Greenhouse writes: "Today, the United States is friendlier to lesbians, gays, and bisexuals than at any point in its history. But there is often still a discomfort toward and about the population represented by the final letter in the acronym L.G.B.T."
Chelsea Manning. (photo: U.S. Army/AP)
25 August 13
In 2010, the WikiLeaks source Bradley Manning confided to Adrian Lamo, a former hacker who eventually turned Manning in to the government, that “I wouldn’t mind going to prison for the rest of my life, or being executed so much, if it wasn’t for the possibility of having pictures of me plastered all over the world press as a boy.”
On Thursday, a day after he was sentenced to thirty-five years in prison, Manning released a statement in which he said, “I am Chelsea Manning. I am a female. Given the way that I feel, and have felt since childhood, I want to begin hormone therapy as soon as possible.” He continued, “I hope that you will support me in this transition.”
Today, the United States is friendlier to lesbians, gays, and bisexuals than at any point in its history. But there is often still a discomfort toward and about the population represented by the final letter in the acronym L.G.B.T. Western society long ago decided that gender is immutable, that men are men and women women in perpetuity—that, somehow, nature or God or whomever is responsible for determining the formation of genitalia and chromosomes in utero is incapable of error. We may know today that this is not true, but we have not figured out how to deal with that fact.
Read More: Accepting Chelsea Manning
