WHISTLEBLOWER, TRAITOR, SOLDIER, QUEER?:THE TRUTH OF CHELSEA MANNING

9 7 R W H I S T L E B L O W E R , T R A I T O R , S O L D I E R , Q U E E R ? T H E T R U T H O F C H E L S E A M A N N I N G L I D A M A X W E L L As the inauguration of Donald Trump loomed in January 2017, President Barack Obama made the decision, against the advice of his defense secretary, Ashton Carter, to commute Chelsea Manning ’s sentence. O√ering little information about the reasoning behind his decision aside from a statement in a press conference that ‘‘justice has been served,’’ Obama moved Chelsea Manning’s release date from 2045 to May 2017, reducing her sentence by approximately twenty-seven years. Since her release, Manning has been increasingly in the public eye. She has been profiled in Vogue and The New York Times Magazine. She was also invited (and disinvited) to be a fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics. Manning’s rise in public visibility has been accompanied by a heightened confusion about how journalists, political figures, and the public depict her actions and example. Manning has been lauded (for example, in the Kennedy School invitation) as an advocate for transgender rights. At the same time, her unauthorized leaking of documents continues to meet with a far more mixed reception. Many conservatives call her a traitor. Mainstream liberal public figures like Barack Obama tend to avoid 9 8 M A X W E L L Y discussion of the topic. On the left, writers like Glenn Greenwald and Chase Madar, and organizations like Code Pink, defend Manning as a whistleblower and hero. In the context of the contemporary movement for trans rights and justice, Chelsea Manning seems to o√er a needed exemplarity. She struggled for appropriate treatment as a trans woman in and after prison. She was courageous in risking visibility and demanding justice both in prison and out. Yet Manning’s struggle for justice as a trans woman is actually connected to her leaking of documents. In the era of ‘‘Don’t ask, don’t tell,’’ Manning released secret documents and film footage describing American abuses of power in wartime. Her leaking had two sides: she resisted what she saw as unwarranted government secrecy and she resisted military and government demands that she keep her sexual and gender nonconformity secret. Connecting these two sides of Manning’s story is important right now, when a substantial minority of American voters favor conviction over fact. Manning stands out as a truth-teller in a time of pervasive political deception. It is vital that we understand what her example o√ers to the political conversation. The Story Raised as a boy in a small suburb near Oklahoma City, Chelsea Manning often felt like an outsider. She was not interested in sports or chasing girls, and spent most of her adolescence playing computer and video games. When she was thirteen, she came out to friends as gay. Manning described her childhood to the hacker Adrian Lamo in 2010, in a set of chats later published in Wired: i was born in central Oklahoma, grew up in a small town called crescent, just north of oklahoma city . . . i was . . . short (still am), very intelligent (could read at 3 and multiply/ divide by 4), very e√eminate, and glued to a computer screen at these young ages [MSDOS/Windows 3.1 timeframe] . . . i played SimCity [the original] obsessively . . . an easy target by kindergarten . . . grew up in a highly evangelical town with more church pews than people . . . so, i got pretty messed up at school . . . ‘‘girly boy’’ ‘‘teacher’s pet,’’ etc. W H I S T L E B L O W E R , T R A I T O R , S O L D I E R , Q U E E R ? 9 9 R During her teenage years, Manning moved back and forth between Wales (where her Welsh mother moved after her parents divorced) and Oklahoma. Comfortable in the home neither of her depressed mother...