Why Do We Pathologize Gender Nonconformity?
Army Pfc. Manning, 2012 United States Army What Chelsea Manning's gender dysphoria reveals about the limits of psychiatric diagnoses Chelsea Manning, the former intelligence analyst recently sentenced to 35 years in prison for leaking classified material to WikiLeaks, made headlines this week when she announced that she wished to change her name from Bradley to Chelsea, and planned to start hormone therapy to transition her gender as soon as possible. Though it seemed to take the world by storm, the Army private's gender identity was a key point in her defense. During her trial, Manning's lawyers argued that the stress of suffering from gender identity disorder while serving in the Army affected her decision to leak more than 700,000 classified documents. Manning's defense brings up tricky questions about the fine line between getting transgender people the medical and psychiatric help they need and calling gender nonconformity a symptom of a disease. For...