Wikileaks Soldier Manning Comes Out as Transgender



  Bradley Manning, a United States soldier recently convicted on charges related to leaking classified documents, released a statement on NBC’s Today Show on August 22nd.  The letter announced that Manningis a transgender and asks to be referred to as Chelsea and with female pronouns.  The statement was in conjunction with Savannah Guthrie’s interview of Manning’s lawyer, David Coombs.  At this time, Coombs is not seeking to sue the government to provide accommodations for Manning’s new sexual identity, but that when it comes to hormone therapy he hopes that Forth Leavenworth, the military prison “will do the right thing.”

  The issue of Manning’s sexual identity was discussed during the trial.  A military psychiatrist testified that Manning suffered from gender dysphoria.  Coombs used the stress and isolation that Manning felt as a context for her defense.  Manning had not wanted her transgender identity to be made public during the trial because she did not want to undermine the issues at hand.  The announcement to the media came the day after Manning was sentenced to thirty-five years in prison.  Currently, Coombs is focusing on petitioning a pardon from President Obama, but said that if the military does not provide hormone therapy that he will do “everything in his power” to make sure that they will, should Manning remain imprisoned.  The Army has already officially commented that they do not provide sex hormone therapy or sex changing surgery.

  After sentencing, Manning said in a statement that he was sorry for hurting the United States.  Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks, said “Mr.Manning’s apology is a statement extorted from him under the overbearing weightof the United States military justice system.”  Assange is the curator for the website that Manning leaked over 750,000 classified documents to.  Assange is currently living in the Ecuadorian Embassy to escape charges from the United States for publishing the documents.
Julian Assange/ Flickr CC via Ars Electronica

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