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.
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| Julian Assange/ Flickr CC via Ars Electronica |
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