SUMMARY: According to the New York Times, the Trump administration is considering a proposal that would establish the definition of gender as a “biological,” fixed quality based on the sex the person was assigned at birth. Critics say that such a move to would eliminate transgender identities in the workplace. William Brangham examines the issue with Sharon McGowan of Lambda Legal.
SUMMARY: It was a night of political firsts for Democrats. Christine Hallquist is the first openly transgender person to win a major party's nomination for governor. Jahana Hayes could become the first black woman in Congress from New England. And Ilhan Omar, a former refugee, is poised to be Congress’ first Somali-American. Judy Woodruff talks with Lisa Desjardins and Stuart Rothenberg about the results.
SUMMARY: As of Monday, openly transgender people are allowed to serve in the U.S. military, despite President Donald Trump tweeting last July that he would “not accept or allow transgender individuals to serve in any capacity." We take a second look at a report on what the shift in military policy could mean for supporters and critics alike.
SUMMARY: Syndicated columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks join Judy Woodruff to discuss the week's news, including President Trump's firing of White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus and what it means for relations with the Republican Party, the Senate's rejection of a “skinny repeal” of the Affordable Care Act and Anthony Scaramucci's obscene tirade.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): It's been another head-turning week in Washington, from the Republican failure on health care, to the President's surprising statement on transgender military members, and a flurry of profanity from the new White House communications director and then, to cap it off, today's announcement from Mr. Trump that he is changing his chief of staff.
Here to help make sense of it all, Shields and Brooks. That is syndicated columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks.
So, I thought we had a lot of things to talk about, David, before about an hour ago, when we learned that the President was changing his chief of staff.
Is this — I guess we knew that this might happen. Reince Priebus has been in trouble with this President, we think, for a while, but what do you think?
DAVID BROOKS, The New York Times: Well, he was never given the chance to do the job.
Every other chief of staff we have ever seen sort of controls the schedule. They control the tempo in the White House. They're the alter ego of the President. They are given some clear sign of respect that they speak for the President.
And Priebus never had that. And so he was wounded and stabbed before Scaramucci came along. He was stabbed like a piñata. And so he was sort of a pathetic figure hanging out there. And so this doesn't come as a total surprise, except for maybe the timing.
As for General Kelly taking the job, I sort of question his sanity there. He's been a loyalist, but I really — with all due respect to the Marine Corps, I don't see how someone who's been trained in pretty orderly chain of command is going to survive this mess.
If he can control the schedule, it will be one thing. I just don't think that's going to happen, given all the independent power figures all around him.
JUDY WOODRUFF: What do you make of it, Priebus out and Kelly in?
MARK SHIELDS, Syndicated Columnist: Judy, I am continually amazed that it's not simply a matter of human decency or empathy when your boss is firing anybody to make sure that person leaves and has a soft landing, that they can leave with their self-respect, that they can leave with someplace to go to, with a plausible explanation to their family and friends that they weren't humiliated, abused and derided.
This President treats staff and others like a used sickness bag on a bad airplane flight. There's just absolutely no sense of respect or decency shown, so you humiliate somebody.
And for those who are left, there is just a sense of, could I be next? It certainly doesn't inspire loyalty.
As far as Kelly is concerned, General Kelly is a four-star general. But I think David put his finger on it. He had a very distinguished and honorable military career. But he grew up in a military structure. He thrived up in a military structure.
As a chief of staff at the White House, this is a freelancing operation. There's no chain of command. There are all sorts of people who go in and see the President any time, who are not accountable to you or responsible.
And least of all, you have a President who will even — won't abide by any sense of a chain of command or structure. And I don't know that General Kelly has any particular political gifts or knowledge of the legislative process or dealings with the press.
So I'm not — I know that the President admires him and the job he's done at Homeland Security and his career, but I don't see the fit.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Well, we should say that Reince Priebus, just in the last few minutes, David, put out a statement saying it's been one of the greatest honors of his life to serve this President.
I guess that's what one expects, maybe.
DAVID BROOKS: Gracious. I'm not sure he would pass a lie-detector test.
(LAUGHTER)
DAVID BROOKS: But one of the things that's happening here is that the President is moving away from the Republican Party.
Priebus was a link to the Republican Party. The congressional Republicans were — had some sort of relationship. Jeff Sessions was a key to the link between congressional Republicans and Donald Trump, and he's been under assault in the most humiliating way imaginable.
And so you're beginning to see an administration — I don't know what party they're joining, maybe the Bannon party, but it's not the Republican Party. And if you want to pass legislation, you probably need your allies on Capitol Hill. If you want to survive investigative committees, you probably want some friends in your party. And this administration seems to be moving the other direction.
-----JUDY WOODRUFF: Well, which leads us to another — I mean, David, you said they have had a struggle anything passed, getting legislation passed. This was a flame-out for them.
DAVID BROOKS: Yes, this was a bigger thing than Donald Trump, though.
It was only one bill that lost. It was four bills that lost. And it wasn’t only a six-months effort. It was a seven-year effort.
MARK SHIELDS: I agree.
DAVID BROOKS: And you could say you could go back to Newt Gingrich.
Think of all the ways the Republicans have tried to trim entitlements like Medicaid or cut government. Name a signal victory. There’s not a victory. They haven’t been able to trim one agency, cut back one entitlement. They failed every single time.
And that suggests isn’t an electoral failure. It’s not a failure of whether Mitch McConnell had the right strategy or not, though that was lamentable. It’s a failure of trying to take things away from people.
People are under assault from technology. They’re under assault from a breakdown in social fabric, breakdown in families. They have got wage stagnations. They just don’t want a party to come in and say, we’re going to take more away from you.
And so Republicans have to wrap their minds around the fact that the American people basically decided that health care is a right, and they figure, we should get health care. And our fellow countrymen should get health care.
It doesn’t mean you have to do it the way the Democrats want to do it with single-payer or whatever. You can do it with market mechanisms. But you have basically got to wrap your mind around universal coverage.
JUDY WOODRUFF: How do you see what happened here, Mark? And where do you see it going on health care?
MARK SHIELDS: Judy, the yapping dog, which was the Republican Party, after chasing the bus for seven years, caught it and had no idea what to do with the bus.
All you needed is that final vote that Lisa described so well, and that is the final argument, after seven years, after winning three national elections where that is your organizing issue, we’re going to repeal Obamacare, came down to a single promise and pledge to your fellow Republicans from the leadership, and that is, what you are voting for, we promise will not become law.
I mean, if you can imagine anything, I mean, that just said it all. I mean, it was a terrible performance. The House voted on something without even a congressional budget scoring of it. The Senate voted on something. They didn’t even have a bill when they brought it to the floor. There was no legislation.
So, I mean, it was horrendous. It was disappointing. There were no ideas. There was no will. There was no imagination. And there was certainly no courage.
I don’t blame Donald Trump, but what was Donald Trump saying? Donald Trump was saying he’s disappointed in the attorney general because he wasn’t loyal to him. That was his contribution to the debate on health care as it came to a vote in the Senate.
SUMMARY: Word of a significant policy reversal came not from the Pentagon, but from President Trump's Twitter feed, where he announced that transgender people would be banned from the U.S. military. Socially conservative groups welcomed the decision, but it drew quick condemnation from Democrats and some leading Republicans. Judy Woodruff learns more from William Brangham.
SUMMARY: Two years since the Iran nuclear agreement was signed, President Trump may be on the way to pulling the U.S. out of the deal. The President indicated in an interview he's willing to overrule the State Department and not certify Iran's compliance. John Yang talks to Robert Malley, a former White House negotiator for the Iran nuclear talks, and Mark Dubowitz of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
SUMMARY: Federal guidelines advising schools to let transgender kids use the bathroom that corresponds to their gender identity are being withdrawn by the Departments of Justice and Education. What will the Trump administration's change mean for schools and students? William Brangham talks to Evie Blad of Education Week.
SUMMARY: Just in time for the start of school, a federal judge in Texas has blocked the Obama administration's directive regarding transgender bathrooms and locker rooms. That rule said that students should be able to choose the facilities that match their gender identity. William Brangham talks with Education Week's Evie Blad about how schools are responding.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM (NewsHour): This ruling is the second setback in recent weeks for transgender advocates. Earlier this month, the Supreme Court said a Virginia school board could block a transgender student from using the boys bathroom while the higher court decides if it will take up these broader case.
Yesterday's decision is the first to say that the Obama administration's directive could be blocked nationwide. Those directives instructed school districts to allow trans students to use the bathroom of their choice. Texas is one of 13 states challenging the constitutionality of the directive.
In this case, the judge wrote that the administration had exceeded its authority under Title IX, the 1970s-era law banning sex discrimination in schools.
To help us wade through the meaning of all this, I'm joined now by Evie Blad, who is the Education Week reporter who's been covering this story.
So, Evie, what does this ruling say, and how significant is this?
EVIE BLAD, Education Week: It's very significant, in that it's the first time we have heard a federal court weigh in on a nationwide basis.
There are several cases winding their way through the federal courts now, but the only one that has had a ruling so far applied only in one circuit. And it's significant, in that the school year is about to start, and this judge is saying, nationwide, that the Obama administration's regulations under Title IX, its civil rights guidance, doesn't need to be implemented.
So what that means is if a school doesn't want to create a policy allowing transgender students to use the rest room of their choice, it doesn't have to. But if a school has a policy that it wants to have, it can keep that policy. It just doesn't have a federal directive to do so.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: So, Texas was one of a bunch of states that had objection to these rules. What is the essence of their objection?
EVIE BLAD: Well, there are two primary things that you will see in these lawsuits.
One is something that we're all familiar with, which is the argument that folks are making about privacy rights of students. Does my student or my child who isn't transgender have a right to use a restroom that doesn't have transgender students in it?
SUMMARY: Gender dysphoria is a difficult situation for a teenager to manage; nearly half of all transgender teens around the country report having suicidal thoughts. Some schools are taking steps to address the issue, such as Atherton High School in Louisville, which became Kentucky's first to adopt an official policy for transgender students. Yasmeen Qureshi of Education Week reports.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): Public schools are caught in the middle of a political debate over bathrooms. The Obama administration says restricting a transgender student's access to restrooms and locker rooms based on biological sex is discrimination and can be grounds for withholding funding.
But that directive has set off some angry reaction. Kentucky is one state where many leaders don't agree with the President. And we look at how one school in Louisville decided to act proactively before the bigger debate began.
Special correspondent Yasmeen Qureshi of Education Week has the story. It's part of our weekly education series, Making the Grade.
YASMEEN QURESHI (Education Week): What's it like to question your gender?
MADDIE DALTON, Student, Atherton High School: It's a little bit scary in the very beginning, I suppose, because you know that you're going to have to face a lot of discrimination.
Like, go through the YouTube comments on any video about trans people, and you will see, like, just how many people are still, like, openly hostile to this idea.
YASMEEN QURESHI: Seventeen-year-old Maddie Dalton is transgender. She says she's always been a girl, but didn't know it.
CASSANDRA KASEY, Parent: Forever, she had that little widow's peak.
YASMEEN QURESHI: She came out to her parents when she was 15 years old.
CASSANDRA KASEY: It was chaotic at first.
And the way I felt it in the very beginning, when I was still coming to terms with it, was, if I had a friend who came to me and said that their child had come out to them as transgender, I would have thought, hooray. You know, your — this young person is becoming who they are.
So, why would I not afford my own child that same — that same blessing? So, even though it was difficult, it was the only right thing to do.
SUMMARY: Syndicated columnist Mark Shields and Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson join Judy Woodruff to discuss the week in politics, including the Obama administration’s new transgender restroom directive, Donald Trump’s latest attempts to unify the Republican party and what Sen. Bernie Sanders’ victory in West Virginia means for the Democratic race.
SUMMARY: The Obama administration's new directive that all public schools should allow transgender students access to restrooms that correspond with their gender has intensified a nationwide fight over the issue. For more on the reaction to the order and its possible impact, Hari Sreenivasan talks to Jeremy Tedesco of the Alliance Defending Freedom and Alex Myers of Phillips Exeter Academy.
HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour): I'm joined by two people who have been involved on both sides of this issue.
Alex Myers is an English teacher at Phillips Exeter Academy, a private school in New Hampshire. He's also an author and speaks frequently about gender identity. He's transgender, came out in high school and was the first openly transgender student to attend Harvard. And Jeremy Tedesco is senior legal counsel with Alliance Defending Freedom, a faith-based legal advocacy group. It represents several groups of parents that oppose allowing students to use school bathrooms based on gender identity.
Alex, let me start with you.
Why is this so significant to you?
ALEX MYERS, Teacher, Phillips Exeter Academy: This is really a moment of recognition that is unparalleled.
I think the transgender community has been existing at the margins not only of mainstream society, but also in some ways of the LGBT community. And President Obama's and Loretta Lynch's statement earlier this week really bring us out of the shadows and into the mainstream.
HARI SREENIVASAN: Jeremy Tedesco, your organization is involved in two different lawsuits in Chicago and in North Carolina to try to prevent these types of policies from rolling out.
Are there a lot of students not transgender who are trying to go into the other bathrooms, so to speak? I mean, why is this a step too far?
JEREMY TEDESCO, Alliance Defending Freedom: Well, I really appreciate you having us on. And I'm glad we can be on PBS and have a civil discourse about this whole issue.
The reality is, ADF, Alliance Defending Freedom, where I work, has been pushing out policies to school districts for several years now, policies that are promote a compassionate alternative that meets the needs of every student at the school.
So, our policy says students who for whatever reason are uncomfortable using the locker room or shower or restroom designated for their biological sex should be given alternative facilities, single-stall facilities or whatever is available at the school. Almost all schools have those available.
But they shouldn't allow the privacy rights of other students to be violated in providing those accommodations. There's interests, rights on both sides of the equation in the bathroom and locker room contexts. Students have an expectation of privacy in those facilities.
And the Obama administration is completely trampling those rights by directing schools to just let students of one sex into the locker rooms and restrooms of students of the other sex.
SUMMARY: Amid the national furor over North Carolina's bathroom bill, the Departments of Justice and Education on Friday issued a joint directive to all public schools to allow transgender students the use of restrooms that match their gender identity. Although noncompliance could cost states billions in federal aid, some conservative lawmakers have already vowed to defy the order. Judy Woodruff reports.
SUMMARY: Last July, Defense Secretary Ash Carter ended the policy of discharging soldiers who change their gender identity, and began drafting a plan for transgender soldiers to serve openly. With a greater proportion of transgender people in the armed forces as compared to the general public, supporters and critics alike are preparing for big changes. The NewsHour's William Brangham and P.J. Tobia report.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM (NewsHour): In 2014, Lieutenant Blake Dremann was going to be one of the first women to serve on a U.S. Navy submarine.
LT. BLAKE DREMANN, U.S. Navy: We got invited to the White House, and this is me with the President and the first 24 females on a submarine.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: But by the time that vessel launched in late 2013, Blake was physically transitioning to the male gender, and giving himself weekly hormone injections.
LT. BLAKE DREMANN: I took my first shot the week before we got under way, and I took them under way with us.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Blake is a transgender man. His sex at birth was female, but he's long identified himself as male.
LT. BLAKE DREMANN: I probably knew when I was like 5, right, that something was amiss. But you grow up in the church, you grow up in Bible college, that type of environment, and you just learn to ignore it.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Blake is now stationed at the Pentagon. He says most of the other officers treat him like any another colleague.
LT. BLAKE DREMANN: The senior officers have been very receptive about it. And I have talked to all kinds of them for sometimes an hour or an hour-and-a-half at a time just kind of answering questions. And if you ask, I'm very open.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: The tide has slowly been turning for transgender service members like Blake. Until last year, if a soldier, sailor, airman or Marine changed their gender identity, Pentagon policy was to give them a medical disqualification and discharge them from service.
This was policy, but it wasn't always strictly enforced. But last July, Secretary of Defense Ash Carter stopped these dismissals, and ordered the Pentagon to draft plans to allow transgender people to serve openly.
SUMMARY: Alex Myers grew up as Alice, a girl, in rural Maine. In the mid-'90s, during the summer between junior and senior years at boarding school, Myers came out as transgender, starting the process of embracing his true gender identity. Once the first transgender graduate of Harvard University, today Myers, a writer and professor, takes his story to high school and college campuses. Hari Sreenivasan reports.
GWEN IFILL (NewsHour): Now we turn to the first in an occasional series on changing attitudes about being transgender in America.
A new survey from the Human Rights Campaign shows more Americans, 22 percent, say they know or personally work with a transgender person. That’s up 17 percent from a year ago.
Hari Sreenivasan has the story of one person’s transition and his efforts to change thinking and perceptions.
HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour): The soccer fields at Choate Rosemary Hall in Connecticut turned into an outdoor classroom of sorts this past Sunday. High schoolers from area boarding schools gathered for the fifth annual conference on Sexual Minorities and Straight Supporters, or SMASS.
ALEX MYERS, Author, “Revolutionary”: It’s really nice to see that written into the rule book and to see the words like gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender students at Choate. It’s like, oh, they exist.
HARI SREENIVASAN: Alex Myers was one of the speakers. He’s the first conference presenter to be transgender, and he uses his life story as a way of educating others about transgender issues.
The media kicked off 2013 with a number of high-profile failures in coverage of trans people and trans issues. On January 6, model Carmen Carrerra and Orange is the New Black star Laverne Cox had to explain to Katie Couric why it was dehumanizing and transphobic to ask about their genitals on live television. On January 15, sports and culture site Grantland published a story, “Dr. V’s Magical Putter,” about a trans woman named Essay Anne Vanderbilt who committed suicide after the story’s writer, Caleb Hannan, outed her to colleagues and refused to sign a statement prohibiting him from disclosing her personal information, from which she may have reasonably assumed he would do so in the article. Following a massive outcry, Grantland editor Bill Simmons admitted that no trans people had been consulted during the story’s reporting or editing process. And, on February 5, Redefining Realness: My Path To Womanhood, Identity, Love & So Much More author Janet Mock was invited back for a second interview with Piers Morgan, where he shouted at her for subjecting him to “cisphobia” because she’d critiqued the show’s choice to describe her as “born a boy.”
To talk about why this coverage is so flawed and what can be done to make it better, In These Times assembled a panel of experts, including Jos Truitt, co-executive director of Feministing.com; Katherine Cross, Ph.D. Student at the CUNY Graduate Center, who wrote an elegy for Dr. V on Feministing; and Emily McAvan, editor-in-chief of Global Comment.
I want to start by talking about the tragedy that prompted this roundtable: Grantland's coverage of Essay Anne Vanderbilt, and her death. The story was widely called out for being insensitive and dehumanizing; it framed Vanderbilt’s gender and trans status as a “mystery” to be uncovered by the reporter. Even her suicide, which came at the end of a long process in which Hannan outed her to colleagues—by which point she probably assumed, rightly, that he would do so in his piece—didn’t seem to spark much compassion or guilt in Hannan. What struck me, reading it, was that it was obvious neither the writer nor the editors had thought to consult any trans colleagues in the media throughout the process (which Grantland editor Bill Simmons later confirmed). What are the conditions in the media that led us to this point?
Katherine Cross: What's remarkable about that case, among many things, is not that the editorial staff did not consult a trans person, but that such would even be necessary in order to remind them that Dr. V was, above all else, a human being. The piece turned Dr. V into a fictional character in someone else's story, mirroring patterns of dehumanization that occur with countless other marginalized groups.
“Transgender” or “transsexual”mean “sensation” to many in the press, which already puts the people those terms describe at a certain remove from human dignity. When that collides with other odious forms of marginalization—say that imposed on sex workers, the working poor, and/or people of color—what results is a terrifying vortex of Othering. Each facet of identity presents journalists with another stigma they can exploit, not only for the sake of sensationalism, but also to write the story for them.
Many cis people think they know trans people's stories, and the trope of the trans sex worker, regurgitated through countless police procedurals, is one they think they know especially well. When a journalist is presented, then, with a dead trans woman of color, what results is less investigation and more recitation of received wisdom that fits with what the journalist thinks they already know. All these are the conditions that not only made the Dr. V tragedy possible, but also much of the terrible journalism on trans women's deaths in general.
I agree with you on reporters “thinking they know,” on some level, what a “trans” narrative is and how to put it together. What strikes me about this Othering is how it leaves trans people out—as sources, as media creators themselves. And that creates a sort of self-perpetuating knowledge gap. For example, I've had conversations with really progressive editors about what the word “cis” means. How can we close that gap?
Katherine: Closing the gap comes from remembering that we are not an alien species; the language of respect used amongst cis people works well for us as well. On a more practical level, ensuring that editorial codes at various press agencies make provision for trans people and answer the “frequently asked questions” of journalists trying to find their way on these issues could go a long way towards ameliorating the problems that gave rise to the Dr. V spectacle. There is only so much that “codes” can solve, however.
A bigger part of the solution lies in enlisting trans people to write and report on these issues themselves. That won't fix everything, but in pulling down the barriers that separate trans people from the nation's newsrooms, it'll be a worthy start.
Jos Truitt: Trans women are incredibly marginalized in every aspect of our culture, including employment, and including employment as journalists. Hiring trans women and learning from our experience will of course improve newsrooms. Of course, this requires the will to treat trans women with respect. It's very difficult to assume good faith when the press does already have guidelines for reporting on trans people, which aren't perfect but are certainly better than the coverage we typically see.
Katherine has pointed out that hostile coverage of trans people, and particularly trans women, ties into larger structures of misogyny. I'd love to explore those intersections.
Jos: Part of what's so tragic about the Dr. V story is that it could have just been about a golf club. Hannan and his editors made a deliberate decision to pursue the story in a way that sensationalized Dr. V's trans status. We see this time and again in the press, particularly with trans women of color who've been murdered and might have done sex work: the New York Times had a particularly prurient frame for what should have been an obituary for Lorena Escalera, a woman who was murdered more than a year ago. [The story began, “She was 25 and curvaceous, and she often drew admiring glances in the gritty Brooklyn neighborhood where she was known to invite men for visits to her apartment.”]
Katherine: It is also worth mentioning that so much of the dehumanizing sensationalization accrues to trans women precisely because of pre-existing misogynist biases in the press.
If you look at the way trans women's stories are told, whether it's the Dr. V case or the tragic murder of Lorena Escalera, what links the coverage is a prurient focus on physical features. It is not uncommon for news stories to rather lavishly describe a trans woman's breasts, hair, makeup, figure, walk, and so on in order to tell their story. The “camera” of newsprint draws the reader into an objectifying gaze where trans women are concerned, and this mirrors some of the tropes deployed against cis women as well, from celebrities to politicians. It's quite reasonable to suggest that the same standards of reporting that lead to objectifying coverage of cisgender women also lead to similar coverage for trans women.
[The difference is that] when Hillary Clinton's cleavage was turned into a Washington Post news story, there was a national hue and cry (as well there should've been). For trans women of color, there is an overriding sense among both journalists and the public that such lurid and quasi-pornographic descriptions are not only seemly, but deserved, often justified with the idea that they brought both death and objectification unto themselves.
RAY SUAREZ (Newshour): Just days after Bradley Manning was handed 35 years in prison over the largest leak of classified information in U.S. history, the Army private is bringing another issue to the fore. The soldier, who long struggled with gender identity, announced on Thursday the preference to live as a woman named Chelsea.
In a statement read on NBC's Today Show, Manning said: "As I transition into this next phase of my life, I want everyone to know the real me. I am Chelsea Manning. I am a female. Given the way that I feel, and have felt since childhood, I want to begin hormone therapy as soon as possible."
The announcement has raised legal questions over whether the Army provides that therapy. The soldier will serve time at Leavenworth maximum security prison in Kansas. The prison has 515 beds and no female prisoners. Manning's attorney says he plans to fight for his client once again.
DAVID COOMBS, attorney for Bradley Manning: A Fort Leavenworth spokesperson said, we don't have certain treatment; that's not what we give.
I'm going to change that.
RAY SUAREZ: Manning's request has put a spotlight on an issue that's often overlooked and how the military handles it.
Estimates vary, but one analysis from the Williams Institute at UCLA. Suggested as many as 700,000 Americans may be transgender, though many fewer may have taken hormones or surgery. Currently, most insurance plans will not cover treatments or surgeries involved with sex changes. There was an earlier gender reassignment involving a veteran. It first came to public attention after World War II.
Christine Jorgensen, an American soldier who served as a man, returned from military service and became Christine. In Manning's case, the focus now lies on how the Army will proceed with the soldier's request and what that means for the private's future in prison.
