Note to media: Get used to calling Manning “she” because there’ll be many more like her

[n2doc]

By Gideon Lichfield

The media tied themselves into knots on Thursday (Aug. 22) when the person they had known until then as Bradley Manning, sentenced a day earlier to 35 years for leaking government secrets to Wikileaks, announced that she was a woman named Chelsea. Reporting this, some newspapers ended up where you least expected them to be: the oh-so-liberal New York Times stuck doggedly to “Bradley” and male pronouns, while Britain’s conservative gossip rag the Daily Mail called her “Chelsea” and “she/her” throughout. One article from Reuters went to extraordinary lengths, writing “Manning” more than a dozen times and even breaking rules of grammar just to avoid using any pronouns at all.

Now, to be fair to the media, the organizations whose job it is to explain transgender issues to the public weren’t much help. Reporters who turned, as I did, to the websites of groups like GLAAD, TransEquality, the Human Rights Campaign, or the UK’s Trans Media Watch when the news about Manning broke would have found admonitions to use the pronouns a transgendered person asks you to use—but no advice on how to write about the very moment at which those pronouns changed, or about the person’s life before then. Should Manning be “Bradley” when writing about her (his?) tour of duty in Iraq? If not, why not?

In fact the answer is simple—”Chelsea”, always—and so is the reasoning, once you know it. To come out as transgender is to acknowledge the gender you have always had, regardless of what your body seemed to be. The gender you used to go by is something you never really were. In that light, for someone else to then keep on using it just looks like stubbornness, or malice.

So what are the media to do? “‘We can’t just spring a new name and a new pronoun’ on readers with no explanation,” a Times editor complained, when the paper’s public editor asked why it had stuck with “Bradley”. Well, indeed you can’t. But you can with explanation, and the explanation part really isn’t that hard.

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http://qz.com/118398/note-to-media-get-used-to-calling-manning-she-because-therell-be-many-more-like-her/

[William769]

1. Kick & very highly recommended.

[Bluenorthwest]

2. I am shocked by the folks who claim 'this is all so new, I'm so confused' when there have already

been so many famous transgender people, from Rene Richards to Wendy Carlos to Lana Wachowski it is just not that 'new' and millions of Americans have already 'digested' it all and dealt with the 'confusion'. Lana Wachowski writes and produces huge films, the Matrix films, Cloud Atlas, big business, high dollar, she employs many people with her ideas and vision. But some here act as if this is the time of Christine Jorgensen, not the 21st Century.
Note to media folks, if you don't know these people, use Google on your own. Your education is not my job unless you compensate me for that education. 'I'm a professional writer and I'm confused about pronouns' folks need to use Google. It's that simple. Look it the fuck up.

[stevenleser]

3. I don't understand it either. I have trouble believing fellow DU'ers who assert this.

Maybe I'm too cynical?