Just moments after being sentenced to a 35-year prison sentence for leaking government crimes and malfeasance to Wikileaks, Chelsea Manning, formerly known as Pvt 1st Class Bradley Manning, announced she would commence to live her life as a woman.
Maybe it is the chip on my shoulder but I felt the air being sucked out of the room. The Right, of course, has never liked Manning, so their support is not expected. The Left has always shown its dysfunctions more publicly. Witness how the San Francisco Lesbian & Gay Pride Committee withdrew considering Manning as Grand Marshall for the Parade earlier this year (but as I have said too many times of that reputed city, all that glistens has never been gold).
Now that Manning has just as publicly declared her gender and that she will begin taking hormones, I imagine much of the Left will simply drop her from their thoughts while she languishes in prison.
How many "I AM CHELSEA MANNING" placards will be see? Time will tell, but history is a guide. We've only just come to liking lesbians and gays, as long as they are devoid of militancy and long deeply to be hetero-normative ... Or is that the chip on my shoulder?
History, at any rate, is also a guide for this conundrum we find ourselves in regarding such topics as sex, gender, and race identities.
We in the Western world - and this includes the non-West where our tentacles have reached - live in a madhouse. I do not mean this metaphorically. Our madhouse is around color and gender identities, and we are crazed about it. This means that our perception of these things are immediately warped, always suspect, and potently volatile. We kill over the stupidest things.
To the strict Western duality, there is Black and there is White. There is Male and there is Female. There is also the Man and there is the Woman. Each must know his [and her] place. Just as there were once mulattoes and quadroons and octoroons, and they had to know their place too.
You are this, or you are that, but if you try some other course you may be lynched.
This duality is about power and maintaining it.
A Patriarchal arrangement with an Old Man God in the sky to whom we must submit as we submit to our husbands and to our kings, and even to our vanguard, must make these distinctions between human drones sharp and few.
As true to a system which affords us Coke or Pepsi, and fewer choices of how to rent and sell ourselves in wage-slavery, it would be stretching hope to think we'd be given broad options in the expression of our so-called identity.
Options would be a threat. Options, simply put, is a means to abolishing the West and its prisons and its morality and its labor system.
I have, for example, read that among many native American groups, the "Two-Spirit" existed while in West African societies, the "Gate-Keeper" thrived.
Modern gay/straight duality thought have placed these phenomena on the LGBTQ team, but this misses the point. The Two-Spirits and the Gate-Keepers weren't fringe subcultures brought out like pets. And it seems while these indigenous cultures had two sexes, they embraced many genders.
They existed as a norm before the West was Won: not as an alternative, not as a "gay lifestyle" but as one of many norms within complex civilizations which had a better relationship with the natural and supernatural world.
Those true civilizations knew what we have lost: we are ourselves expressions of this natural and supernatural world, and this fact confronts the Western claustrophobic one every day. This is why governments and monotheists have waged wars against any expression of difference.
If we had escaped what anthropologist Margaret Mead called, simply, "an accident of history" - that is, us, here and now, enslaved, brutalizing each other, exterminating the ecosystem, fouling the planet, and seeking to spread our plague to galaxies far, far away [and calling it Progress!] - we might still have our civilization and not live in a dungeon of barbarism, guilt, and man/woman duality.
Yes, we got history backwards. Our official texts tell us we are modern and civilized, advanced and developed while our ancestors were primitives. That is a lie. What we really have done is what the Hon George Galloway lectured the US Senate in a not dissimilar context: we have defied evolution and gone from a butterfly and become worms.
In our real civilization, the ones we aren't supposed to know about, people like Manning would not be imprisoned in the binary male-female world: is she a man, or is she a woman, and what do I call ... him? .
I say these things about our false gender choices at some risk of angering my more sympathetic friends and allies on the Left. Because I am skirting dangerously close to criticizing Manning's announcement. Maybe that old chip on my shoulder wonders how civilized cultures, like who embraced the Two-Spirit and the Gate-Keepers, among others, would have nurtured Manning in his youth and allowed that human being to grow and become, period. It was not a Coke and Pepsi world back then. It would have offered the child more ways of being, as normal and as natural as another. It would not have told him, in so many violent ways, "if you are not this you are that."
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