It didn’t take long for the Jacksonville mass shooting to yield to wearying, familiar discourses. On Fox News’ The Story with Martha MacCallum, the host tried to tie games to a welter of mass shootings. “[The gunmen] spend 12, 15 hours a day [gaming], like Nikolas Cruz was one of them, Adam Lanza, and now this young man, gaming,” MacCallum said, adding that playing for hours on end is a danger on par with cigarette smoking. That’s par for the course for Fox, but even the BBC got in on the act, with a headline promising an article that explores the “Florida video game gunman’s dark obsession with [games].” Meanwhile, Florida’s Trump-enthusiast attorney general, Pam Bondi, bafflingly blamed video game location services for the attack.

The gunman, David Katz, murdered two of his fellow competitors, Elijah Clayton and Taylor Robertson, at a Madden 19 tournament on Sunday before turning the gun on himself. Along with the victims, the game’s publisher, EA, which sanctions the tournaments, received an outpouring of support on social media from all quarters. According to a source with knowledge of EA’s internal communications, three EA employees were at the Jacksonville tourney but escaped unharmed.

However, there was a disturbing number of people who couldn’t ignore the fact that EA is generally quite loathed among gamers, and they took the opportunity to flood their social media with jokes. “Let’s call EA tech support in India and see if they can help us,” wrote one person on Twitter. Another tweeted, “Good response but I still won’t be buying transgenderfield V,” referencing the outrage expressed by reactionary gamers about the introduction of a female protagonist in Battlefield V. On EA’s Facebook condolence post, a commenter wrote, “Will you be adding a thoughts and prayers dlc to Madden?” (The latter became something of a micro-meme, with people tweeting things like “Jacksonville DLC 35$” or “D*EA*TH Pay $100 to proceed.”)

More worryingly, one person tweeted at EA’s global community lead, “some day all the shit that Ea [sic] has loaded in everyone of us will shock in your face, in your bodies. Stop it! Make your game great, not a fraud!” It all goes on and on.

The temptation to look at this behavior and see a proximate cause for the shooting in Jacksonville is real. Certainly, the culture that produces these comments is a diseased one. EA employees who are innocent of the sins committed by their firm’s C-suite are pilloried for them nevertheless. The callousness required of these self-identified gamers to target employees verges on the perverse. Gallows humor belongs only to the condemned, not to those jeering from the crowd.

But to draw the conclusion that this toxicity is a direct cause of such shootings would be as wrong as blaming the games themselves. The gaming community has, in the main, grieved; in addition to shaming the trolls, they’ve also come together to honor the fallen, EA included. This is the first such tragedy at a gaming event, and the game being played at the Jacksonville tourney was a sports game, not a first-person shooter.

The larger problems at work here aren’t unique to gaming or its culture, toxic though it may be. The behavior of the people who harassed EA’s staff speak to two larger issues: desensitization to these shootings and the dissociative effects of online life where we are uniquely insulated from both empathy and the consequences of our words. But for now, it seems unlikely that these are causes of the shooting.

The real issue is what it has always been: easy access to firearms.

We can, and should, scrutinize the sociological realities of online culture, its gaming subcultures included. But it’s important to remember that those cultures are global; their local variations in Canada, Sweden, Australia, and Japan do not produce the same unending plague of mass shootings that wracks the US. It’s not easy for an ordinary person to become a killer, but for those few who fall into that terrible mindset, the essential ingredient for mass murder is always the gun.

Statistically speaking, the only reliable predictor of increased gun violence is the availability of those guns. Americans constitute 4.4 percent of the world’s population, but we own almost half of the world’s civilian-owned firearms; the results are chilling in their inevitability.

That doesn’t take any discussion of “culture” off the table, but we should move away from splashy proclamations that the causal factors are cultural. The chief cause of American mass shootings — again, the ease with which anyone can obtain a firearm — is known. But there are still ways we can critique aspects of the gaming industry while also acknowledging the scientific consensus that games don’t cause violence.

First, we should note that critiques of “gamer culture” often place the blame primarily on rank-and-file players. This is misguided. In truth, the larger blame rests with the powerful: executives who market to base impulses and bestow crowns on would-be consumer kings. EA has actively fed a toxic siege mentality among gamers in the past; once, it stoked anxiety over “censorship” by astroturfing “Christian” protests against their own games. Other companies have given in to braying, bigoted mobs at the drop of a hat, even at the expense of their own employees.

Second, we should recall that the AAA sector of the gaming industry has profited mightily from cozy agreements with arms manufacturers. In 2013, Barrett Firearms’ Ralph Vaughn, who negotiates brand licensing deals with video game studios, told Eurogamer’s Simon Parkin, “We must be paid a royalty fee — either a one-time payment or a percentage of sales, all negotiable. Typically, a licensee pays between 5 percent to 10 percent retail price for the agreement.” He bragged to Parkin that “video games expose our brand to a young audience who are considered possible future owners.”

This alone does not cause mass shootings. But the arrangements become a moral issue of gut-wrenching severity when one considers that these manufacturers fund the National Rifle Association to agitate against even the slimmest of legal reforms that might help prevent them. Invariably, some of that lobbying money must have come from the gaming industry’s ever-expanding coffers. One longs for the days when games like GoldenEye 007 could make great hay with knock-off guns (like the infamous Klobb, named for producer Ken Lobb). Now, the industry chooses to effectively donate to the enablers of America’s gun crisis.

Then there is the larger issue of ennobling violence, particularly the constant portrayal of bloody retribution as the pinnacle of masculine autonomy. Manliness means violent domination, a point not lost on gun manufacturers. Bushmaster, the maker of the AR-15 rifle — which has been at the center of many mass shootings — advertised the gun with a “Consider Your Man Card Reissued” tagline.

That brings us rather neatly back to the troll who used the Jacksonville shooting to complain to EA about women in Battlefield V, and to the bigger picture, of which gaming culture is simply a convenient microcosm.

The men who commit mass murder (and they are nearly all men) are motivated by a variety of factors. But there is a common thread among so many: hatred of and a demonstrated history of violence toward women — be it their girlfriends, wives, or mothers, or just random women and girls who said “no.” Indeed, the Jacksonville shooter got violent with his mother, according to the aforementioned BBC report, which buried the lede by choosing to focus on his gaming habits.

Games, no matter how violent, will not make a mass murderer by themselves. Yet, like all media, they — especially the corporate-approved fandoms, and communities around them — can be used to shift general political views more subtly. Games join with a range of other cultural forces — religion, parental socialization, other forms of mass media — that sustain subtle but durable forms of prejudice, particularly resentment against women and minorities. That can lead some to extremist echo chambers and fascist militias, about which there is nothing subtle, which is making matters even worse.

It all adds to the bone-dry tinder of intimately personal and publicly political influences that may act on an angry young man. But what will ignite it all?

The gun he can get so easily.

2017 was a year of grim milestones, and its tail end offered one more to add to the painfully long list: the first confirmed death from a gamer-initiated swatting. Swatting, the practice of calling a SWAT team to the house of a target by fraudulently reporting a serious crime at their address, has finally done exactly what critics of toxic video game culture have long feared, and claimed a life.

The recent death of Andrew Finch, slain when a feud between two Call of Duty players ended in a SWAT team being summoned to his home in Wichita, Kansas, leads us into a thorny thicket of questions that demand introspection from policymakers, technology and gaming studio executives, and fan communities. Reflecting on change and self-improvement is all the rage at the dawn of a new year, and it’s long past time to assess the problem of toxic fandom with the greater urgency and seriousness it deserves, as well as the terrible costs of using lethal force as a first resort in law enforcement.

First, we have to take stock of what led us to this moment, including technology and gaming industries too willing to indulge the “passion” of their most ardent fans — even when that “passion” is nothing more than frothing rage and unchecked entitlement. We also have to reckon with why swatting is so potentially deadly: militarized American police forces trained to shoot first and ask questions later.

Just a few months ago, we witnessed another case of fandom gone horribly awry, which — in its own absurd way — prefigured the same entitlement and callousness on display in the instigators of the Wichita shooting. The incident is infamous now precisely for its penny-ante stupidity: fans of Rick and Morty running wild at McDonald’s restaurants that ran out of szechuan sauce packets for a promotional tie-in with the show. Several McDonald’s employees were screamed at by fans who did not receive their sauce, and treated the people behind the counter as uniformed vending machines obligated to dispense the edible fandom kitsch they desired. “Some [fans] became physical,” reported Eater, and in one Los Angeles location, police were summoned to the scene.

The restaurant giant responded to the debacle by plucking a page from the PR handbook of the gaming industry, which routinely reacts to even the most vile attacks by rhapsodizing about the enthusiasm of their fans. Take Beamdog CEO Trent Oster, who responded to a furious transphobic backlash against Baldur’s Gate: Siege of Dragonspear by saying: “The last few days have showed us how passionately many of our fans care for our games.” McDonald’s, similarly, issued one ingratiating tweet after another, calling the unruly Rick and Morty fans “the best fans in the multiverse,” and saying that the company was “humbled by the amazing curiosity, passion, and energy” of the enraged sauce-seekers.

There’s nothing quite so emblematic of commodified fan culture as corporate representatives euphemistically describing this sort of toxicity as “passion.” This C-suite impulse — to never draw a line in the sand and to let the ugliest and loudest voices dictate what fandom should look like — inevitably privileges the bottom line over the more vulnerable people who are harmed by the colliding forces of technology and toxic fandom.

A Slate op-ed on the McDonald’s debacle put it thusly: “It’s beginning to seem like building a culture, an economy, and a society based on tolerating and amplifying the worst impulses of a bunch of jerks for profit can have undesirable secondary effects.” But sadly, this phenomenon isn’t “beginning” at all; it’s merely entering a new phase. In 2015, a man in Maryland was shot by rubber bullets after being swatted. The gaming industry has seen this sort of behavior for years, from disgruntled fans summoning helicopters to the homes of game developers to calling in bomb threats on planes carrying studio CEOs.

Ironically, it’s at the corporate level of studios and tech firms where this toxicity is often cultivated and indulged — rabid fans are devoted fans, after all — but there’s also the continued, paradoxical indulgence of the idea that the online domain is somehow real when it’s convenient to fans’ whims, and unreal when it is not.

Journalists Katelyn Alanis and Nichole Manna, whose excellent on-the-ground reporting of the swatting death is a reminder of why local newspapers remain vital, captured this hypocrisy vividly. According to one of Manna’s reports, a man who claimed responsibility for placing the swatting call posted on Twitter, “I DIDNT GET ANYONE KILLED BECAUSE I DIDNT DISCHARGE A WEAPON AND BEING A SWAT MEMBER ISNT MY PROFESSION.” When a YouTube channel reached out to the Twitter account for an interview, the man they spoke to added that “it’s my personal belief that I didn’t cause someone to die.”

For anyone familiar with the excesses of fan culture, this self-justification sounds like more than just panicked denial. It stems from the dissociation encouraged by gaming communities that regard their online beefs and entitlements as real enough to merit horrific online abuse — and in the case of swatting, very tangible abuse — but unreal enough that they can delude themselves into thinking that no one really gets hurt. And if no one is harmed, no one has to be responsible. It’s the same way “trash talk” in games, however abusive, threatening, or prejudiced, is often described by fans and industry executives alike as a “heated gaming moment,” as “just words on a screen,” or “just a game.” (But heaven help you if say that after playing less than expertly in a multiplayer game.)

The age of thinking “words on the internet” were unreal passed us by long ago — if it ever existed at all. People have already been hurt, their lives ruined or forever altered, by cavalcades of online harassment. They have beenforced from their homes, only for law enforcement to not take it seriously; others saw their livelihoods impacted by trolls and even colleagues who fed stories to Breitbart. More saw their families and loved ones targeted because they spoke out about the abuse. Many more still, those whose names weren’t “important” enough to make it into a news article, suffered in silence.

President Trump has demonstrated with painful clarity how even manifestly untrue tweets can move financial markets and embolden harassment of the worst kind. And now, for the gaming community, there’s a bodycount for its “passion.” Now more than ever, we need to acknowledge what the tech industry and its associated fandoms have been egregiously remiss in addressing: that what we say and do in our fan spaces, in games, or on social media, has consequences and we are responsible for it.

As we reflect on this rising wave of internet-facilitated abuse, we should conclude by reflecting on why swatting happens in the first place. Part of its appeal is theatrical: you swat a streamer and then reap “lulz” from seeing a SWAT team burst into their living room or bedroom live on their webcam. But especially for the more vicious harassers that stew in fan communities, it’s a SWAT team’s capacity for violence that really appeals. The police are an extension of their will, a physical manifestation of all the power they think they’re owed. They can hurt people they dislike, or at the very least damage their property — not to mention their sense of safety — with a publicly funded battering ram. With one phone call, they can wield the lethal weaponry of law enforcement like a cudgel in their personal, petty disputes. And as is so often the case with American police, those guns might just go off.

Swatting is not a “prank,” as it’s so often characterized by the press. Two years ago, I was interviewed about it as part of a themed April Fools’ segment on public radio. It must now be recognized as the potentially lethal practice it is, one with dangers that are amplified exponentially by the ruthless training of American police forces. Among many examples, a West Virginian policeman was fired for not killing someone when he could have. In Wichita, the local police force defended the killing of the unarmed Finch by saying that he didn’t hold his hands the right way when he answered the door and appeared to be reaching for something.

These sorts of familiar excuses for police violence are often buttressed by stern lectures from officers and random tweeters alike to always act thus-and-so around cops. But why must American citizens be drilled in reacting with military stoicism to having guns pointed in their faces — especially African-Americans, who bear the brunt of unwarranted police violence?

Emanuel Kapelsohn, a policing consultant who has trained thousands of officers in the use of force, went so far as to criticize a case where a police officer safely subdued a suspect who had been “running toward him while holding his hand in his pocket” without using deadly force. “From a professional point of view, the officer made an extremely poor tactical decision and needs to be retrained, not commended,” Kapelsohn told Slate after watching the body cam footage of the incident. “This was someone who needed to be shot, should have been shot.”

This institutional belief that the overriding priority of a police officer is self-preservation rather than serving and protecting, often leads to shooting first and asking questions later — an especially pernicious approach given that implicit biases can affect people of color. Taken together, it’s all made this country a world leader in fatal police shootings.

The people who swatted Finch’s home in a dispute over $1.50 worth of Call of Duty content may try to deny their responsibility for what happened, but they played an undeniable part in putting that armed officer at Finch’s house. A militarized police force did the rest, despite their attempts to foist the blame on those who called them. Both are responsible.

We must do more to rein in the many violent excesses of fan culture and stop sanctioning and coddling their worst offenders as “passionate.” It’ll mean finally listening to what their victims have said for years. And if we truly want to neuter swatting as a tool of abuse, we also have to address police brutality urgently, and finally heed the Black Lives Matter movement instead of consigning it to propagandistic stereotypes. No one should have to die like this. No one had to. We were warned.

When Chelsea Manning first appeared as a trans woman, the announcement came like a lightning bolt, electrifying an already charged political landscape. All of a sudden, those of us in the trans community had to brace against the inevitable backlash from what was now the most famous trans woman in the world being branded a “traitor.” What I was not quite prepared for was for her to become a hero, even a saintly figure, to so many of us.

Rumors had been circulating about her gender since 2010, when journalist Xeni Jardin, writing for Boing Boing, published chatlogs of a conversation between Manning and the hacker Adrian Lamo. In the process, her words “the CPU is not made for this motherboard,” in veiled reference to her gender, were put out into the media sphere.

After a trans person tweeted at Jardin that she’d just “outed Manning,” the journalist wrote a follow-up piece explaining how she had no idea that the somewhat coded language, or even Manning’s use of the word “transition,” might refer to Manning talking about a transgender identity. To Jardin’s everlasting credit, she gave an honest account of her reasoning and interpretation of the logs before editing the original piece to remove “specifics of personal issues not directly related to the whistleblowing/national security concerns at hand.” But it was in the water now, and though the revelation remained out of view from mainstream observers, it was fair to say that many trans women looked at the logs Jardin had published and saw our own faces staring back at us.

We knew.

Of course, not everyone welcomed the suggestion that Manning was Chelsea, even in seemingly open-minded communities. “I mentioned in the comments on Queerty, I think it was, that we don’t know for sure that Manning is a man, so we should hold off placing anyone in the pantheon of gay heroes,” April Daniels, the young adult fiction author and trans writer, told me. “The comments shutting me down were swift and aggressive. Lots of really stern words that amounted to a polite ‘fuck off how dare you.’” For Daniels, it was the first time that she realized she “couldn’t trust places that said they were LGBT, because they would always forget the rest of us were in the acronym, too.”

But for the trans community, the familiarity in Manning’s logs was too much to ignore. The odds that she was a #girllikeus, to borrow the Janet Mock-inspired hashtag, were suddenly very high indeed. We had to prepare for what that meant in a militaristic society where treason is a literal death sentence. We had to prepare for the fact that the face of the ultimate civic betrayal would be a trans face.

In August 2013, Manning publicly removed all doubt. But we were prepared to defend her.  

There is a certain irony in the fact that Julian Assange, a man whose glory was built on the back of Manning’s War Logs leaks, has been rehabilitated by a political right that once demanded he be shot. Meanwhile, Manning remains a fetish object of hatred for them. That has everything to do with the values that each committed themselves to in the years since the War Logs. The embassy-bound Assange asserted himself like a vengeful internet troll; Manning’s prison dispatches revealed a woman whose commitment to radical politics was both sincere and principled.

Assange, though under a de facto house arrest, retires to plum, Wi-Fi-equipped digs every night. Manning has had to endure torture in an actual prison — from being denied necessary transgender health care to solitary confinement, both, in their measure, contributing to her being a suicide risk. No one could begrudge Manning if she felt bitter, yet her writing has been a candle of hope. “I am scared and I don’t know what to do, but I feel a lot of responsibility,” she wrote in a post-election essay posted to Medium. The messages she transmits through the layers of carceral bureaucracy, via her lawyers, onto Twitter and Medium, are statements of principle that never forget the neediest among us.

“How will we protect ourselves and unite together?” she asks at the end of that Medium post; there is no swagger here, no score-settling, only a vulnerable responsibility. In response to leaked text of a disastrously anti-LGBT executive order being mooted by Trump in January, Manning tweeted: “Now, each morning we wake up and ask ‘What next?’ Answer: We keep going <3”

“The word ‘inspiring’ gets thrown about so much vis-a-vis trans matters,” says trans author Casey Plett. “Often, though, not always, by cis people writing about such trans matters. But I think Chelsea Manning has been an inspirational woman to us in the truest sense of the word. Or, at least, I’ve heard many trans women express admiration for her resolve and determination to do what she could in her position to right injustice.”

When you consider the conditions she has lived under, between torture and her life’s uttermost intimacies being held up to the glaring lights of angry public scrutiny, Manning’s optimism seems almost superhuman. A trans friend of mine, Cassandra Kleinpeter, put it rather well: “Her courage has been such an inspiration to me in my own journey. If she can be true to herself with all the adversity she’s faced for making a moral choice in an immoral system how can I do any less?”

While Julian Assange was abetting the campaign of Donald Trump, who exploited every terrorist atrocity he could to whip up fear and hatred, Manning got a dispatch out to The Guardian where she decried those who used ISIS’s terror to stoke Islamophobia and erode our privacy rights. In the aftermath of the bloody Bataclan massacre in Paris, Manning found the courage to speak in defense of those values that terrorists and their unwitting handmaidens on the political right seek to erode:

“I don’t have all the answers – but I do know that blaming minority groups, refugees and immigrants, investing in gigantic surveillance platforms and calling for expansive legal authority and the creation of a neo-Gestapo and panopticon-style police state aren’t one of them.”

Manning has become an infosec high priestess who expresses a keen interest in struggles at the intersection of technology and politics. She is often ready with a comment on free speech or policies surrounding whistleblowers, and she’s just as willing to tweet extensively about the Trump administration’s attempts to empower ISPs while eviscerating our privacy, or talk about health care, prisons, and the rights of minorities. If anyone had a right to cutthroat radical politics, red in tooth and claw that justified all means in service to its ends, it would be her. Yet justice’s sword, to her, is an instrument of “wisdom” rather than vengeance.

Lauren McNamara, a trans activist and videoblogger who opines under the name Zinnia Jones, knew Manning online long before she blew that fateful whistle; she confirms the character that so many other trans people would later come to admire. “Even from our first conversations,” she said in an interview for this piece, “it was plain to see that a strong moral stance was fundamental to her understanding of her role in the military, a stance which ultimately drove her to do something she believed was necessary even at great personal cost to herself.”

There was a clear sense, McNamara said, that many cisgender people saw transphobia as a way to punish or express disapproval of Manning. “Good” trans people would be gendered properly and receive health care, went the implication; “bad” ones would be punished by having their very humanity denied. “When I spoke with news outlets after Chelsea came out as a trans woman,” McNamara told me, “I frequently encountered a tendency to treat her gender as being contingent upon their personal approval or arbitrary editorial decisions. It was common to hear from people who objected to her receiving appropriate medical care, or refused to recognize her as a woman, on the basis that she was a ‘traitor.’”

And there it was, what we’d all been preparing for: the fight to argue that our humanity should be ground in something more solid than the caprice of a cis mob’s approval. Thus, to defend Manning’s dignity was to defend us all.

Often, famous trans women are cultivated by a media that wishes to exploit their bodies for maximally lurid gains. Caitlyn Jenner’s inoffensive, initially apolitical coming-out was greeted with reams of glossy, sympathetic coverage. Our legs are spread — literally, as well as metaphorically — while our mouths are taped shut if we have anything meaningful to say. Thus we periodically see a newly out trans person revealing the most intimate, depoliticized details of their transitions to a salivating press, before they mysteriously disappear. The best of us — Laverne Cox and Janet Mock, among our number — are those who tell their own story while colossally astride the cis stage, making it theirs. They don’t back down from being political in a discomfiting way.

That’s a dangerous place for any woman to be. Since the days of Hypatia, Saint Catherine, or Mary Wollstonecraft, the outspoken woman has been threatened with being separated from her tongue. The endurance that Manning embodies in the face of attempts to break her is no small part of why we admire her; so many of us hope to hold her up against myriad attempts to grind her down.

While Jenner was, at this point in her life, merely famous for being famous, Manning has claim to being something of a historical figure who would rightly appear in a textbook. And unlike Jenner, she didn’t ostentatiously spit on those who didn’t share her background. Jenner, clothed in the immensity of wealth’s solipsism, only ever seemed to vaguely understand the plight of white trans people. There was a weary sense of obligation on our parts, particularly as her myriad rhetorical stumbles congealed into ugly, reactionary politics that pledged fealty to the likes of Ted Cruz — no friend of LGBT people.

Meanwhile Manning developed an appreciation for the struggles of others as well, in all their intersectional complexity, shaped, at least in part, by how she came to understand what happened to her.

“What Chelsea did for the world,” Casey Plett added, “combined with her own struggle to be trans in a military prison makes her, I think, a particular representative of that interconnected struggle and maybe why she has struck a deep chord for many of us.”

As programmer and trans activist Lynn Cyrin would have it, “[Manning] got imprisoned for an undue amount of time given the ‘crime’ committed, and then was subject to the psychological torture that’s unfortunately business as usual for trans people in the criminal justice system.” In a context where “the criminal justice system is broken, society is oppressive, and shit is just generally Bad,” she told me, “Chelsea’s imminent release is, at the very least, a step towards things in the world being slightly less broken.”

There remains the hope that, in the sober light of historical hindsight, Manning will be remembered as a courageous woman who blew the referee’s whistle in defense of democracy. For many trans people, who as a group indisputably lean left, Manning exposed the dark heart of American imperialism at a time when it was urgently needed, while also exercising the prudence necessary to prevent loss of life from her actions.

Not every trans woman supports Manning’s actions, of course; she has her detractors, particularly among the many who’ve served in the military and feel she was indecorous at best with her leaking. To some in this band of sisters, she harmed the cause of trans acceptance in the military by becoming the picture of disloyalty. In the estimation of one trans woman veteran’s advocate I spoke to, “She added a solid year to the timeline for getting open transgender service implemented. [S]he was part of [then-Secretary of Defense] Hagel’s reluctance to tackle the policy issue.” She adds that friends of hers “with security clearances were subjected to harassment and loss of their jobs, because of what [Manning] did.”

Without discrediting the real experiences underlying these words, the core of the problem is less Manning herself than the prejudicial way she was made to represent all transgender servicepeople who already felt they had to work twice as hard to prove their loyalty.

Yet if the wider community is forced to have her represent us, then there are just as many trans women who are quite happy to have her as our face rather than, say, Jenner. However one feels about her actions, she moved the world on its axis and she’s one of us. She had a story we could see ourselves in — the nerdy, shy lass awkwardly confessing her strange gender-feels on IRC while struggling to keep her head above the water.

Thus, Manning became “Chelsea” to so many trans women, spoken about like a sister of blood. Her name was invoked to dispel the demonism of those who insisted on slandering her with her old, dead name as a means of undermining and insulting her. It expressed kinship and conviction. We followed updates on her status in prison with trepidation and a faint flicker of hope that seemed like an homage to Chelsea’s own peaceful candle. We read her every dispatch, treating it like a precious missive from the other side of some unimaginable divide.

She is not a saint, of course. Who on Earth is? Plett was at pains to make that point when she spoke to me, “Chelsea, if you’re reading this, I’m sorry, I don’t mean to reduce you to a political synecdoche! I think you’re wonderful and brave and I’m so glad you get your freedom back and I hope you get to meet at least some of the gaggle of us who are grateful for what you’ve done.”

And on many levels, I think, that speaks for most of Manning’s trans supporters. We appreciate that and welcome the day she returns from Hades to the embrace of her community on the outside. Then she will just be one of us in the colloquial sense — one of the girls like any other, human and frail again as we all must be.

The greatest gift we could give her is the ordinariness that is normally accorded to anonymity among the masses, a sense that she is not a holy woman whose every appendage is an icon to be treasured in some reliquary. “One of us” will have to mean something Chelsea Manning can rest in, can be herself in, can be flawed and silly in. That’s what she deserves, and it is what I hope to play some small part in giving her.