Bradley Manning wants to be called "Chelsea"

A post entitled “He Is Not Bradley Manning. She Is Chelsea Manning. Deal With It,” by Ryan Kearney on The New Republic's site says that Bradley Manning, the WikiLeaks leaker, wants now to be called “Chelsea.” Kearney, of course, has the right to call him anything he wants to. But he will always be Bradley Manning on this site.

I have no problem with people being gay, lesbian, or bisexual. We don't know how much is heredity, how much is environment, or even if there is some third cause, but whatever it is, people feel attractions to different people, and regardless of the Religious Right's railing about “unnatural” sexualities, it is truly natural for them. I'm willing to accept even stranger sexualities, though I can't fully understand them; I won't go into all the details. But the one group I can never understand or make sense of is that of the transgendered: men who think of themselves as women or vice versa.

A man who falls in love with another man just has his sense of what he finds attractive different from the majority. We are all programmed to eat, but many people eat, every morning, foods that it disgusts me just to contemplate. Sex is like food — the species could not survive without each of them, but how desires manifest themselves in different people varies. (Yes, gay sex does not procreate; but people have been known to eat non-nutritive foods as well!) And now, as gay people are getting more and more accepted (a lesbian has a good chance at being the next Mayor of New York!), there is less and less reason to consider a same-sex attraction as “unusual.” People can simply love whomever they want to love.

But transsexualism is another story. Bradley Manning will never be able to have a cell in his body (other than the sperm cells in his testicles) that has anything other than an XY chromosome type. Even if they cut off those testicles and his other male organs, and give him all the estrogens he asks for, he will still be genetically male, and he will never be able to function sexually as a female. He will simply be a castrated male, dressed in woman's clothes. No act on earth is possible that will make him anything other than that. So what does he get by adopting a female identity? I suppose, the right to go around in a dress. It's not the right to marry a man — twelve states already give him that, and more will follow, while the others probably would not even if he undergoes the sex-change operation.

Kearney's policy is “call someone what they want to be called.” Mine is “call them what they really are, if I know it.” And what they really are is in their genes.

We don't need to be Canada, or Belgium

Yesterday, my wife went down into the District of Columbia to straighten out some problems involving her unemployment insurance benefits, and I accompanied her at her request. (There had been some problems that could not be handled by phone or online, and she was advised to come in and take care of the situation in person.) After we found the correct office, we waited while a clerk there dealt with the two persons ahead of us, in Spanish, which was evidently a language she was fluent in. When it got to my wife, we went in and it was absolutely clear that she was somewhat short of fluent in English. There were a number of points in the discussion where my wife had difficulty in communicating some point to her; fortunately, perhaps because I have had somewhat more experience trying to communicate with people whose English was weak, I was able to facilitate the communication, and my wife, afterward, thanked me effusively for making things work so she got the benefits due her. (The problem was not the usual bureaucratic problem of someone who insists that if you don't follow the letter of the procedures, you're out of luck; this clerk genuinely seemed willing to help once we could get across the information we were trying to provide.)

But then I was surprised to hear my wife complain that an employee of the Government of the District of Columbia, a subdivision of the United States, ought to be able to work with clients in English. She didn't like the idea that she might have lost money she was entitled to just because she could not express herself in Spanish, making her feel like a foreigner in her own native country. I could hardly disagree with her. She was expressing opinions I have held for decades, but which she had tended to disagree with — she had, for example, not agreed with my support for the group, started by S. I. Hayakawa many decades ago, called “U. S. English,” which advocated making English our official language.

I guess it took exposure to the consequences of U. S. English's not accomplishing their program to make her see why we need to do something. Seeing what has gone on in countries like Belgium and Canada brought me to these beliefs, but it took the fear of loss of money she was entitled to to make her see the point.

Health "insurance" isn't really insurance

One of the things that probably causes a lot of difficulty in discussing the whole healthcare business is the fact that people speak of "health insurance." Now, when someone buys fire insurance, one really does not expect that one is going to get paid off out of the insurance; the chance of a real fire is small, so the premium is small. Even for life insurance, while we all expect to die, we probably will not die this year, or even very soon, so the insurance company takes the premium and uses a part of it to cover current liabilities (the people who do die in a given year), but most of it is invested until it's needed.

"Health insurance" is different. Most people will go to the doctor, at least for minor things like checkups, every year. And so every policy pays out something every year. It's really more a prepayment plan than an insurance plan. And if we called it that, it would make our discussioms more relevant to the health care problem.

"Please order in English"

A cheesesteak restaurant in Philadelphia put up a sign, "This is America. Please order in English." As a result, he was charged with discrimination. But fortunately, he was recently vindicated. Yes, this is America, and Joey Vento, the owner, was ruled within his rights by the Philadelphia Commission on Human Relations.

Why was he even charged with discrimination, though? Millions of immigrants came to this country and learned the majority language. My father came to this country about 80 years ago as a child, and the local druggist made him learn English by not letting him order an ice cream in his native Yiddish after a while. The druggist understood Yiddish and had taken his orders for a while in that language, but he knew that this 11-year-old kid that eventually became my father would need to learn English to function in America. And my father, by the age of 15, had graduated from the 8th grade, though four years previously he had come to this country devoid of the English language. And by the time I was around, years later, my father spoke English without a significant foreign accent.

Joey Vento was right to do what he did. And thank Heaven that the final decision came the way it did, even if it was years in the making.