How to refer to Chelsea Manning

I don’t know what’s so goddamn hard about this. Manning is obviously not cisgender, and Manning hasn’t directly expressed a pronoun preference, so what is so hard about not using gendered pronouns?

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I will change my pronouns the moment circumstances warrant

That’s great, but no one mentioned “changing” pronouns until you did. If you read the article, Manning is not referred to by gendered pronouns at all. “Pfc Manning,” “the Army analyst,” “Manning,” etc are all used, but neither he, nor she, nor any other pronoun. I say that’s good on BB, and await the day they drop “Bradley” from their coverage (not for Breanna, at least not without Manning’s clear saying so, but dropping “Bradley” for “Manning” or “Private Manning”).

EDIT: nvm just re-read and there’s a “his” in there. Serves me right for thinking Boing Boing could try to remain neutral on this unanswered question. My overall point (that it is entirely possible to tell this story without saying “he,” “him,” “his,” “she,” “her,” “hers,” “Bradley,” or “Breanna”) still stands.

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I moved this discussion here so it can continue if desired.

Your OP still works because then it’s deliciously snarky.

This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.

Well, just to bookend this with a definitive answer:

I’m glad that was finally established beyond any reasonable doubt, from the best possible source: Manning.

(Also, did everyone notice that I have the magical power of posting on closed topics?)

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Appreciate the honesty, but I’m not sure why it required much thought?

If they’ve transitioned to, say, being a woman - then why would you refer to them as he? The whole point is that they’ve changed their gender.

She. Stop being a dick. You know damn well it’s she.

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You have no excuse to intentionally fuck around with Chelsea’s pronouns, I know that.

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You’ve got some weird bug where slashes seem to be creeping into your text. The word you’re after is “she” or “She”. Feel free to copy and paste these into your edit.

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You know, in my opinion, your comment was entirely corrupted by your egregious abuse of Manning’s pronouns. The only reason for you to do that is to openly show disrespect for and contempt of Chelsea Manning. Knowing as we do that you are so biased as to be so disrespectful of her personally, why should any of us consider your opinion to be anything but equally biased?

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Just to clarify, I was using “s/he” due to trying to refer to identified gender both in past tense (when Manning publicly identified as masculine) and present (as feminine) simultaneously. It’s not intended to be a slight, but rather respecting the shifting of publicly-acknowledged gender identity over time. Apologize if some folks found it to be antagonizing, it was intended to be quite the opposite.

And yet you’re totally incorrect! I have absolute respect for gender transitioning individuals. Interwebs doesn’t always allow people to understand one another personally all that well, you know. Btw, love the Cowgirl Ed avatar. :slight_smile:

FYI: Manning identified as female long before these recent revelations.

It’s still entirely inappropriate to do this.

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Well, I already apologized. There aren’t too many guidebooks on the politically correct way to refer to shifting gender over time. True story, have a friend who was female when I met her in college. Transitioned to male some years ago. When I refer to this individual in the past I use his former female name and say “her” and when I,refer to him in the present I use his current male name and say “he.” No disrespect intended, and didn’t realize it was a faux pas? Again, apologies for the abbreviation that made some people instantly jump the the conclusion I’m some anti-LGBT asshole. Anything but, frankly.

As a transgendered American, (and ex service member), I found that use of the pronoun entirely inappropriate. Others may disagree and that’s their right. My subjective opinion is that it’s offensive. I know damned well it would have offended me.

I like Edward Wong Hau Pepelu Tivrusky IV. :slight_smile:

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I hear there’s like, a whole internet.

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It’s still entirely inappropriate to do this.

It’s a pronoun. It’s a word used as a referential identifier. The entire point of a pronoun is to convey a degree of specificity regarding which person one is refering to out of the possible options available linguistically.

For example, “John and Marsha live in France, but he is currently in England.” The purpose of “he” in this sentence is to identify which of the two people, John and Marsha, are currently in England. The purpose is not to make some sort of judgement about John’s personal identity or gender roles or anything like that. Those are all unfortunate tangential complications which are linguistically unimportant.

Gender has been incredibly heavily cemented into language over the centuries not because of some sort of overt political agenda or conspiracy, but because it has historically been convenient. When speaking about one person out of a group of others, you could use gendered pronouns to quickly and “cleanly” separate the whole into two differing categories, and at the same time convey a lot of information that would otherwise take a great many more words to get across.

This was of course only possible due to the patriarchial nature of civilization for the past few millenia, but that was the way things were, and you can’t expect language not to conform to the reality of the culture in which it develops.

But now societal values are different. Patriarchy, thank goodness, is losing steam to be replaced with a more meritrocratic, egalitarian form of thinking. But these values have changed very, very quickly, speaking in terms of a historical perspective. Language has simply failed to keep pace.

We do not yet have a proper, deeply rooted, “appropriate” set of rules for how to use pronouns to refer to people who undergo not only radical shifts in how they personally identify, but also radical shifts in their own physical appearance. Dividing people based on their appearance into “he” and “she” categories is still so very damn convenient, and we haven’t come up with a suitable replacement yet that people have managed to agree upon.

Well, technically we already have some, but they aren’t fully accepted.

“It” is linguistically suitable and has a long history of usage, but unfortunately it is associated with reference to non-human beings or to objects, and hence people don’t like referring to people as “it” in most situations.

There are, of course, invented pronouns like “ze” and it’s relatives, but the problem is that invented language never works - you have to develop language organically, it has to “catch on”. Just look at Esperanto - a brilliant idea, except no one wants to speak it.

Of course, there’s also the system most of the world already uses - the “generic” he, or the usage of the masculine form of a pronoun to refer to both genders inclusively when speaking of groups, reverting to the feminine form only to specifically denote an individual of that gender. However, this has historically been criticized by feminists on the grounds of gender bias, so it too is problematic.

“One” is likewise already extant, but suffers from limited versatility. We use it pretty much exclusively for statements of generality, rather than specificity. To say “John talked to one yesterday about one’s use of gendered pronouns” sounds stilted and vague.

Ultimately, I don’t think you or anyone else can really say which pronoun usage is “appropriate”. The language has yet to develop far enough in that respect for us to speak definitively about it. I personally see nothing wrong with the usage of “s/he” when someone is speaking of a transgendered individual, especially if they are using it to convey a sense of dichotomy, change, or uncertainty.

Language, folks. Get over it.

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yeah, they don’t print them out because there generally pretty short:
rule 1: Refer to the person in the gender they identify themselves by, regardless of tense.
rule 2: dont be a dick.

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