I hope she's alright after this; there might be people literally gunning for her, even if she wasn't trans.
I worried about all these things and all I was doing was coming out as gay. And I live in the UK, which has strong legal protection against discrimination on the basis of sexuality and gender, and a relatively accepting culture.
I can only imagine it was a thousand times worse to come out as trans. Or even to understand it in yourself - again, this took me years and I was "merely" discovering that I was gay.
Then when you get wounded you call a airstrike and eliminate the village.
One has to give it to the drone warriors- at least they send the commando duke of hazards to the unemployment office.
I hate this whole walking on eggshells around gender/identity politics. It detracts from the discussion for no valid reason.
I don't go out of my way to be insensitive, but I'm not going to flush my DVD of The Matrix down the Memory Hole because it has "Wachowski Brothers" stamped on it. If the Wachowskis put out a new movie today, I'll reference them appropriately as the Wachowski sisters who produced it, but they simply weren't sisters when they created The Matrix, and I'll continue to reference the creators of that movie as brothers.
I saw a similar rewriting of history upstream in this thread, and I just can't let that slide. In fact, this is an edge case where nobody is right or wrong, so there can really be no "correction" to call out. Someone (Manning) changed the rules mid-game, so it must be expected and tolerated that not everyone will parse the output of the remainder of the game to their liking.
Until then, I'm afraid that there's not really a whole heck of a lot that's respectful about your disagreement. Trans folks as a whole overwhelmingly evince preference for not having their prior name or gender identity thrown around and trans folks very regularly remain in the closet publicly even when they are out to friends and family, making your assumptions based on...well, not a whole heck of a lot. Unless you've read something I haven't (totally possible, but you'll forgive me if I doubt it), you have no idea of timing or the propriety here and so the presumption of her gender identity at that point is kinda actually really mean. You may have good intentions, but you're pissing in the pool and you should stop.
For instance, when Muhammad Ali won a gold medal in the 1960 Olympics and the heavyweight title in 1964, he was still going by his "slave name" of Cassius Clay; do you think it is reasonable - either for anyone or for someone who watched the matches at the time - to refer to the 1964 heavyweight champion as Cassius Clay, or should they just call him Muhammad Ali?
Women also frequently change their name, sometimes more than once, throughout their lives; if a woman marries and takes the name of her husband, or divorces and resumes use of her maiden name, would you continue to refer to her by her former name, even in reference to events that took place during her use of it, or would you simply update your nomenclature without complaint?
>this is an edge case where nobody is right or wrong
It's not some sort of edge case, the "right," (polite) way to refer to someone is the way they prefer to be refereed as. If someone named James introduces themselves as "Jimmy" and you refer to him as "James" and he says "it's Jimmy" and you say "Nuh uh your name on your birth certificate is James, you're wrong I'm right!!" you are just being a dick.
People change what they like to be called during their life all the time, that's not new nor is it an edge case. Kid nicknames go to the wayside of adult names/nicknames. I've known a "Peggie" who changed to "Margaret," an "Anthony" who changed to "Tony," and a "Robbie" who is now "Bob." In fact, many/most women change their name at some point in the future. It's normal/accepted/polite to call someone by their current name/pronoun even when referring to past actions.
If I recall a childhood story about my friend Tony I'm going to call him Tony in the story even if he went by Anthony at the time. It's weird/confusing/stupid to do otherwise and certainly not "rewriting history" or "changing the rules."
This only follows if the value of "not saying something that would be offensive to someone who isn't even party to the conversation" (a value which we violate without a second thought, sometimes even gleefully, when it doesn't involve an anointed "social justice" issue) outweighs the value of "communicating clearly and accurately". Chelsea Manning was named Bradley Manning. She was male, at least as far as anyone else was concerned.
It's one thing to request that people call you by a certain name and pronoun now - it's quite another to insist that everyone pretend it has always been thus.
Nobody is disagreeing with that. But using 'he' as a pronoun, even for things in the past, is weird and confusing. Do you call Marilyn Monroe 'Norma Jeane Mortenson' when talking about her childhood? No, of course not, because that confuse people.
Manning has been Chelsea and used 'she' for 4 years now, people now know her as a woman, and it makes sense to use that pronoun. Back in 2013, when Manning first came out as trans, maybe it would be alright to say 'Bradley' for a day or two when talking about her transition. But not now.
> it's quite another to insist that everyone pretend it has always been thus.
Quite frankly, it feel like you're just doing this to be transphobic and invalidate her identity.
I guess there are more trans people than informants so maybe there's some statistical point to be made there, but frankly I'm not sure why you picked this nit to begin with. I think it's important to recognize, rather than downplay the risks faced by marginalized groups in the US and elsewhere.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unlawfully_killed_tran...
As a Dutch person I was very confused for a minute, but then I remembered there are indeed lawfully killed people in other countries.
(And while writing this, I remembered euthanesia is legal here, but that's not killing in my mind because the person chose it for themselves and the given reason cannot be an external, solvable condition.)
Similarly, if you go on social media to make posts about how being trans is not as dangerous as people seem to be implying, even if it contains a grain of statistical truth, you are making a certain point. Again, I think it's important to "photograph" the oppression faced by marginalized groups than to highlight ways this oppression is supposedly exaggerated.
Your point about my poisoning the well suggests you think I was trying to "call you out" or attack you, but that's not the case. I think we have a reasonable meta-disagreement about whether there is a political knock-on effect of highlighting different statistics or narratives. It's a disagreement two people of good faith can have.
Here's some more reading: https://www.hrc.org/resources/violence-against-the-transgend... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unlawfully_killed_tran...
https://www.facebook.com/sophievlabelle/posts/18847957251286...
Who is gunning trans (just because they are trans)?
> Though a federal hate crimes law requires the collection of some statistics related to violence against transgender people, experts are dubious about the numbers they're getting. “A lot of jurisdictions report zeroes, even in places where we know there are hate crimes," Keisling says. Most state laws don't require the collection of such statistics, according to Minter.
Given the high incidence of sexual violence against transgender persons (https://www.ovc.gov/pubs/forge/sexual_numbers.html) it certainly seems likely the murder rate is similarly high. There's a "one-in-twelve" stat that appears to have gone around, but it's not true: http://www.politifact.com/texas/statements/2015/may/13/garne...
(edit removed the yet in "proved yet")
Because of the media, power balances, legalities etc of US life, they obviously wouldn't be doing them in an open Third World/Banana Republic style (where, depending on the country/political climate, the state doesn't hesitate much to semi-openly get rid of enemies and more or less everybody knows they did it).
Because people who would be targets of political murders don't die at a statistically unusual rate. Unless you think they are also being secretly replaced with more pliant clones/cyborgs or we are all just copied over to a less unruly simulation. Then it would be harder to know.
They don't have to be well known people that you would identify as targets. In fact those would be the worst to target. They could be potential whistleblowers you never learned of, for example.
That said, sticking to well known people that could be targets, there's a large variety of those to e.g. MLK Jr, Malcom X, JFK, Robert Kennedy -- to name but a few in a single decade's span.
Some of them, we don't know who did them at all (e.g. MLK).
But even if that was the case, it's not difficult to manipulate a "crazy" to do something, especially if you have both crazies and guns in abundance in a country.
It would be a nice way to avoid blame for the whole thing, and you can even have some mafia figure/ex-cop collaborator kill them afterwards, before said crazies ever get to go to trial for the first murder.
>you have to come up with some evidence otherwise it's just conspiracy theorizing
You think there's much evidence in e.g. banana republic political murders too, even those where still everybody knows the government or some mogul with special interests ordered them?
It's not difficult to say it's not difficult. Again, it's a completely evidence-free claim.
You think there's much evidence
There isn't any evidence the government is taking out hits on politically inconvenient figures in the US. "There can't possibly be any evidence, look at some other (vaguely described, non-specific place/event) where there is also no evidence, QED" is pretty much classic conspiracy-theorist logic (if you can call it that).