@13: I (and others who've had a lot of time to think about it) pay little credence to the concept of "gender identity". That the White House uses it really doesn't change much either way. It's a lip service.

But given that I've sat back and watched you compete in the Slog's Oppression Olympics, I'm not really sure why slinging that here is terribly effective. Incidentally, you introduced me to the concept right here. That aside, let's have a look at this:

it doesn't change that the law and the prescribed punishment mirror exactly the same one would face if it were two males. Trying to push as hard as you can into denying that very basic concept is rather insulting.

Actually, I must disagree, especially in the broad-stroked context that a notably westernized framework for "homosexuality" has, particularly in the last 50 or 75 years, reified a construct of what that idea is supposed to encompass. Taken further, since about the early 1990s, transgenders have done much the same with a lot of people they shoved and beat into their cute, big, stupid umbrella.

How is this manifest? In the social-cultural anthropology context, the field study of local, indigenous cultures have, I politely argue, ascribed meaning to anything deviating from a western notion of heterosexuality and heteronormativity. At first, this is understandable, given that aggregated knowledge of cultural variety (sorry Claude Levi-Strauss, there is no unifying structure) made primitive distinctions between the familiar and the Other (in this case the Other is anything that which isn't a westernized concept of heteronormativity). That framework has informed non-western cultures (mostly though, I also argue, cultural imperialism) to turn to look at their own selves and re-frame their understanding of what they see in their back yard in a westernized context. The Other always gets the short end of the deal.

As this anthropological knowledge diversified and became more nuanced, the social-political current continually finds itself lagging way behind on what that social-cultural anthropologist is observing, recording, and analyzing at the local level. Unfortunately, they're also making these observations even as western cultural constructs creep in and re-shape the indigenous world view of these local communities. I have no doubt that other Tiwonges in Malawi's past have quietly existed and probably been embraced by the local, Gemeinschaft-oriented communities. But these are being subsumed by a rough transition to Gesellschaft communities like our own.

Who pays the price? Anyone "Othered", but also the nuance of that incipient society's structure also pays with its own existence being wiped out. In other words, the cultural woman and man and otherwise, respectively declared at birth as boy or girl or otherwise, becomes a thing of the forgotten past as this cultural knowledge is replaced by a discourse of "heterosexuality" and "homosexuality" — exported to them, of course, by us.

So what I see in this Malawi case is a bunch of social-political voices chiming in and using very blunt-force means which just carry along that erasure of non-western cultural history. What makes this story particularly high-profile is the immediacy and ubiquity of the internet and the westernized values assigned to the Steven-Tiwonge arrest.

That all said, ahem, yeah Baconcat, you're totally correct about the point I made in @11: it was bald-faced rhetoric and intended to be provocative — the latter not so much to be a bitch or troll, but because it challenges the world view brought on by our own cultural biases that do permeate everywhere and is exported elsewhere. This is less about "gay rights" or "trans rights" as you put it and more about the problem of broad-stroked oversimplification. Where I did so was less to define the case than it was to challenge the oversimplified working definitions (i.e., that Tiwonge must be gay, or gee, it doesn't matter, since oppression is all the same) being used in this story or in political circles.

Who's Mrs. Haddock?