Who’s the Fairest?

Should the army pay for Bradley (aka Chelsea) Manning’s  sex change therapy? If he’d been acquitted, he probably would have received a dishonorable discharge and the responsibility for any operations would be his alone. But now he's a prisoner who claims he’s also imprisoned in his own body. For instance, if in the course of the approximately 7 years of the 35 year sentence he's supposed to serve, Manning had developed a chronic heart condition requiring a bypass, the federal government would be responsible for the surgery, as they would be for most prisoners. In any case we’ve come a long way baby. It seems only yesterday when “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT) was the order of the day. Now the army is being asked to provide female gonads for their men, in or out of the brig. Recently Chris Beck, who had been a highly decorated Navy Seal, revealed that he too had long believed he was a woman in a man’s body. Chris is now Kristin. She became the first Navy Seal, to publically reveal her transgender status. What would have happened to Chris/Kristin if she'd revealed the truth during his career? Up until recently she’d have been stripped of her medals. Bradley Manning and Kristin Beck are two separate cases. One returns to his cell every night, a prisoner of both the state and the self; the other a hero, is, at least in our current increasingly more tolerant culture, free to become the woman he always wanted to be. And then there are all the men and women who have no problem with the bodies they were born into and yet are still unhappy. In some ways, they’re the most difficult case.