I’ve noticed recently that journalists and writers normally refer to fully 'transitioned' transgender adults (mostly male to female) with the feminine (she, her, hers) pronouns when describing their lives before transition, as well as referring to them by their new names when referring to pre-transition life history.
They also refer to the person with the new (or current) name when describing the past.
In past blog posts, I have sometimes referred before-transition incidents with the previous names and pronouns. I now wonder of this would be considered misgendering or deadnaming, even when writing about past events.
This whole question leads me to present a couple other videos and incidents.
Let’s look at Johnny Harris’s video of May 10, 2022, Why He Matters: The Danger of Ignoring Julian Assange. Harris starts out by describing Assange’s 'escape' to the embassy of Ecuador in London and hiding out in that confinement for seven years, before he gets into the actual leaks that got him “into trouble”, especially regarding information stolen by Chelsea Manning about the Iraq war. Well, in fact, one of these was a forty-minute video of an American accidental war crime that I even carried on one of my Blogger blogs since April 2010 (until I closed it down in Jan. 2022). It is called “Collateral Murder” and cannot now be embedded (age restriction from YT).
Harris always refers to Manning as Chelsea and doesn’t convey the fact that the soldier then was Bradley Manning, legally male at the time when the leaks from the Iraq war started. According to Wikipedia, Manning announced she was transgender in 2013, and completed transition surgery, litigated when she was an inmate, in 2018. Manning had considerable grass roots protester-type support for recognition of her transition as early as 2013, but the gay press did not cover her case very much because of political opposition to “Bush’s war”.
This leads my discussion to recalling the legal battle over Manning’s imprisonment for refusal to appear to a grand jury later in 2019. Ford Fischer covered a lot of this for News2Share when other media outlets pretty much ignored it. The Wikipedia article covers it. I have a couple videos I took myself of the demonstrations outside the federal courthouse in Alexandria, VA in the good old days of March 2019. I plan to edit and combine these into more professional videos later this summer, as I plan with some of my other mini-video sets (like on “stop the steal”).
Video 1
Video 2
I can digress here one more time on Harris’s video, noting one conspicuous blue tattoo on one inner forearm (shows up later in the video). Why does he disfigure himself? (He never impressed me as someone who would "need" body art.) I love the orange beanie cap (as if paying homage to Tim Pool, but Harris has is own video style that adds a lot of in-the “visually compelling”-field fact finding to his subject matter, more than Pool usually does in his volume of Timcasts.) Max Reisinger may well be on the path to developing a Harris-style reporting presence as he finishes his gap year.
Toward the end, Harris notes that "journalists" as such are not a legally recognized category with legal privileges (although there are such things as press passes). Journalism carries with the expectation of objectivity and intellectual honesty, which is both a duty and a privilege. That gets dicey when someone (like me) does journalism for self-expression, but is not willing to bond with others in a supposed marginalized group for organized "activism". More about that is to come.
I’ll wrap up this one by making note of the Netflix film “Untold: Caitlyn Jenner”, directed by Chrystal Moselle. This is part of Netflix’s “Untold” streamed film documentary franchise. It had been reviewed on the 'Media Commentary' site that has been sunset. Again, journalists usually refer the Caitlyn as 'she' for the entire life, although sometimes they will say “previously known as”, as with Chelsea. It’s interesting that she wants to run for governor as a Republican and has some pretty sensible ideas as to how to prevent the GOP’s converting itself into ordered (or actually chaotic) fascism. As I recall, Caitlyn refers to her earlier male life in the third person, as a real person in the past. Time, after all, is a dimension.
(Posted: Sunday, May 15, 2022 at 1 PM EDT by John W. Boushka)