Gender Dystopia

Chelsea Manning
1 min readNov 13, 2015

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Responding to US Government move to dismiss my lawsuit seeking health care for gender dysphoria

I believe that defining ourselves in our own terms and in our own languages is one of the most powerful and important rights that we have as human beings. Presenting myself in the gender that I am is about my right to exist. What the government is basically telling me is ‘you cannot exist,’ that ‘you are wrong,’ and that ‘you do not exist.’ What they are doing is taking away our right to exist. I think this is the kind of situation that justifies all kinds of terrible things like ignorance, maltreatment, torture, murder, and genocide.

Nobody knows your gender more than you do. No — one. You do not know my gender better than I do. A doctor doesn’t know it better than me. My parents don’t know it better than me. No one experiences my gender in the way that I experience it. Gender presentation should reflect the person that you are. When you lose control of your gender presentation you lose an important aspect of your identity and existence.

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Chelsea Manning

Grand Jury Resister. Network Security Expert. Fmr. Intel Analyst. Trans Woman. #WeGotThis