i have been trying to find the right way to put this, but it's not easy.

yesterday i wrote for hours about slavery and petroleum, the Transition movement and Lydia Maria Child.

there's a point to be made there, but i couldn't quite make it, because i feel a powerful need to cover my bases, explaining carefully, so i am not misunderstood, what is and is not the same about the chattel slavery economy and the petroleum economy. and what i hope and fear is, or is not, the same about Transition Northampton and the Northampton Society of Education and Industry.

i've also been reading stories about what the world might look like, once petroleum goes away, if slavery doesn't. they're quite good, and have gotten inside my head, in that way that unsettling parables do.

and i've been planning for grad school, in history. and reading derrick jensen for the first time, and spending a lot of time outside, down by a river that seems to get lower by the day, and the woods that are none of them much past 100 years old.

just now, a series of funny things. i read this sentence: "what are ten species of edible plants within one hundred yards of your home?" and i could answer that question. more or less.

and then i read this: "I was recently in new england, and someone there commented that local trees had grown back over the last hundred years. he took this as a good sign: the people of the region had finally learned to not deforest their own backyards." followed by a counterpoint: "technological and social innovation have enabled these yankees to deforest the globe."

and my first thought was that when i walk, or run, out to those century-old woods by the river, where i can identify burdock and lambs quarters and dandelion and acorns and nettle and daylily and a half dozen other edible plants, i find them in fields that get annually bush-hogged, and in the thin slips of young woods between.

and then the last funny thing that happened was that, in this same book, i read the name of a friend i fell out of touch with years ago, which spurred me to try to find the right way to say this again... and when i went upstairs, i found i'd left my coal burning computer open and idling on the website of the man who gave me that phrase.

the friend was someone who went to yale when this country was first invading iraq. she thought that the invasion was a really bad idea, and hung the flag upside-down out her window, and for her trouble, she had her living space invaded by a belligerent group of white undergrad men wielding 2x4s and racist epithets.

I remember the sense, at the time, that this kind of violence was waiting, out in the open, for anyone willing to say anything marginally honest about iraq, and this nation's military goals there. doubly so if these honest people failed to be straight white men.

and i remember being confused that someone who so gloriously failed to be such things would still be, as our mutual acquaintances told me she was, a primitivist. my exposure to primitivists at that point was mostly to the variety that seemed excited about The Collapse, and the fantasy of eking out a hard-bitten survivalist existence that was nasty, brutish, and short, in the deer hide pants that they had already made for the occaision. i had, and have, little patience, and something verging on utter contempt, for dudes whose rejection of "civilization" stems from civilization's emasculating nanny culture that fails to separate the men from the boys... or whatever. so i wrote off primitivism and deep ecology and "anti-civ" as so much masturbatory ablist heteropatriarchal macho fantasy, with a fetish for the noble savage. There's a slight aftertaste, bitter and lingering, of some of that in Jensen's writings.

at the beginning of my senior year in college, i watched Post-Katrina New Orleans happen. and i worked on my thesis during spring break, when most of my friends went to new orleans for the same reasons i later did - a powerful need to do something.

and when i got down there, i found that Post-Katrina New Orleans had taken place just like The Gulf War. and what is most upsetting, and hardest to shake, is that new orleans absolutely refuses to be anywhere but the real world. which means that what happens there happens because of what happens here. the same world, the same rules, the same patterns of inputs and outputs. 

at the beginning of the summer, two lovely friends from new orleans visited my home town, and we talked about the Deepwater Horizon. gallows humor, mostly. a few weeks ago, a wonderfully thoughtful mentor and i sat down to lunch, and she said "It's gotten to the point where things are so fucked that I can't take it all in." we were talking about the collapsing lobster population in the atlantic, and about the Deepwater Horizon, which had still not been capped.

i've reluctantly revisited my dismissal of primitivism. or rather, i've come to the conclusion that all my discomfort with The Dudebros Of The Apocolypse is merited. and that calling it "civilization" is complicated, but that the industrial petroleum economy is going to burn itself out, that there are other economies waiting to take its place, and they are also going to burn themselves out, and that in so doing, those economic systems are going to continue destroying vast areas of the world, and vast numbers of its inhabitants. Look at the gulf, or that other gulf that oil comes from. or the niger delta, or the appalachians. or the Sundarbans. one of the helpful things about Jensen is that he insists we already know plenty of examples. and i find that i do.

basically, i have, in the last several years, stopped seeing apocalypse as an adventure fantasy, and have started to see it as a fairly honest way of describing actual events. a partial description, because apocalypse, as a concept, has two parts. the first part is the end of the world in question. then the veil-lifting part. and we've got the worlds ending part. it's been with us since 1492 (in Al-Andalus and Guanahani both) and before, and since. the difference now is that many different sorts of worlds seem to be ending at once. 


there's some level of consensus on oil discovery and production being well over the hill. ditto the effects of climate change. and as joni seager doesn't quite put it in her wonderful talk at barnard, fuck a bunch of 2 degrees feel-good bullshit.
it's the revelation part that we're still waiting on. not The Case Of Chosen v. Fallen kind of revelation. the other one, where knowledge gets assimilated, incorporated, and acted on.

So i'm marking the end of this summer by taking the GRE, and then looking after some dogs, and then going to work with some Queer Family in tennessee. and from there, i'm hoping to go visit a lot of people i care about, in a lot of places i've never been, and try to figure out the right thing to do, somewhere in the process. 

because i know that i can wake up in the morning and write my thesis instead of going to new orleans. i've made that decision before.

but there are deeper and more simple questions, about far less familiar and far more apparent options.

And i'd appreciate some input.

RUN

In the ongoing debate over Whether We Should Do It, Nike have generally held a pretty consistent position. To put it mildly, they are in disagreement with Frankie's view.

 Frankie assume that we want to Do It. Nike tell us that we Don't want to Do It, but hold out the hope that we may be able to Just impulse-buy our way out of that lethargy. With help, of course, from Nike.

But then sometimes Nike Say somewhat different things about doing it.

Sure, we have that special, disempowering form of women's empowerment, where women still get targeted and objectified like in any slasher film, but are then empowered to not die by the products they purchase! But i also see what Nike did there, with the turning of the slasher film pastiche on its michael-meyers-visaged head. and there's something worth salvaging from it: running away is awesome.

Chainsaw Man has all the Power signifiers. he's a burly, masked, fully clothed dude. he has a deep throaty growl, a chainsaw, and the element of surprise.

Fleeing Woman has all of the powerlessness signifiers. she's a slight, partially disrobed, unarmed lady with a high-pitched scream and no obvious means of defense. in a normal slasher movie, FW would grab a kitchen knife, lock herself in a closet or bathroom, and/or run outside into the protective arms of Big Strong Man, who will then take up his patriarchal protective responsibility.

FW doesn't do any of this, she just takes off. Nike wants to associate itself with her ability to run, which is bullshit for reasons i'll get into another time. but all the things that make FW look like the inevitable victim of CM in the typical misogynistic slasher narrative are quite the opposite if her goal isn't to defeat the bad guy and defend the territory of The Home. minimal clothes make movement easier and body temperature self-regulating. no mask makes breathing easier. and it's much easier to run when you're not carrying a growling chainsaw.

and as she heads off into the night, FW isn't looking for BS Man who will fight for her. nor a closet to lock herself in. she's just running.

Running from a conflict is supposed to be bad. "cut and run" is now used in political posturing to mean, roughly "i support the war and don't care that my figure of speech implies that our ship of state will shortly be dashed to splinters by the oncoming storm." The imperative to hold the line insists on the failure of giving up property or territory or an affected posture of Power, which are all made more or less synonymous. Holding your ground, or your stuff, or your burly bravado, all require the ontological certainty that anything so defended will be safe, or more generally, that you can define a space, and keep out the things you don't want.

Any trans person who's ever used a public bathroom can attest to the safety of such defended spaces.
so can, hopefully, anyone who's paying marginally close attention to the current debates over immigration.
or anyone who's ever been present uninvited on a college campus, or in a corporate building.
or any queer person or other mutant who's been ensconced in the normative safety of The Home.
or ask Francine. or Mrs. Torrence.

the call always comes from inside the house.
or more to the point, the zombies always get in, and if the cavalry shows up, then you're stuck with the cavalry.

Holding the line never just requires grit and guns. it requires a chain of command, and uniforms, and the brig. and the first to be frog-marched to the brig are always the people who we've been holding the line down on top of. their bodies make our line waver treacherously, and this Will Not Do.

but the good news is, the line can't be held. you can't stay pure, and you can't stay clean, and you can't stay safe, and you can't keep from getting hurt, and that door won't hold forever. but you can run away. you can't carry much with you when you do. and that's a good thing. so relax.

what we can do is keep moving. resist the logic that says we have to stay put, have to clean up, have to defend what we have, where we are, because someone else wants it and somewhere else will be worse.

we can keep running longer than anything else with feet. ain't nothing can keep up with us once we get moving. not the creep with the chainsaw, not your husband with the axe, not the zombie, and not the man with the gun

quick. the world we thought we knew is burning. drop everything and run.

visualization aids in learning

Info from the Wikileaks Afghan War Diaries.
(thanks to Casual Entropy for the link)


the original, higer-resolution version of this video is set to Iron Maiden's "Run To The Hills."
for those unfamiliar, that's a song by the heavy metal band about the genocidal Indian Wars of the 1800s.
which wouldn't be so bad if the youtubes didn't keep urging me to buy the MP3 on itunes, and present me with popup ads about designer shoes. moreover, it's worth mentioning that, to this day, standard US military parlance refers to all territory not under US or Allied control as "Indian Country."

the obvious

< stating it >
although it's been said,
many times, many ways,
bear with me.

because now that everyone else has said it,
it's worth saying again.

we are not doing anyone any favors by continuing to occupy Afghanistan.
No wait, let me rephrase that. We, the taxpayers who fund the US military, have actually allowed our employees to do many favors, for many people. Many of these people are in the Pakistani military, including the Directorate For Inter-Services Intelligence, and the Taliban.

To whatever more abstracted degree support for the Taliban has been enabled by US drone attacks which predictably kill civilians and destroy towns, to whatever degree our strategy has transformed the embattled ruling cadre of the Talib into an ethnic Pashtun nationalist anti-occupation insurgency, the fact remains.

We Fund The Taliban. No past tense. We're doing it right now. We give money to warlords, they give it to the Taliban. We give money to Pakistan, they give it to the Taliban. The Occupation Funds The Taliban.

We can, and clearly do, pretend otherwise.
It's not that it's so glaringly obvious, or so embarrassingly well established as to be impossible to ignore.
It is well within our power to keep ignoring the old information. I have total confidence that we can continue to do so, while simultaneously dismissing new information as "nothing new."

We can keep doing it until we lose.
< / stating it >

Wikileaks and the security of communities

go listen to this

it's just under an hour and a half long. and it's worth it.

what you're listening to, incidentally, is the keynote speech for the HOPE conference, which is a semiregular conference in NYC, the 8th of which is winding up today.

the keynote speaker was announced, as of yesterday, to be This Man, who, as the actual speaker tells his audience of computer whizzes and feds early on, will not be able to make it, because of the overwhelming interest of the latter group.

The target audience of this speech, in fact of this conference, is knowledgeable about computers to a stunning degree. i don't understand a lot of the specific technical stuff Applebaum is talking about. and i'm ok with that (though i'd still like someone to walk me through securely installing Tor) because the social dynamics at play here are at least as interesting.

These are computer geeks with political and rhetorical savvy: The likelihood that Assange would make it into the US was very small at the time when his keynote was announced. BUT saying he'd be there guaranteed that a helluva lot of intelligence operatives and agents of various persuasions would show. which provides a really lovely teachable moment about how hierarchical and authoritarian structures are obligated to respond to stimuli in predictable ways, and that those patterns tend towards assuming people are "leaders" of organizations which can be structurally "decapitated."

this, no matter how many times those supposed leaders explain that they are not so much calling down the rain as observing the direction of the wind, and though they may be supa dupa fly, they do not have the keys to the jeep, as it were.

So the guy with the microphone isn't Assange, he's some guy named Applebaum who I never heard of before. And he takes that first teachable moment, and turns it into a different one, about the resilience of community, and how "leaders" and figureheads aren't the source of a community's power, but emergent properties of it. He doesn't say it in quite this way, but in that moment, the State had responded in its predictable way, and has succeeded, sort of. The speech is the moment immediately after, where the community is running around like a hydra with its head cut off.

The community that Applebaum invokes has far more interesting implications than its defanged contemporary usage. it's not a synonym for "identity grouping." it's an obligation, and a security protocol. and if you neglect your community, that compromises the security system. which, in cryptographese, is called an attack.

Applebaum talks about someone who performed this kind of attack. (more background & etc.)
i don't know if the parallels with avoidance speech mourning practices is intentional, but it's striking. saying someone has no name anymore, in this context, has profound practical implications. they're no longer a trusted node. this in a set of systems where identity verification is everything, and is the source of one of the only widespread means of strong encryption.

keep listening for the parts where Applebaum talks about community.
dissidents, especially computer geek dissidents, get painted as antisocial like nobody's business, and there's something truly beautiful about hearing the idea of collective interresponsibility, and the drive to keep your people safe, invoked so passionately by someone with such a broad understanding of his collective, and so much of the wherewithal to aid in that safety.

it's worth saying, frequently, that the current wars are not about far off places we don't understand, but about us, and what we allow to be funded, and how far we can expand our universe of empathy, and what our societal response to crisis is. it's worth saying that war is a process by which destruction and suffering are manufactured domestically, for foreign consumption. so i always appreciate when someone  bothers to say it.

and then listen to the part where he invokes Harvey Milk. because it's a really wonderful reminder that coming out was never just about saying "hey, i have an immutable individual identity! if the status quo can assimilate it i'll stop bugging you!" It was actually about asking the people who wanted to see you dead if they would like say it to your face, when you ran into them at family gatherings. it was about strategy, and it was about passion, and it was about community, and it was about making it personal.

in the end what i get out of this, even when i can't understand the jargon, is that caring about people is powerful. tangibly so. and that being able to care about and and trust people is a valuable security resource, and a tool with almost limitless social potential.

7-7-10

yesterday broke 100 degrees fahrenheit.

or not broke, exactly. monday too had bested the double digits

this has happened 8 other times.

to be clear: by "this" i don't mean back-to-back triple-digit-days.

nor do i mean 101 degree july 5ths, or 6ths.

i mean that this little bend in the Connecticut river has seen ten days this hot in recorded history, and two of them happened in the last 48 hours.

3 out of 10 since i graduated college.

to account for the next 3 you have to go back to the summer that the civil rights act was passed.

but since the dawn of the standardized mercury thermometer in western massachusetts, every single day above 100 has come since the birth of Queen Elizabeth II.


The front page of tomorrow's paper lists another ten days. On these ten days, residents of New England drew more electricity from our coal-and-nuclear grid than at any other time in history. None of these days is so much as 5 years distant.

this morning the dial in the shade outside the kitchen window read 90 degrees by 10AM, while the cylinder out the back door catches a glint of sun, and reads above 110. officially, this is not another 100 degree day. The Official Thermometer can sit in the shade all day and lose no credibility.

residents of the United States have a long and distinguished history of believing themselves outside of history, or avatars of the driving forces of history, or witnesses to the denouement. Being all of these at once, history is reduced to teleology, an ugly fable to which we are the moral. We speed towards ourselves along this story's only trajectory, which is a brutal process of elimination.


Yesterday I waded barefoot through a riverbed lined with smooth stones, pottery shards and bits of brick with edges worn round. I watched the sun set over a field of feral peas and brassicas, sitting in among the Queen Anne's Lace in a stand of sumac. The field has been pocumtuc land, the border territory with nipmuc, then logged and farmed for a hundred years. Just over the rise, 205 years, one month and 2 days ago, on a hill called Pancake Plain, two irishmen, Dominic and James, were hanged for murder and with scant evidence. Farmland, a few trees, and a crowd of fifteen thousands looked on. Fifty years on, the field was farmed again, now by the inmates of a State Asylum. In the quiet of the baking sun, the sumac grows back in the poor soil, and the remains of an Institutional foundation and its attendant coal boiler fall slowly down the hill behind me.


I watch the sun set on what may not be the hottest day of the year, and i listen to the highway, 
and i wonder if America only concerns himself with the end of the World because he has already ended so many of them.

Soldiers' resistance, the Trans Well Of Loneliness, resistance and queer community: Separately, and wearing boots.

I've been meaning to put together a coherent intro post about this blog, and the name.
but poesy is important. And when unexpected allusions jump out at you, it's important to take a hint.


so let's talk about Bradley Manning.


What we know is that Manning:

• holds the rank of Private First Class in the US Army
• served as an intelligence analyst
• is being held without charge, as of late May, at Camp Arifjan, Kuwait, after allegedly leaking the Collateral Murder raw video, and potentially more than 200,000 state department cables and details of hundreds of thousands of incidents from the iraq war, along with other sensitive files, to Wikileaks
• was implicated in the Wikileaks matter by what appears to be unencrypted instant message correspondence with Adrian Lamo, a former hacker with "links to the LGBT community" turned threat analyst, journalist, and FBI informant, who was diagnosed last month with Asperger's.
• The "informant" part comes from Lamo turning over his chat logs with Manning to the federal government. This after Lamo assured Manning that he was both a journalist and an ordained minister, and thus would treat anything Manning said as the words of a confidential source and as confessional.

While the inadvisable nature of telling a snitch where they can shove it is a matter of historical record, it is also a matter of historical record that snitches have no friends, terrible sex lives, never experience true love, are unbelievably boring, die alone, and deep down even their pets don't actually like them.

Also, cismen who snitch experience chronic persistent erectile disfunction. Alone.

(A note on the link: Ms. Kibby was found not guilty.)

(Mostly unredacted portions of the chat logs and further links can be found here. As for the "few words regarding specifics of personal issues not directly related to the whistleblowing/national security concerns at hand," keep reading.)

What we absolutely do not know, and what is pure speculation, but at this point increasingly pervasive speculation, is that some of Manning's non sequitur asides during chats with Lamo were not, in fact, non sequiturs at all, but were "portion[s] of the exchange... tightly packed with trans code words and lingo and analogies." This from an anonymous "source with deep ties to the LGBT community" providing a quote to Boing Boing.

Just to say again: we don't know that Manning is trans. The logs show "bradass87" as distraught, overwhelmed by the magnitude and powerul dirtiness of the government dirt in question, and (this is something other than pure speculation) lonely and scared shitless.

Bradass87 says some muddly things about not wanting pictures of them "as a boy" plastered all over the internet, along with some comments about how "the cpu is not made for this motherboard," wanting "time to figure myself out," figuring out "transition" (which could mean getting discharged from the army for having an "adjustment disorder." Adjustment Disorder NOS, in the civilian world, is the blanket diagnosis your shrink puts down so they can get paid for their time treating you, without giving you a specific diagnostic label that your insurance provider could find out about.)

If you go to the Boingboing piece, it's worth noting that over there, they treat personal matters of identity with equal or greater reverence (or something) than they do classified government documents. I appreciate that Xeni Jardin is trying to be respectful. I'm also assuming she's not queer or trans, because she relies on an anonymous source to tell her whether things are queer or not. But if she can find "a source with deep roots in the LGBT community" who's willing to speak for All Trans People regarding the secret codewords we use, then she could really go the extra mile and find someone willing to identify themselves as a Trans Person Who Thinks They Can Speak For All Trans People. 


As it stands, doing it this way has the effect of making "a source with deep roots in the LGBT community" analogous to "a source in the intellgence community." Saying our names is like that Valerie Plame thing, but, y'know, gayer.

So, as a named source within the LGBT (sort of) community, with codeword clearance, I am issuing a directive to allies and well-meaning cispeople. CCed to Trans Folk Who Think They Can Speak For All Trans People. I'm also forwarding the directive to Xeni Jardin of Boingboing, for the sake of redundancy. 

----------------------------------

Directive begins: 

Be it known that Global Gender Command has never, and does not at this time possess an encryption system decipherable by all active gender operatives, but opaque to the cispublic. Any claims to the contrary by any gender operative must either draw that operative's security status into question, or indicate an ongoing intelligence exercise whereby the operative is making fun of you.

Be So Advised,

Field Operative Beatrix Dang,

Subaltern First Class

Gender Command Group Delta (operations classified and ongoing), 

authorization passphrase LOOK NOW SERIOUSLY

Directive ends.

---------------------------

I'm queerer than a football bat, I have been diagnosed with "Adjustment Disorder (not otherwise specified)" and have a letter in my wallet explaining how I have GID and the only treatment is for people to treat me like my gender means something. If I got no freakin idea whether Manning's trans or not, then none of the rest of these homos do either. The special information queer and trans folks might have boils down to the  particular odor with which the whole thing stinks to the highest of the heavens. This ranges from (a) the way Manning may have been outed by well-meaning techie "allies" while already in military custody overseas to (b) the fact that a techie diagnosed with mental troubles and with possible queer status was turned over to the feds by a queer techie diagnosed with mental troubles.


To recap: I don't know if Manning is trans or queer, and neither do you.

Having gotten that bit of nonsense off my chest, let's return to the matter at hand.

If there is substance to the groundless speculation that PFC Manning is trans, then a member of the family was betrayed to the feds by someone they thought they could trust. We can assume that they will be mistreated in a manner unfamiliar to most middle class, cisgender, heterosexual white people. We can further assume that the matter of gender identity will be used as leverage against PFC Manning, as an insult, a humiliation, and a means of manipulation during the course of the interrogation.

If, on the other hand, the speculation about Manning's gender identity turns out to be both groundless and wrong, then a 22 year old kid, already at wit's end and scared shitless, was betrayed by someone he thought he could trust. We can assume that he will be mistreated in a manner unfamiliar to the standards of domestic civilian courts and constitutional protections. We can further assume that the matter of gender identity will be used as leverage against PFC manning, as an insult, a humiliation, and a means of manipulation during the course of the interrogation.

Now that The Trans Speculation has begun, Manning's story should be broadcast far and wide, so that the military will feel sorta self conscious and follow something approximating their own particular variety of due(ish) process. Because this is an opportunity to support someone who needs it, while clearly articulating the ways that homophobia, transphobia, and gender policing are real and potentially very dangerous things for everyone. 

So go back and watch the collateral murder video, just the short one. It's horrifically violent, and shows helicopter gunships killing Iraqi civilians while the gunners and pilots laugh. several of those civilians were journalists and none of them were armed. We can assume this because there is no reason not to use your gun when you are being shot by a helicopter.

If Manning did what has been alleged, then that video exists as a public document only because of the PFC's actions. Manning encountered this video, and possibly many thousands of other documents, and was so affected by their contents that conscience, disillusionment, and visceral revulsion drove them to Wikileaks, hoping that exposing the documents "might actually change something."

I don't know what Manning's "adjustment disorder" is providing cover for, or what the "transition" might consist of. But that's not to say I don't care. The story that's already starting to emerge from this is familiar. 


Communists-And-Fellow-Travelers familiar, and it goes like this: 

Queer folk are unstable, and the paranoia that someone will expose their queerness will drive them to betray state secrets. (the solution is to explicitly bar overt queerness in the military, so all queerness will be covert, and the paranoia will be powerful enough to keep mouths shut.)

Or Bayard Rustin familiar, and then it goes like this:

Sure, queer folk do great and heroic things of great historical import, but they do those things because they're great and heroic PEOPLE of great historical import, and queerness has nothing to do with it. Mentioning queerness cheapens their heroism and allows them to be marginalized and ignored. (the solution is to marginalize and ignore the queerness of great and heroic people, which will prevent any queer people in the future from imagining that they might be great or heroic, or do anything of great historical import.)

Orbiting all of this is a narrative of trans experience, and most especially transfemininity, that is textbook Cold War Lavender Scare caricature of the homosexual: 

The Homosexual Transexual, Operational Security threats of:

Pathological, unstable, incontinent in the ability to retain sensitive information and to restrain their bizarre urges. A member of a pervasive-yet-elusive secret society present in the very foundations of our hallowed military-industrial complex, the homosexual transexual is nonetheless vulnerable for exploitation as an intelligence asset by our enemies because of the perpetual loneliness and emotional excess intrinsic to the condition.

Anyone who's gone to high school can tell you that queerness is far from invisible. Everybody thinks about us all the time, and sees signs of us everywhere, in their friends, in their rivals, in the unpopular kids, in themselves. Thanks to Don't Ask/Don't Tell, the military has finally gotten a chance to extend the high school experience, and incorporate a lot of ambient violence and firearms. But I'd like to propose that the previous, HUAC-esque formation isn't completely or totally wrong about queerness and its role in undermining national security. The "invisibility" of queerness (which I am intentionally using to encompass gender deviance, because as referenced above, antagonism towards either is really about the same thing.) isn't invisibility at all, it's a constant proving ground fueled by some of the ugliest of heteronormative social impulses. But what might be true about the Lavender Scare mythos is this: the isolation this engenders can allow us, as queers, access to different ways of forming community, which produce multiple, complex allegiances. 

When the operation of the machine systematically excludes you and stigmatizes you, kills and mistreats people like you with impunity, when it calls you sick and odious, then you are constantly confronted with the mismatch between your prescribed role and the person you think you might be. Having an adjustment disorder not otherwise specified or PTSD, are not things that destabilize people such that they go crazy and disclose military secrets. PTSD and adjustment disorders are the sorts of things we might expect to develop in people who are trying desperately to incorporate the violent and dehumanizing day to day realities of military life into a sense of who they are. A queer or trans identity just might sometimes give you some wiggle room to take a look at your situation, separate your orders and job description from what you can live with, and do something subversive, because you feel that you have to.

So if Manning isn't trans, which is likely, and leaked the files, which is possible, then thanks, kid. I think you did the right thing in an unbelievably scary situation. You're way too young to be a martyr to anybody's cause, and I hope like hell that the leaks really do change something. In the meantime you have my support.

And if Manning is trans, which is possible, then welcome to the family darlin! Join our pervasive-yet-elusive secret society just so fast as ever you can, it beats the hell out of the loneliness, and we're here for you. Just don't think that "we" are the people you meet in support groups or that pathetic, sad, emotionally unfulfilled Lamo douchebag. few of us might be, but the powerful community lies elsewhere. find the queers and we will love the shit out of you. You're still way too young to be a martyr to anyone's cause. And if you're behind the leaks, which is possible, then damn you are one fierce whatever-you-wanna-call-it. come home quick, come home safe, tear shit up and be your beautiful self.

I'm not asking. i'm just telling:

One way or the other, PFC Manning, You have rocked the world.

(edited for typos and cohesion.)