Tag: Premium

by Patrick Appel

Glenn Beck fixates on the race of Christopher Lane’s suspected murderers:

Adam Serwer looks at how the right has seized upon the story:

Twenty-two year old Christopher Lane, a student at East Central University, was shot dead in Duncan, Okla., on Aug. 16. Lane’s death has drawn national attention because the teenage suspects allegedly told police that they shot him because they were “bored and didn’t have anything to do.” Many Australian press reports have have focused on the easy availability of firearms in the United States.

Conservative media however, have honed in on the argument that the three suspects are black and the victim is white. In fact, one of the suspects is white, an official from the Stephens County District Attorney’s office told MSNBC Wednesday. “That is not the case,” the official said when asked whether all three suspects were black. “One is black, one is half-black half-white, the other is white.” Conservative media appear to have relied on an erroneous report in the Australian media about the identity of the suspects. Right-wing outlets have since singled out tweets from one of the suspects that include derogatory language aimed at white people.

Local officials have not presented evidence yet that the killing was related to or based on race, but for many conservative outlets, the assumed race of the suspects was proof enough that Lane’s killing was racially motivated.

Bouie adds:

Lane’s death has become fodder for conservative media, and in particular, its narrative of white victimization.

See, the two suspects charged with murder aren’t just teenagers, they’re young black men. And for these right-wing provocateurs, the identity of the assailants is a direct rebuke to the “Justice for Trayvon” movement and evidence of racial hypocrisy from civil-rights leaders and anyone else who spoke about the George Zimmerman trial.

“It’s worse than a double standard. This is a purposeful, willful ignoring of the exact racial components, but in reverse, that happened in the Trayvon Martin shooting,” said Rush Limbaugh, speaking on his radio show. “From Obama on down, didn’t care about Trayvon Martin. All that mattered was that incident offered them an opportunity to advance a political agenda.” He also dinged the media for not focusing on the “racial component of any of the people involved in this.”

Weigel counters Limbaugh et al:

[H]ow hard is it to understand how the Martin/Zimmerman case became a sensation? It wasn’t the only shooting of a black person by a nonblack person that year. Martin was shot on Feb. 26, 2012. Zimmerman was taken in by police but released after five hours, and not charged. The first national media stories about the shooting came more than a week later, and it took until April 11 for Zimmerman to be charged. Compare that with the Lane tragedy: He was shot on Friday, and the suspects were charged four days later. And the second wave of Zimmerman/Martin news came after Zimmerman was acquitted. On Earth-2, where Zimmerman is charged on Feb. 27, does this story from Sanford, Fla., become a national “teaching moment”? I don’t think it does.

by Patrick Appel

Patrick McConlogue’s wants to teach a homeless man to code:

The idea is simple. Without disrespecting him, I will offer two options:

1. I will come back tomorrow and give you $100 in cash.

2. I will come back tomorrow and give you three JavaScript books, (beginner-advanced-expert) and a super cheap basic laptop. I will then come an hour early from work each day—when he feels prepared—and teach him to code.

Noreene Malone, along with much of the internet, trashes the idea:

What this suggestion shares with earlier ideas to turn the homeless into wireless hot-spots and to act as app beta-testers is a belief in the saving power of the tech world.

It’s not that the ideas are intentionally exploitative or ill-intentioned; rather, it is the bubble-bound thinking that is bothersome. In this worldview, involvement in the startup scene is the kind of transformative thing that can be a cure-all balm. It’s a narrow sort of Utopianism, one that doesn’t fully consider that there might be problems that the tools they have at their disposal can’t solve. These instances get noticed because it’s not good PR to be insensitive to the less fortunate, but this mindset pervades the tech world far beyond its interactions with the homeless.

Will Oremus partially defends McConlogue:

McConlogue’s post makes people uncomfortable not only because it is naïve and condescending, but because it raises an issue over which many of us quietly harbor guilt and doubts of our own. What is the proper response when your heart aches for a homeless person you pass every day on the way to work? Is it to flip a few coins in the guy’s direction now and then? Maybe buy him a sandwich or two? Resolve to donate some money to a local shelter this year? Turn your head and walk on? And if your answer is any of the above: What makes you so sure that your approach is doing any more good than McConlogue’s?

In a follow-up post, McConlogue reports that the homeless man, Leo, chose the coding lessons.

by Brendan James

Jake Tapper interviewed a friend of Manning’s:

Emily Greenhouse notes that Manning could face serious danger in prison now that she’s announced her identity as a woman:

Discrimination and violence, especially sexual violence, against transgender women is disproportionately bad. And in prison, according to a 2009 study of inmates in California, some sixty per cent of male-to-female transgender individuals locked up with cisgendered men suffered sexual assault. Not one of the transgender inmates in the study trusted guards to protect them against rape and harm.

Amanda Hess explains the legal measures that are in place:

[D]etention facilities (including military ones) must follow special policies to protect inmates like her. In 2003, Congress passed the Prison Rape Elimination Act. Though real-world implementation of the PREA standards has been slow-moving, the act ostensibly requires facilities to—among other things—take extra care in assigning housing to transgender inmates to reduce their risk of assault. That often means respecting the prisoner’s stated gender identity. According to the National Center for Transgender Equality, housing decisions “must be made on a case-by-case basis” and “cannot be made solely on the basis of a person’s anatomy or gender assigned at birth.”

The transgender inmate’s “views regarding their personal safety must be seriously considered,” as well, and the “decisions must be reassessed at least twice per year.” Simply placing the at-risk inmate in solitary confinement to sidestep the gender issue is not an acceptable option.

Winston Ross notes how the same act could allow Manning to end up in a women’s prison:

[The Prison Rape Elimination Act] led to regulations from the federal Department of Justice to determine housing for transgender inmates on a case-by-case basis, “taking into account factors like personal preference and safety needs,” according to the ACLU, not solely based on their genitals. The act bans “protective custody” for transgender inmates, along with segregated LGBT housing units, and it requires staff to be trained on how to communicate with and treat transgender inmates, even including the ban of “genital searches of transgender inmates just to determine their gender.” Those rules, as of June, apply to all correctional facilities that require federal funding.

Manning’s notoriety and her public revelation about being transgender already put her at serious risk of harassment and/or rape at Leavenworth. No giant leap from there, then to argue that Manning would be best protected by the prison rape act by doing time in a women’s facility, [Dru Levasseur, transgender rights project director at Lambda Legal] said.

Previous commentary here.

by Patrick Appel

Commenting on yesterday’s Nasdaq shutdown, Felix argues that our “system of stock exchanges is so incredibly complex, with so much information flowing around at mind-boggling velocity, that it is certain to fail from time to time — and to fail in unexpected ways”:

As Alexis Madrigal says, the surprising thing isn’t that the Nasdaq broke, it’s that we don’t see this kind of thing far more often.

In fact, if I had the opportunity to interview Edward Snowden, that’s one of the questions I’d love to ask: How well do the NSA’s systems work? How often do they just crash, or otherwise stop working for an unexpected and unpredictable reason? The NSA is dealing with orders of magnitude more data than the Nasdaq, and has to do so in conditions of great secrecy. My guess is that things go wrong on a pretty regular basis. But the real-world consequences of today’s market outage, just like the real-world consequences of the flash crash, were pretty slim. And so too is it hard to determine what if any harm might be done by a temporary failure of America’s national security apparatus.

by Patrick Appel

David Graeber believes that “bullshit jobs” are on the rise:

In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century’s end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a 15-hour work week. There’s every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn’t happen. Instead, technology has been marshalled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.

In response, Ryan Avent claims that “administrative jobs are the modern equivalent of the industrial line worker”:

Disaggregation may make it look meaningless, since many workers end up doing things incredibly far removed from the end points of the process; the days when the iron ore goes in one door and the car rolls out the other are over. But the idea is the same. …

The issue is not that jobs used to have meaning and now they don’t; most jobs in most periods have undoubtedly been staffed by people who would prefer to be doing something else. The issue is that too little of the recent gains from technological advance and economic growth have gone toward giving people the time and resources to enjoy their lives outside work. Early in the industrial era real wages soared and hours worked declined. In the past generation, by contrast, real wages have grown slowly and workweeks haven’t grown shorter.

by Tracy R. Walsh

Yesterday, President Obama delivered the first of three speeches setting out his vision for higher education: an ambitious if not-entirely coherent list that includes new federal college rankings, outcomes-based funding, more MOOCs, and universal income-based student loan repayment. Jon Chait zooms out:

The most controversial element of Obama’s proposal is to create a metric measuring which colleges provide the best value. This has been a longtime goal of higher education reformers – the Washington Monthly, for instance, has published its own college rankings. Under Obama’s proposal, the U.S. Department of Education would craft such a measure by 2014 and then, after trying it out to ensure it works well enough, begin using it to prorate federal tuition subsidies by 2018. That is, students could get more generous loans for the most effective schools, and less-generous loans for the least effective. 2018 is far enough in the future that it might as well be “eventually,” but it matters in the sense that Obama is laying down a marker that a successor president can choose to hit if the first stage goes off as planned.

Kevin Drum adds, “The basic idea here is that endlessly increasing the amount of federal student aid just isn’t working anymore”:

At this point, all it does is encourage universities to raise their prices, which means that students are no better off than they were before. In fact, maybe worse, since they end up graduating with ever more gargantuan loans to pay off. Instead we need to reward universities that actually provide a good bang for the buck: a solid education and high graduation rates at a reasonable cost.

Scott Jaschik notes that the plan has “common elements” with the administration’s proposed regulations for for-profit schools:

An underlying goal both of those regulations and this plan is an attempt to judge colleges based on the “value” they provide to students and taxpayers, based on a mix of student outcomes. Gainful employment, aimed at vocational programs, focused exclusively on employment outcomes and debt; the president’s plan for colleges generally would look at a broader mix of institutional and student outcomes, including access and affordability as well as employment outcomes.

For his part, Josh Barro is enthusiastic:

We’ll need to see how the rating systems work when the Department of Education releases them next year. But this is the right direction to be moving in. As with health care, third-party payment causes the education sector to focus too little on cost, and the government needs to make sure that tax dollars are spent efficiently. If we want to make college affordable, the government needs to bend the cost curve, not just write bigger checks.

Daniel Luzer is cautiously optimistic, but notes that “there are a lot of ways for this to go wrong”:

Colleges are likely to lobby pretty seriously against more oversight. Republicans might oppose it just because it’s an Obama policy, and because it introduces more regulations to a system many argue is already over regulated. The real outcome will look a lot different from what Obama proposes and it’s possible some compromises will result in very different outcomes from those intended. Rewarding colleges for higher graduation rates but not also rewarding them for enrolling more Pell students would likely cause colleges just to enroll fewer poor students, who have more trouble getting through college. Enrolling all students in “pay as you earn” programs but not providing schools with more money through Pell grants could result in massive funding shortages, for instance. But there’s a lot to work with here, and the ideas are impressive.

Tyler Cowen is more skeptical:

So far, I don’t get it. There seems to be plenty of information about colleges, and I doubt if a federal rating system would improve on those ratings already privately available. To the extent that federal system became focal, the incentives to game and scheme it would become massive, and how or whether to punish the gamers, if and when they are caught, would be a political decision. I don’t see that as healthy. … Should we be giving colleges an incentive to identify and deny admission to potential lower earners? Do we really want the federal government helping to crush humanities majors? And I don’t see that the kind of rating system under discussion here is measuring actual value added.

Meanwhile, Diane Ravitch slams the plan as “No Child Left Behind for higher education,” and Walter Hickey is outright cynical:

In the pursuit of fundamental change, President Obama will in all likelihood create just a new way for college to juke the stats. He shouldn’t be surprised. Colleges “adjusting” the stats in order to achieve a higher rating is a longstanding tradition in academia. In order to rank highly on the U.S. News and World Report college ranking — by and large the most trusted resource for high school seniors attempting to ascertain an arbitrary and decontextualized numerical value of a college — universities will do anything necessary to move the needle. … George Washington university lied about their freshmen class rankings, worth 6 percent of the score. Baylor paid their freshman to retake the SAT, worth 7.5 percent. The U.S. Naval Academy allegedly inflated their admissions numbers, worth 1.5 percent. Allegedly, the Ivy League often has discrepancies between the numbers they report to U.S. News and the number they report to the Federal Government. Clemson University was alleged to have manipulated a realm of stats in order to climb from 38th place to 22nd place in the ranking.

Borrowers in the class of 2013 started their post-collegiate lives $35,200 in debt and entered a job market where even biology and chemistry majors struggle to find work. In that context, Obama’s speech is welcome: After all, the first step is solving a problem is admitting you have one. But ranking systems and accountability-based funding have backfired at the K-12 level, and Obama’s plan does little to address two major problems: declining state aid to universities, and student-loan bankruptcy laws that encourage banks to lend students enormous amounts of money regardless of their ability to repay (and encourage schools to raise tuition accordingly). Given those realities, it’s not clear students have much to celebrate.

by Matt Sitman

Recently Russell Moore, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, offered these thoughts on how conservative Christians should respond to the “transgender question”:

As conservative Christians, we do not see transgendered persons as “freaks” to be despised or ridiculed. We acknowledge that there are some persons who feel alienated from their identities as men or as women. Of course that would be the case in a fallen universe in which all of us are alienated, in some way, from how God created us to be.

But we don’t believe this alienation can be solved by pretending as though we have Pharaoh-like dominion over our maleness or femaleness. These categories we believe (along with every civilization before us) are about more than just self-construction, and they can’t be eradicated by a change of clothes or chemical tinkering or a surgeon’s knife, much less by an arbitrary announcement in the high school gym.

The transgender question means that conservative Christian congregations such as mine must teach what’s been handed down to us, that our maleness and femaleness points us to an even deeper reality, to the unity and complementarity of Christ and the church. A rejection of the goodness of those creational realities then is a revolt against God’s lordship, and against the picture of the gospel that God had embedded in the creation.

I suppose the caveat Moore includes about transgender people not being freaks is welcome, but what he gives with one hand he immediately takes away with the other, rigidly adhering to the binary categories he supposedly finds in “creation.” So, transgender people aren’t “freaks,” just particularly stubborn examples of the sinfulness of this fallen world. Its truly bizarre to characterize the struggles and, often, suffering of the transgendered as a “revolt” against God, as if their experiences merely were a form of arrogant defiance, something chosen and pursued out of a prideful rejection of God’s plan. Even more importantly, its far from clear to me that “creation” is so simple. Jonathan Merritt, responding to Moore, points out the complexity of the matter:

According to research conducted by Anne Fausto-Sterling of Brown University, one in 100 children are born with “bodies that differ from standard male or female” biology. This includes those children born with both a penis and a vagina, as well as those with vaginal agenesis, ovatestes, or genetic disorders such as Klinefelter syndrome. Apparently, God sometimes creates humans both male and female or neither fully male nor fully female.

Intersex persons offer a critique of those who believe that gender is a static binary assigned from birth and divinely ordained. For example, what about a person who is a sexually “mosaic,” which means they have mixed gonadal dysgenesis such as the development of both ovaries and testes? It’s hard to say because Christian commentators almost never acknowledge the existence of these individuals…

[T]he situation seems to grow even more complex when one considers the internal workings of transgender people. According to research conducted by the National University of Distance Education in Madrid, Spain, transgendered people show significant differences in brain patterns. MRI scans of female-to-male transgender people, for example, resembled male brain function even though they were born biologically female.

Christians believe that God not only creates our bodies, but also our minds. Are one’s external created realities more revealing about God’s intentions than one’s internal created realities?

Merritt asked Moore about these matters, which he waved away by replying that these facts are “a question of epistemology, not of ontology,” meaning they merely obscure what sex a person “really” is. Which is another way of saying: everyone is either male or female, they just don’t know it yet. Sound familiar? Its similar to many right-wing Christians’ rhetoric about homosexuality – everyone really is straight, they just haven’t realized it, or refuse to act in accordance with that “deeper” reality.

What I find so disturbing about Moore’s approach is both its evasion of the actual, documented facts noted above and its a priori imposition of easy answers, gleaned from one rather narrow reading of Scripture, on this sensitive question. I haven’t considered all the theological implications of transgender people – its an issue, I suspect, many Christians haven’t fully considered – but I do know thinking through the question should begin with profound empathy, and a willingness not to presume to have the “right” answer from the start. Moore’s position bothers me, then, not just because of its substance, but because of the posture it exemplifies: there’s not a trace of doubt in his essay about the righteousness of his own approach. Sharon Groves wrote a follow-up article that captures this almost perfectly. She argues that Moore’s handling of the matter “is dangerous because it discourages a curiosity about the actual lived experiences of trans people” and that he’s “shutting down any deeper conversation and, in the process, dampening our understanding of how the spark of the divine exists in all of us.” She continues:

The core teachings of Christianity are to love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength and love your neighbor as yourself. We cannot love God fully if we don’t do the work of trying to understand who God is for each of us. When we look at the most moving and transformative religious writing – from Augustine to Thomas Merton – there is a sense of openness and curiosity to the experience of God.  We can’t love God if we don’t try to glean how God works in our lives.

Similarly, we can’t really love our neighbors if we cast off all curiosity about who they are and their experience of life in the world. And finally, if we remain uninterested in ourselves – about how we come to know our gender–then we can’t really love the difference that shows up in our neighbors.

The heart of Christianity is grace, or God’s one-way love for each of us, wherever we are in our lives. Its a message of radical acceptance and affirmation, without conditions. It does not depend on our having figured everything out, or having gotten our lives together, or having settled questions about our gender or sexuality. Similarly to the way the Bible does not address the matter of homosexuality as we have come to understand it, there is no “biblical” position on the issue of transgender people – except to love them exactly as they are.   Transgender people need to be shown this love, not have their own experiences dismissed as a form of alienation from God’s intentions for them. Showing them this love, if it is real and not a mere pose, necessarily includes walking along side them on their journey, not pointing them to a one-size-fits-all destination. A love that seeks to change or cure is not love at all, but only a more subtle form of power and control, the very means of relating to others Jesus consistently rejected. Like all of us, transgender people need mercy, not easy answers. Like all of us, they need to experience the church as a welcoming refuge – a place of genuine affirmation. Like all of us, they need to be reminded, not of those verses Moore rips from the book of Genesis, but of St Paul’s words from his letter to the Galatians that, in the Kingdom of God,

There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.

(Photo: Five-year-old Tyler, known until last fall as Kathryn, gets a haircut from his dad Stephen at their suburban Washington, D.C., home, on Monday, March 12, 2012.  Tyler’s insistence on being a boy started at the early age of 2. By Nikki Kahn/The Washington Post)

by Matt Sitman

Librarian Judith Finnamore of London’s Westminster Archive Centre has been cooking her way through The Unknown Ladies Cookbook, “a 300-year-old British compendium of family recipes” she rediscovered. You can follow her culinary exploits via her blog, which offers detailed recipes and historical snippets from the manuscript. Handwritten by several different women between 1690 and 1830, the recipes show just how much the way we prepare our food has changed. In a profile of Finnamore’s work, Amy Guttman highlights a few of these shifts. One of them? Brits used to use a lot of eggs:

Some recipes call for as many as 30 eggs to bake a cake; others suggest whisking for an hour. But if you were to try out these recipes today, you’d need to use just two-thirds or even one-half of the eggs indicated, Gray says, because eggs have grown larger over the last century. As eggs began to be classed by quality and weight, farmers culled smaller chickens in favor of larger ones that produced bigger eggs.

Even in 1940, Gray says, egg cups were much smaller than they are today, indicating a gradual change. While whisking for an hour sounds like a workout, with servants to do the actual work, the women running a household wouldn’t have minded. Gray says she has actually whisked eggs for a full hour, and it does make a difference in texture. So if you have servants to do it, why not?

Samuel Muston notices some of the more interesting recipes Finnamore uncovered:

“Some of the recipes are ‘challenging’ for our palates – I mean the sheep’s head dish won’t be for everyone.” Other surprises include “mince pies” with calves tongue in them. There is also a vast 3lb cake, whose inclusion is puzzling given Finnamore doesn’t think this was used by a cook at some great country pile, but rather that it came from a “place like the Bennett house in Pride and Prejudice”.

by Patrick Appel

Peter Orszag thinks it has been debunked:

Like many others who read Malcolm Gladwell’s book “Outliers” when it came out five years ago, I was impressed by the 10,000-hour rule of expertise. I wrote a column (for a different publication) espousing the rule, which holds that to become a world-class competitor at anything from chess to tennis to baseball, all that’s required is 10,000 hours of deliberate practice. David Epstein has convinced me I was wrong. His thoroughly researched new book, “The Sports Gene,” pretty much demolishes the 10,000-hour rule — and much of “Outliers” along with it.

Gladwell protests:

“We’ve tested over ten thousand boys,” Epstein quotes one South African researcher as saying, “and I’ve never seen a boy who was slow become fast.” As it happens, I have been a runner and a serious track-and-field fan my entire life, and I have never seen a boy who was slow become fast either. For that matter, I’ve never met someone who thinks a boy who was slow can become fast. Epstein has written a wonderful book. But I wonder if, in his zeal to stake out a provocative claim on this one matter, he has built himself a straw man.

The point of Simon and Chase’s paper years ago was that cognitively complex activities take many years to master because they require that a very long list of situations and possibilities and scenarios be experienced and processed. There’s a reason the Beatles didn’t give us “The White Album” when they were teen-agers. And if the surgeon who wants to fuse your spinal cord did some newfangled online accelerated residency, you should probably tell him no. It does not invalidate the ten-thousand-hour principle, however, to point out that in instances where there are not a long list of situations and scenarios and possibilities to master—like jumping really high, running as fast as you can in a straight line, or directing a sharp object at a large, round piece of cork—expertise can be attained a whole lot more quickly. What Simon and Chase wrote forty years ago remains true today. In cognitively demanding fields, there are no naturals.

Earlier Dish on Epstein’s book here.

by Brendan James

https://twitter.com/attackerman/status/370619079151075328

This morning Bradley Manning released a statement declaring a new gender identity, taking the name Chelsea and resuming a transition interrupted by her military trial. Manning’s biographer Denver Nicks places the announcement in context:

We’ve known for some time that Manning struggled with gender identity issues–a struggle that got top billing in his defense–and considered herself, at least for a time, to be a woman, so I’m not surprised by the announcement. I suspect it is coming only now, after his sentence has come down, because Manning wanted to avoid antagonizing the court by appearing to make more of a spectacle of the trial than it already is. … Inevitable rhetorical challenges aside, the important thing for us in the media is to report on Manning with respect for the trans experience.

In response to the NYT and other outlets referring to Manning as “he” while reporting the change, Ryan Kearney points out that most style guides provide easy rules in this case:

The Guardian, to its credit, changed its topic page to “Chelsea Manning.” This should not be the exception, but the rule. Even the Associated Press stylebook says so: that reporters should “use the pronoun preferred by the individuals who have acquired the physical characteristics of the opposite sex or present themselves in a way that does not correspond with their sex at birth. If that preference is not expressed, use the pronoun consistent with the way the individuals live publicly.”

Maureen O’Connor notes that the media respects other types of name changes:

Why is it so hard for people to type an extra s when they write about Manning? We updated our nomenclature for “Snoop Lion” and “the Artist Formerly Known as Prince.” “Ali Lohan” and “Lil’ Bow Wow” became “Aliana” and “Bow Wow” to reflect personal growth. We accept typographical requests from branded products like iPhone, PowerPoint, and eHarmony — and from branded humans like Ke$ha, A$AP Rocky, and ‘N Sync. (The last being unusual even without the asterisk.) The idiosyncrasies of capitalism, apparently, are more compelling than a human’s self-professed gender.

Amanda Marcotte urges the press to start using the new pronoun:

The goal here should be to move as quickly as possible from referring to Manning by a male name and male pronouns to her female name and pronouns. The sooner journalists stop writing “Bradley” and start writing “Chelsea,” the quicker everyone following this story will adapt—and even change their Google search terms when looking for coverage. A gender-free headline to indicate that this is an in-between stage in coverage makes sense, but with this announcement, Manning herself gave everyone a nice, clean break—a point to just stop saying “he” and start saying “she.”

Even if you disagree with Manning’s actions and believe she deserves the harsh sentence she received, her gender identity had nothing to do with her crimes.

Katie McDonough views the episode as a rallying point for coverage of transgender subjects:

[T]hese failures in reporting have not gone unchecked. There is a growing chorus of transgender rights advocates rallying for accountability from major news outlets. Formal complaints have been submitted to the BBC and the New York Times, and this conversation, probably the most mainstream discussion the press has had to-date about transgender identity and the importance of respectful (and truthful) use of pronouns and chosen names, could very well set an important precedent for future coverage of transgender issues.

Of course, Rod Dreher isn’t having it:

I presume Bradley Manning still has a penis and male chromosomes. He is not a female simply because he says he is. Though I very much doubt that the military will give him the female hormones he has requested for his prison stay, Manning may have the operation one day, but for now, he is still a he. I don’t see why feeling pity for Manning’s psychological suffering requires us to play along with his hallucination. If you want to do so, be my guest, but shouldn’t journalists hold themselves to different standards?

Meanwhile, Sarah Kliff looks into whether Manning is likely to receive the hormone therapy she’s requested, since Fort Leavenworth denies they supply it:

“Where inmates have been denied care, courts have said that’s unconstitutional,” says Jennifer Levi, director of the Transgender Rights Project at Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders. “I don’t know of any cases that have been brought yet against military prisons. But they would have the same obligation to provide adequate medical care.” Levi worked with a North Carolina inmate to reform federal policy on hormone replacement therapy in prison. Vanessa Adams entered a North Carolina facility at age 29. She was biologically male but “self-identified as female throughout her adult life,” according to court documents.

“Because of this, she wanted to initiate the gender transition process prior to her incarceration, but found herself unable to do so in the face of the restrictions imposed on her by a conservative family and workplace,” the lawsuit continues. Adams had been diagnosed with gender identity disorder; Manning has also received the same diagnosis.