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[TW: CISSEXISM & MISGENDERING]

Private Manning has endured horrendous treatment in prison waiting for trial. But listen again to what she had to say, in chats whose validity would seem to have been proved over the weekend: ‘I wouldn’t mind going to prison for the rest of my life, or being executed so much, if it wasn’t for the possibility of having pictures of me… plastered all over the world press… as boy.’

This kind of ‘ungendering,’ as trans theorist Julia Serano has argued in her landmark book Whipping Girl, is itself harmful, an act of violence by a world that has little inclination for respecting the self-identification of transgender people and exposes them to violence in every sphere of society.

Now that we have entered the trial stage and the facts are being confirmed, it is mindboggling that her supporters continue to engage in this, in the very act of ‘support’–and it says everything about how we on the Left see transgender women.