How the LGBT Community Helped Create the Caricature of Private Manning

A day after being sentenced to thirty-five years in prison for offenses related to the disclosure of U.S. government information to the leaks-based media organization, WikiLeaks, the soldier, who had faced prosecution for over three years, had his civilian defense lawyer, David Coombs, make the announcement that she was a female and would be known as “Chelsea Manning.”

The reaction to the announcement from the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community was supportive, but statements appeared to explicitly avoid acknowledging what Manning had done to end up serving time in a military prison in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

The Human Rights Campaign (HRC) declared,

Regardless of how she came to our attention, Pvt. Chelsea Manning’s transition deserves to be treated with dignity and respect. What should not be lost is that there are transgender service members and veterans who serve and have served this nation with honor, distinction and great sacrifice. We must not forget or dishonor those individuals. Pvt. Manning’s experience is not a proxy for any other transgender man or woman who wears the uniform of the United States.

Mara Kiesling, executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality, said on “Uprising Radio” that the organization’s concern “immediately went to how Pvt. Manning will be treated in prison.” She noted that prisons and jails can be “horrible, horrible places” for transgender people and there can be sexual abuse from staff. She also called the statements from the military that they would not provide Manning with hormone therapy “absurd, illegal and immoral.”

The Transgender Law Center’s statement bore a great similarity to HRC’s. “Regardless of how people feel about Manning and WikiLeaks, Private Manning has a basic right to dignity and to access medically necessary care while incarcerated, which may include a prescription for the hormone estrogen.”

Up to this point, the mainstream LGBT community had kept their distance from Manning’s case. There had been some statements from LGBT leaders, groups, and press when Manning’s civilian defense lawyer, David Coombs, raised Manning’s sexual orientation and gender identity issues in a military courtroom at Fort Meade, but those statements were mostly in reaction to what they were hearing in the case.

Transgender activist Hannah Howard, who helped create Gender Justice LA, said on the Feminist Magazine radio show there has been a “reluctance to name the fact that her story is much larger.” She said the LGBT community should start calling her a “trans-hero” and mentioned that there is “political struggle from folks who really have a conservative agenda.” For example, “transgender military veterans” have had a “pretty hard time coming to embrace” her “as an ally.”

In the following sections, I’ll provide background on Manning’s case, with particular attention to what motivated Manning to act and how that has created tension in the LGBT community. I’ll also explore what should be considered a misperception around the case—the idea that Manning’s defense put forward Manning’s sexual orientation or gender identity issues to excuse what she did or argue this is what led her to disclose information to WikiLeaks. Yet, that is what has been suggested in most of the commentary and coverage of the case.

Background on This Article

Between December 2011 and August 2013, I traveled to Fort Meade in Maryland on a regular basis to report on Manning’s case for Firedoglake.com, which features contributors that engage in a blend of news reporting and opinion writing.

Sometimes I was one of a handful of journalists at the military base covering the case. Others who were present just about every day included independent journalist Alexa O’Brien, Courthouse News reporter Adam Klasfeld, Nathan Fuller of the Bradley Manning (now Private Manning) Support Network, and David Dishneau of the Associated Press. Reporters from Reuters, Agence France Presse, Al Jazeera English, the Guardian, the Washington Post, and the New York Times attended the proceedings but less frequently.

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