> Now wait just a moment. Surely if Manning's own identity can only be understood from his/her own perspective, then my own meaning -- whether I am being disrespectful -- can only be seen from my perspective. How dare you project disrespect into what I am communicating.
It is clear that Chelsea Manning is a woman and should be referred to as such. She had a very public message about this. Continuing to refer to Manning with him/his pronouns is being disrespectful. It doesn't matter if you don't understand or believe in trans* as an identity or that people can actually switch their gender, you are intentionally ignoring what someone publicly asked others to do in a way that is most certainly disrespectful.
> What I said was that someone who is not transgendered might claim that they are in order to get some sexual kicks, or to subvert legal protections afforded to women. I'm not trying to take away from the genuinely transgendered, I'm saying that the claim of being transgendered can be misused.
The reality is that nobody does this. The kind of discrimination and violence trans* people face makes it unlikely that someone would pretend to be trans* for a period of time. Without actual evidence of this happening in a way that systemically abuses legal protections or considerations (of which trans* people get less than the rest of us), this is a false argument.
> I believe that I made clear in my post that I was largely in agreement, but was playing devil's advocate in order to draw out some deeper understanding -- just vanilla Socratic method stuff. Your reply seems to indicate that someone who is not fully up to speed ought to just shut up, and accept what his betters are telling him.
Nobody needs to play devil's advocate for transphobic viewpoints, those ideas and actions happen all the time in society today. There is very real data and anecdote about all the things we've talked about. There is no deeper understanding being drawn out here, the arguments you made are common transphobic arguments that don't hold up (confusing gender with sexual identity, confusing gender with biology, unalike comparison with a gender pronoun and a title, appeal to society at large to define trans* identity, gender pronouns as unimportant, straw man arguments about people pretending to be trans, separation of trans women from other women as an identity, etc.).
> Something I don't get here. I'm married to someone of a different race. I don't see what that has to do with my identity. The fact that my wife and I are married and of differing races, has nothing to do with who I am or who I expect people to see me as. She's my wife, I'm her husband, and that's all there is to it. I fail to see how this is expecting someone to change, or even have, any view of my personal identity.
That is fine if you don't consider such a relationship to be a part of your identity in that way. That is for you to define. For some people, their relationship with others does form a part of their identity in a way they consider meaningful. The point is that we don't automatically disqualify that part of said person's identity. When we do disqualify those things, those attitudes are tied to things like racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and so on.
Chelsea Manning is a woman and asked everyone to refer to her as such. That is all there is to it. There is no need to try and justify misgendering this person for any reason.