I have been puzzling about why the United States authorities ever thought that Bradley Manning, who was jailed last week for 35 years for leaking military secrets on an unprecedented scale, was a suitable person to join the army. His size alone might seem to be an impediment to effective military service, for he is only five feet, two inches tall and weights 105lbs (7.5 stone). But his stature, though tiny, nevertheless comes within the army’s prescribed limits. He would have had to be two inches shorter and a stone lighter to have been rejected on grounds of size or weight. (If he had weighed over ten stone, he would have been rejected as obese.)
But being the wrong size is only one in an absurdly long and detailed list of official reasons for an applicant’s rejection by the army. This list consists mainly of physical ailments or conditions, all of which Manning must have passed. Even though he has now proclaimed himself to be a woman, and changed his name from Bradley to Chelsea (like Bill and Hillary Clinton’s daughter), he does not suffer from an ‘absence of both testicles’ or the ‘unexplained absence of a testicle’; for if he did, the army would have sent him packing.
There are, however, certain psychological characteristics that the army might have seen as obstacles to Manning’s recruitment. The reasons for rejection of applicants to join the US military include ‘transsexualism, exhibitionism, transvestism, voyeurism, and other paraphilias’, and ‘symptoms of behaviour of a repeated nature that impaired social, school, or work efficiency’. If a transsexual means, as the Oxford Dictionary says it does, ‘a person who emotionally and psychologically feels that they belong to the opposite sex’, Manning certainly is one. In his statement last week announcing his femininity, he (she) said: ‘I am Chelsea Manning.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in