{"id":21802,"date":"2013-08-24T09:34:06","date_gmt":"2013-08-24T14:34:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=21802"},"modified":"2013-08-24T09:34:06","modified_gmt":"2013-08-24T14:34:06","slug":"bradley-manning-or-chelsea-manning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2013\/08\/24\/bradley-manning-or-chelsea-manning\/","title":{"rendered":"Bradley Manning or Chelsea Manning"},"content":{"rendered":"

In this week’s Goldberg File<\/em>, Jonah Goldberg talks about Bradley Manning’s stated desire to transition to be Chelsea Manning:<\/p>\n

What is the best time to announce that you want to be treated like a woman? Not wanting to be a woman myself, I can only speculate. But a few possibilities come to mind. First of all, if you are, in fact, a woman. Then there might be a whole panoply of times and situations when making such a request makes sense. Like when a bunch of steak-head dudes try to include you in their fart humor. Or when they challenge you to a chicken-wing-eating contest.<\/p>\n

So I’m talking to you dudes right now. When would it make the most sense for a guy to ask to be treated like a woman? When you’re redeeming your coupon at a day spa, maybe? Certainly, if you’re the cowardly sort, when hostage-takers on your flight announce they will release the women and children. Maybe when you’re the only “man” in your Fifty Shades of Grey<\/em> book club? Or perhaps when the testosterone in the air at BronyCon<\/a> stings your nostrils. Again these are only guesses. And I’m just going out on a limb here — but my gut feeling is that one circumstance you can cross off your list, one moment when you don’t<\/em> want to announce you want to be treated like a dame, is when you’re about to spend 35 years in a men’s prison.<\/p>\n

Don’t get me wrong. Some dudes can pull it off. For example, this guy<\/a> (Click it! It’s funny!). But Bradley Manning just doesn’t seem like the kind of fellah that could discriminate successfully among potential suitors and sundry other gentleman callers. <\/p>\n

Let me be clear up front, if Bradley Manning wasn’t a treasonous buffoon who materially damaged the United States of America, I’d take it a little easier on him. In fact, I’m a little squishier on this stuff than Kevin Williamson<\/a> is — and he’s a libertarian. <\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

That said, I do think that such beliefs can be very, very strongly held. I also think that as we learn more about how humans develop in utero, gender-identity confusion can have a very hard-wired component. A man thinking he’s a woman — or thinking he was supposed to be born as a woman (or vice versa) — isn’t the same thing as dabbling in Marxism in college or thinking that Van Halen was better with Sammy Hagar. It is not purely a conscious choice or matter of taste. As such it deserves some sympathy, respect, and even a little social space.<\/p>\n

But you know who else deserves space, sympathy, and respect? The majority of Americans who don’t think<\/em> the factory installed their parts wrong. For instance, the push to make unisex bathrooms or let gender-confused girls use boy’s rooms and vice versa is quite simply madness.<\/p>\n

The vast majority of Americans — straight, gay, black, white, young, old, Christian, Muslim, Jew, Jedi, and atheist — believe that the humans with the dangly bits should use the boys’ bathroom. And yet out in California, the DOJ just settled a suit saying that this very old arrangement must now be revised to accommodate a minority of one person.<\/p>\n

Of course I believe in individual rights and liberties. I’ve always believed democracy without guaranteed individual rights is just a clever way to organize a mob (as I like to say, in a pure democracy, 51 percent of the people get to pee in the cornflakes of 49 percent of the people). But we’re talking about a civilization here, and in a civilization you don’t hold the entire culture hostage to the ever-changing whims and desires of a handful of people. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In this week’s Goldberg File, Jonah Goldberg talks about Bradley Manning’s stated desire to transition to be Chelsea Manning: What is the best time to announce that you want to be treated like a woman? Not wanting to be a woman myself, I can only speculate. But a few possibilities come to mind. First of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[57,10,13],"tags":[343,766,196,139],"class_list":["post-21802","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-humour","category-liberty","category-usa","tag-crimeandpunishment","tag-democracy","tag-lgbt","tag-psychology"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-5FE","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21802","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21802"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21802\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21803,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21802\/revisions\/21803"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21802"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21802"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21802"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}