I certainly don’t see them as the same. Bradley Manning’s announcement, and especially the time of it considering his/her circumstances, is especially suspect. And my focus is the idea that the government should be providing the treatment, and if they refuse they will be sued by Manning.

1) If someone that is a working individual with their own unique psychological issues decides to have therapy that involves hormones and possible surgery that he or she pays for himself or herself based on months and months of slow, deliberate, and rational counseling exploring all options– making a free choice as a free individual to determine his or her own affairs– then that’s one thing.

2) If someone that is a criminal, having done something clearly illegal and pussy-foot-ed around that fact, adopts a transsexual identity as a sort of politically correct shield for his or her own behavior and then tries to force other people to pay for his or her desires… then that’s another thing.

Let’s not confuse these two people. They are as clear and different as oil is from water and night is from day. This is important.

It’s frustrating as all f–king hell to see this treated as the same. Jeffrey Dahmer is not to be held up as someone that somehow is a lens to treat normal gay men with. The KKK is not to be held up as a lens with which to think of all Southerners by.

Dang — 🙁

I suspect he thinks sex reassignment will keep him away from Bubba and the boys. He should have thought of that before. Suck it up you whiny little b@stard.

Men (and until recently they were all men) with whom I spoke before their surgery would tell me that their bodies and sexual identities were at variance. Those I met after surgery would tell me that the surgery and hormone treatments that had made them “women” had also made them happy and contented. None of these encounters were persuasive, however.

The post-surgical subjects struck me as caricatures of women. They wore high heels, copious makeup, and flamboyant clothing; they spoke about how they found themselves able to give vent to their natural inclinations for peace, domesticity, and gentleness– but their large hands, prominent Adam’s apples, and thick facial features were incongruous (and would become more so as they aged).

Women psychiatrists whom I sent to talk with them would intuitively see through the disguise and the exaggerated postures. “Gals know gals,” one said to me, “and that’s a guy.”

The subjects before the surgery struck me as even more strange, as they struggled to convince anyone who might influence the decision for their surgery. First, they spent an unusual amount of time thinking and talking about sex and their sexual experiences; their sexual hungers and adventures seemed to preoccupy them. Second, discussion of babies or children provoked little interest from them; indeed, they seemed indifferent to children.

But third, and most remarkable, many of these men-who-claimed-to-be-women reported that they found women sexually attractive and that they saw themselves as “lesbians.” When I noted to their champions that their psychological leanings seemed more like those of men than of women, I would get various replies, mostly to the effect that in making such judgments I was drawing on sexual stereotypes.

He goes on to talk about how tragic it is that these people hate themselves and their bodies so much that they want to amputate crucial parts of their anatomy — and how crazy it is that we accommodate them. (He spends some time on the case of the hermaphrodite infants, too, a special case.)

Wonder if it was like Hasan; implied prejudice against sexual nutcases would look bad.

Oh, Hell no!