http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/09/chelsea-manning-not-a-pacifist

What do you guys make of the comments section, I’ve yet to fully get my head around what causes and how society reacts to gender identity issues.

There are many people on there who show a total lack of empathy for Manning.

If anyone could enlighten me on the subject that would be great, as I’m pig ignorant on the issue. (goes off to trawl pubmed)

Never read the “bottom half of the internet”. It will only make you miserable… 😉

Rachel

^ this is very good advice.

Aaaaaah

I heard the name “Chelsea” Manning for the first time last week. I thought it was “Bradley’s” sister. Now it all becomes clear. I knew he had gender issues but I didn’t know he was now a she. Good on him/her.

Anyway, never read the online comments on a newspaper article. They’re soul destroying

I’m struggling to see what the gender identity issue has to do with the fact that he/she leaked massive amounts of classified data to anyone who would be interested, including those who would dearly love to cut your head off on the internet.

I would wish her sincere and heart felt best wishes on her gender reassignment, but I am also very happy that to do that from the other side of a prison cell.

including those who would dearly love to cut your head off on the internet

The daily mail?

Never read the “bottom half of the internet”. It will only make you miserable…

A hint of irony given where it’s posted, but otherwise, so very true. Have you ever looked at the comments on YouTube? Batshitmentalists, the lot of them. Go and look at the comments on the Wall Street Journal, it’s no better!

who’d have thought that murdering people from a helicopter would incite others people to carry out some more killings

[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rXPrfnU3G0[/video]

“We were very concerned that folks might choose not to talk to us anymore because the information that came out could be detrimental to their livelihood,” General Carr said.

Pressed by one of Private Manning’s lawyers, Mr. Carr could not cite specific data showing the effect of the leak on the number of foreign civilians and emissaries talking to the United States, though he said he knew of examples.

Asked whether he was aware of anyone who had been harmed by the disclosures, General Carr said he knew of an Afghan national who had been killed by the Taliban. But a defense lawyer jumped in, objecting that the individual’s name had not been found in leaked documents, a point that General Carr acknowledged

FAIR

And that was the entire ‘damage’ found by:

Carr’s group, known as the Information Release Task Force, was fully staffed by the beginning of August 2010 with 125 people and operated 24 hours a day, seven days a week through September 2010, when the group thought it had a handle on the information that had been released or might be released.

The cost of operating the group was $6.2 million.

Washington Post

What do you know that they don’t, GeeTee?

I don’t know what the US equivalent of the Official Secrets Act is but I know I see it as a complete “do not cross” line. No excuses at all. Yes, that does mean bad things can end up being covered up, I realise that.

Sorry OP – going back to your actual question: It’s a fairly complicated subject but here’s a couple of random thoughts hat might give some sort of insight. Gender Identity means…

# A momentary glance and declaration made by a doctor in the first minute of your life determines how you will be addressed, how you will be brought up, how you will be taught about the World and your place in it and how you will be expected to behave for the rest of your life

Having Gender Identity Issues means… (from a male -] female point of view)

# You *know* something is wrong. It might take a long while to be able to express what that is. This *will* affect your life. Unless you are extremely lucky, it *won’t* go away
# Suicide Ideation (people who have seriously thought about Suicide) rates are thought to be up to 60% within the trans community. Yes, sixty bloody percent. (some studies think it might actually be higher. Very conservative studies still show 40%)

IF you manage to go ahead and come out and transition, it means…

# You will likely lose your friends, family, job (job is protected by equality law but that doesn’t mean much if you cannot tolerate issues at work. Depends what you do and where)
# It’s scary coming out. It’s not like being gay – being trans is like walking around with a sandwich board saying “hey – look at me – I’m trans” – you stand out, particularly to start with!
# Getting rid of body hair HURTS. A LOT!
# If you’re lucky, you still have hair. If not, it’s wig time!
# Your faith in the NHS will be severely tested. Believe me…
# People seem to think it is still acceptable to make jokes about trans people in the way they wouldn’t even consider making equivalent jokes about black people or gay people etc.
# While you are going through a really difficult time during transition, you need to take oestrogen; it makes you ridiculously emotional. It’s like the “bandwidth” of emotion is suddenly widened and you need to learn how to cope with it at a really hard time. A LOT of crying is involved!
# Getting size 9 shoes is a pain. (actually, I’m lucky; most of my trans friends have bigger feet than me!)
# Clothes are expensive. Hair cuts are expensive. Everything is expensive…
# You have to see a psychiatrist for two years who is clearly the only one in the meeting that has mental issues…
# The oestrogen (and lack of testosterone) is great for smoothing the body but you lose strength. EVERYTHING is heavy!
# Turning up to an event with new people is REALLY scary. If you think it is weird turning up to, say a Peaks Pootle for the first time and trying to fit in, imagine what it’s like doing it after coming out as trans…
# Getting rid of body hair HURTS. Did I mention that??
# It doesn’t hurt as much as surgery does… 😯

BUT…

# Transitioning and getting on with life is amazing, brilliant, wonderful…
# You learn who your REAL friends are. They are the ones who matter!
# Just occasionally, you get to actually look really good. It feels brillant!
# Actually, once you get to know people, you realise you CAN be accepted and people DO treat you how you wanted to be treated.
# You can look at yourself and actually feel it looks kinda right.
# No need for a beaker by the side of the bed 😯
# Sex is a million times more fun 😉

Best way to understand, though, is to listen to comedy. Bethany Black did a really amazing set about her life and I learned more from that than I’ve ever learned from anyone, including all the medics…

First three minutes of this recording are just crowd noise – you can skip that. https://soundcloud.com/bethany-black-1/beth-becomes-her-glasgow-11-03

Rachel

but I know I see it as a complete “do not cross” line. No excuses at all.

Well that’s what it should be, if it was used to keep those few things, a small amount of data involving military and security operations where crime is not involved.

But it isn’t it is used to hide the daily operations of governance, and the many crimes and breaches of the rules that regularly happen. It is used as a sledgehammer to crush freedom of information. Information that should be public and is vital in allowing us all to make informed decisions.

😆 @ Rachael

What i would add is that anyone who can go through all that has nothign but my utter respect

Imagine the bravery needed to face up to all that and face down the **** who are going to give you grief
I worked closely with someone at uni , ex fireman so always looked like a man in drag sadly, That said all mannerisms were feminine. I felt sorry for her tbh. I cannot imagine what it is like to live my life always being started at like she was or facing down the bigots every single day of my life, the talking behind her back, the sniggers the shitty innuendos. It was not nice. Some serious words [ ok threats and a skirmish] were exchanged with one group who were bullying
I have nothing but respect for what is a very brave decision and for her [ and I assume rachael] a bumpy and difficult road to happiness. She is “married” now and runs a PO in a small village and everyone is fine with her.

TBH I think most of us are so tied to our gender and it is such a non issue to us that we cannot even begin to understand what could make you want to change and some of us dont even bother to try.

Imagine facing all that and have your downstairs bits done as well…you gotta be brave to do all that, face colleagues, family and friends.
Its a long lonely road to happiness and it takes some balls to do it [ see what i did there]

She is “married” now

– huh? What does “married” mean? Surely she is either married or not married?

Back on topic, the Guardian’s Comment is Free section is inhabited by complete Fruit Cakes, you think the pro-Android / pro-Apple fanbois on here are bad, it’s like a matter of life or death on CiF…

Living together as man and wife but no legal status to said situation.

This all predates the 2004 legislative change so they were not able to marry or have a civil partnership in the 90’s and they see no point changing now.
They do have the same surname and view themselves as husband and wife hence “married”

ah yes – I forget that the law wasn’t changed until recently – my apologies

Go and look at the comments on the Wall Street Journal, it’s no better!

No … really don’t… It would completely blow your leftist minds 😯

Even as a city geet I think they are stupidly, madly, right wing.

And

They still think Lance Armstrong is brilliant.

This is well worth a read on some of the implications for the “law abiding” private individual of GCHQ activity as revealed by the Snowden disclosures

If Manning belongs in jail under us law having leaked secret info that harmed no one, then George Bush deserves longer. He deliberately blew the identity of a CIA undercover operative to score a political point against their partner and compromised their operation and life.

It’s a difficult one; however we view the actions of the subjects in the classified materials released by Manning, such as GCHQ, it doesn’t make it right to release them in an uncontrolled manner.

Again if Governments were selective in what they classified secrets, you may have a point, when they declare everything a secret they are the source of the problem, not the whistle blower.

it doesn’t make it right to release them in an uncontrolled manner

I broadly agree. However, as “uncontrolled manners” go, the author of the piece I linked to points out

“out of the 4.9 million Americans with access to classified information, 480,000 private contractors in the US had the “top-secret” security clearance issued to Snowden. If hundreds of thousands of people had access to these secrets, how secure were they? The NSA and GCHQ had no idea that Snowden had this material, and apparently still don’t know exactly what is in it – which is one reason they’ve been panicking and freaking out.

But if they didn’t know that Snowden had copied it, how could they possibly be sure that someone else hasn’t also taken a copy and slipped it to the Chinese or Russians or Iranians or al-Qaida?”

“Our spooks lost at least 58,000 pages of classified documents to a US civilian sitting at a workstation in Hawaii, and did so without realising it had happened. In effect they’re saying, “your secrets are safe with us, except when we lose them”.

To allow such a massive amount of information to be available without proper oversight to so many people is pretty uncontrolled in itself. If nothing else, I can see why GCHQ would want their poor security practices to remain a secret.

To allow such a massive amount of information to be available without proper oversight to so many people is pretty uncontrolled in itself. If nothing else, I can see why GCHQ would want their poor security practices to remain a secret.

They also hilariously smashed up a MacBook at the Guardian’s offices believing that would destroy all the data even though the Editor did try to explain that thanks to this new fangled thing called the Internet, they had copies all over the world, out of GCHQ jurisdiction.

Does make you wonder how smart some people at GCHQ are…..

I don’t know what the US equivalent of the Official Secrets Act is but I know I see it as a complete “do not cross” line. No excuses at all. Yes, that does mean bad things can end up being covered up, I realise that.

The Nuremberg trials made it clear that following orders was not a valid defence under law for being a party to war crimes either directly, directing others or being part of the apparatus that issued orders and soldiers had a duty to refuse unlawful orders. It’s not too much of a stretch, therefore, to could argue that breach of the official secrets act in case of war crimes cover-up is justified if your fellow soldiers and superiors know about the crimes and cover them up or do nothing to bring the perpetrators to justice.

Manning’s problem was that she decided to release a huge raft of documents that she couldn’t possibly verify the contents of rather than those documents relating to specific events that cross the line into war crimes. I think if Manning had managed to only release those (rather than political cables etc as well), it would have been much a harder case to try at the courts martial. That said, she’d still be in prison, but the case would certainly be far less clear cut.

footflaps – Member
Does make you wonder how smart some people at GCHQ are…..

On a related not this article from the always excellent Adam Curtis blog was quite an eye-opener:

BUGGER

For most of the twentieth century the combination of ineptitude and secrecy created an organisation that retreated more and more into a world of fictional conspiracies in order to disguise it’s repeated failures. The question is whether the same is true today?

Thanks for the link johnners.

That BBC blog is well worth a read.

MSP – Member
That BBC blog is well worth a read.

+1 fascinating stuff

But it was a world that was all made-up. Le Carre – who had himself been a spy – admitted this, and described what the true reality of the spy world was:

“For a while you wondered whether the fools were pretending to be fools as some kind of deception, or whether there was a real efficient service somewhere else.

Later in my fiction, I invented one.

But alas the reality was the mediocrity. Ex-colonial policemen mingling with failed academics, failed lawyers, failed missionaries and failed debutantes gave our canteen the amorphous quality of an Old School outing on the Orient express. Everyone seemed to smell of failure.”

😀

allthegear

Cheers Rachael, I’ve got a pet interest in neuroscience developing that I might pursue professionally, so thanks for the informative post.

Understanding other peoples lives and the difficulties they face is the key to helping people. I find the subject fascinating as well, did you know good male scientists are more likely to have a slightly more female brain and good female scientists are more likely to have a slightly more male brain? Something to that extent anyway.

I’m a sponge for this kind of stuff.

being a transsexual my self i just dont get what it has to do with the crime she committed, ffs we need some transsexuals in the news that ant **** ups.

allthegear – Member
Best way to understand, though, is to listen to comedy. Bethany Black did a really amazing set about her life and I learned more from that than I’ve ever learned from anyone, including all the medics…

First three minutes of this recording are just crowd noise – you can skip that. https://soundcloud.com/bethany-black-1/beth-becomes-her-glasgow-11-03

I saw Bethany a while ago, though not doing this this material. Just listened, well worth it. Thanks for the link.

Also as this is STW it’s worth noting that Picolax gets a mention around the 36 minute mark.

To be fair, 3dvgirl, most people in the news are **** ups. That’s usually why they are in the news. 😉

That Adam Curtis blog is excellent

That Adam Curtis blog is excellent

Good to see that we are in safe hands, with such a well run security service looking after us 24/7 !

Just following procedure and @rse covering. If it turned out that the grauniad hadn’t actually copied the data elsewhere (v. unlikely I know) and the spooks left with it in situ then someone would have got a serious ear bending when the “Phew, we nearly lost all this stuff but here it is…” headlines appeared a few weeks later 😉

The Adam Curtis blog on counter-insurgency is well worth a read too

I love STW 🙂

Looking at just how far attitudes toward homosexuality have changed (in the main) in the last few years makes me really optimistic for the future and hopefully we’ll see same change in attitudes towards trans people.

I don’t reckon “Chelsea” is going to enjoy the supermax!!! 😀

Well that didn’t last long.