial of Private Bradley Manning, given that I’ve been directly involved with this situation before and I probably will be in the future. But I feel that certain recent developments in the case deserve to be addressed.

As part of this phase of the trial, the court heard the testimony of Master Sgt. Craig Blenis, who acted as Manning’s counselor during his detainment at Quantico. According to reporters covering the hearing, Blenis stated that Manning had sent two letters from the brig using the name “Breanna”, and he considered this a reason to place Manning on Prevention of Injury status. Blenis claimed that this was “not normal” and “not stable”.

There is a history of some uncertainty over how Manning identifies. Prior to his arrest, he had spoken to a gender counselor online, and said he felt that he was female. He told his superiors in the Army that he had gender identity disorder, which he talked about in his conversations with Adrian Lamo. He also set up Twitter and YouTube accounts under the name “Breanna Manning”, and listed this as an alias when he was first confined at Quantico. However, the Bradley Manning Support Network have stated that he prefers to be addressed as Bradley, and when I talked with people who are in close contact with Manning, they all told me he currently identifies as male.

Words have definitions. That isn’t liberal or conservative, it just is.

The term “Sex” is the literal term for the physical differences in a species. That is the 1st definition of “sex”:

SEX - noun: “1- either the male or female division of a species, especially as differentiated with reference to the reproductive functions.”

As opposed to Gender, which refers to linguistics:

GENDER - noun: (in many languages) a set of classes that together include all nouns, membership in a particular class being shown by the form of the noun itself or by the form or choice of words that modify, replace, or otherwise refer to the noun, as, in English, the choice of he to replace the man, of she to replace the woman, of it to replace the table, of it or she to replace the ship. The number of genders in different languages varies from 2 to more than 20; often the classification correlates in part with sex or animateness. The most familiar sets of genders are of three classes (as masculine, feminine, and neuter in Latin and German) or of two (as common and neuter in Dutch, or masculine and feminine in French and Spanish).

And other definitions of Gender:

“the behavioral, cultural, or psychological traits typically associated with one sex “

And of course, it also has the definition “Sex”, as it is considered a synonym. But that wasn’t it’s primary use.

And since language is defined by its cultural use (sadly, but always the case), it is useful to know that the term “gender” has a different shade of meaning than “sex”.

I guess if you think it is important, you can argue to defend the literal definition of “gender”. That doesn’t seem to me to be where the real war lies, and not understanding how the language is used today makes it hard to converse with the generation we need to reach.

There were two aspects of this article in my mind when I posted.

1) The new information (new to me anyway) about Manning’s gender identity disorder. Which is quite a different matter that him simply being “gay”.

2) The showcasing, so to speak, of gender identity disorder and the resultant confusion as exemplified by the author.

It is a very informative article, if not exactly in the way the author intended it.

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