Chelsea Manning is a Queer American Hero

There are not many people who have been through what Chelsea Manning has, and come out, relatively on top. Chelsea’s story from childhood to the present day has been a story about perseverance through a world which has not wanted her to succeed. From dealing with divorced parents and facing bullying as a child for being different than her peers, to being arrested and tortured for bringing some of the horrors of the US military to light. Chelsea is an inspiration to many people today, including LGBTQ+ people as well as antifascist/anti-capitalist groups. The question is, how did we get here? What parts of the political culture in America has Manning benefited from, if any? As well as which parts of the political culture allowed for her to be so severely punished for what seems objectively to be the right thing to do? It is also important to realize that Chelsea Manning is not just a trans woman who has carved her story into American history, but that she continues to challenge the status quo to this day, as she is running for a U.S. senate position in Maryland later this year and has if anything, risen in popularity continuously since her release from military prison in 2017.

To fully understand Manning’s political socialization, it helps to start at the very beginning. Manning was assigned male at birth, and was raised, “as a boy” in a suburb near Oklahoma City (Maxwell, Lida p. 98). Manning’s childhood was difficult to say the least, but a struggle that is unfortunately all too familiar to American children. Manning described her childhood to Adrian Lamo in 2010, in the same chats that would later be used to arrest her:

“I was . . . short (still am), very intelligent (could read at 3 and multiply/ divide by 4), very effeminate, 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.”

Manning came out as gay to her friends at 13. As a teenager, Chelsea was forced to deal with yet another all too common tragedy in the lives of children. Her parents got divorced and Chelsea wound up spending time in both Oklahoma with her father who was an alcoholic (Maxwell, Lida p. 99) and Wales with her mother who moved back to where her family was. This back and forth proved unhealthy and uncomfortable for Manning, and she eventually moved in with an aunt in Washington D.C. where she was able to experience some degree of stability. While in D.C. she got into the “hacker” culture as a young adult and had anti-authority political beliefs like a lot of high school/college students.

It is important to understand Chelsea Manning’s childhood, at least to some degree, to understand the sort of political socialization she experienced. There is a lot about an adult that can be better or more fully understood by looking back at their formative years. Chelsea virtually never felt as though she belonged in the spaces she found herself in. In her experience in both Wales and Oklahoma, being gay, being effeminate, and being smart and opinionated were all ways that she was singled out and bullied by her peers. It also damaged her relationship with her father, who kicked her out after he found out about her being gay. After years and years of feeling as though there was not a place for her in this world, she made the decision to join the military in 2007 (with her father’s encouragement). Like many rebellious/nonconforming young people, Chelsea hoped that the Army would give her direction and purpose.

The Army, much like most other places Chelsea had been in her life, did not value or accept her. At this time, the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” bill was still the way the military operated regarding LGBTQ+ people. This meant that so long as you were closeted, no one was supposed to be able to ask you about your sexuality or discriminate against you for it… but you were not allowed to be open about your “homosexuality”. Chelsea grew up in a world that denied her of her right to self-identify, be it a family and neighborhood that discriminated against her for being gay or the United States of America itself telling her that no one *wants* to know who she is. Aside from that obvious tension with her military career, she also did not fit the authoritarian structure of the Army. The hacker culture that she had been a part of prior to enlisting into the military was one that was very much against authority, hierarchy, and ownership. Though, based off comments from people who knew her before she joined the military she truly did at one point believe the U.S. to be a positive force: ““I think he thought it would be incredibly interesting, and exciting,” Jordan Davis told me in an email. “He was proud of our successes as a country. He valued our freedom, but probably our economic freedom the most. I think he saw the US as a force for good in the world.”” (Nicks, Denver. “Private Manning and the Making of WikiLeaks).

As Manning got farther and farther along into her military career, she began to be disillusioned and realized that America was not the “good guys”. A culmination of the disgust she had for what she had been discovering about our military, and the stress and anger of being outcast by that very same system are often pointed to as explanations for why she leaked the thousands of classified documents that she did. In many respects, this is most likely correct. From her messages with Adrian Lamo (who is the man that she confided in telling what she had done, who later betrayed her trust and turned her in), Chelsea gives an example of the wrong doings that made her distrust our state (Hansen, Evan. “Manning-Lamo Chat Logs Revealed”):

“I think the thing that got me the most… was watching 15 detainees taken by the Iraqi Federal Police… for printing “anti-Iraqi literature” … I was instructed to investigate the matter, find out who the “bad guys” were, and how significant this was for the FPs… it turned out, they had printed a scholarly critique against PM Maliki…and when I found out that it was a benign political critique … I immediately took that information and *ran* to the officer to explain what was going on… he didn’t want to hear any of it… he told me to shut up and explain how we could assist the FPs in finding *MORE* detainees…”

In May of 2010, Private Manning was arrested and held in Kuwait and then Quantico. Where for 8 months, she was kept in solitary confinement 23 out of the 24 hours in a day. The UN even had a special rapporteur from the Human Rights Council which found that Manning’s treatment at Quantico was at the very least “inhumane and degrading treatment” and at worst, torture to get information from Manning (Pilkington, Ed. “Bradley Manning’s Treatment Was Cruel and Inhuman, UN Torture Chief Rules.”). Chelsea Manning was held in prison without being found guilty of any crime for more than 3 years, and then, after a trial where she was found guilty of multiple counts of violating the Espionage Act as well as several other charges, on August 21st, 2013 a judge sentenced her to 35 years in prison. The documents that she had leaked to Wikileaks, and that got her into such severe legal trouble, were documents and videos of American war crimes and misdeeds throughout the Middle East, the most famous of which being the “Collateral Murder” video which shows an American Apache helicopter full of U.S. soldiers who indiscriminately shoot and kill a group of people including civilians, two Reuters News staff and the people who tried to help them (link to video ).

The day after her sentencing, Chelsea Manning made an announcement via the TODAY show that: “I am Chelsea Manning. I am a female. Given the way that I feel, and have felt since childhood, I want to begin hormone therapy as soon as possible.”. This announcement, much like virtually everything Manning had ever done, further alienated her from the dominate political culture in the U.S. Not only does she have the audacity to be trans, but she was/is also a “traitor” in many peoples’ eyes. This lead to argument after argument of course about whether “our tax dollars” should go to medical treatment for someone. She did get some of what she requested regarding healthcare & hormone treatment, but she was still forced to stay at an all men prison for the remainder of her sentence. And after an attempt at suicide, Chelsea was threatened to be put in solitary confinement indefinitely and was denied access to some of the health care she needed to properly recover from said attempt (“Chelsea Manning Faces New Charges, Indefinite Solitary Confinement Related to Suicide Attempt.” American Civil Liberties Union).

Although it is true that the popular political culture has very rarely, if ever, been on Manning’s side… that does not mean that there has not also been a counter culture supporting her. Plenty of the most respected journalists in the field today held her up as a national hero whistleblower, much like Daniel Ellsberg (Greenwald, Glenn. “The Strange and Consequential Case of Bradley Manning, Adrian Lamo and WikiLeaks.”). She also has had support from a sizeable chunk of the public since the very beginning, which she referenced and thanked in the same statement that she came out as transgender in.

Fast forward to 2017: The United States prepares for a new president to take power for the first time in eight years, and just days before Donald Trump’s Inauguration, President Obama officially commuted all but four months of Chelsea Manning’s Sentence. Meaning that she would be freed on May 17, 2017 instead of sometime in 2045 (Savage, Charlie. “Chelsea Manning to Be Released Early as Obama Commutes Sentence.”). This decision seemed to come out of no where for most, due to the fact that the Obama Administration was the harshest on punishing leakers of any presidential administration before him (Savage, Charlie). Chelsea, since being freed has amassed a considerably large social media following (322k followers on Twitter alone) and has become one of the faces of the movement for progressive political change as well as for transgender and queer people. The rise of her popularity in the face of all that she had thrown at her by our government and society as a whole, is a testament that some part of the political culture is changing. The ongoing story of Chelsea Manning is an inspiring one to many, but also not something that was expected. Her life looked to be another sad tale of America’s brutality and complete apathy for those who look to make positive change… but now, Manning is getting prepared for the upcoming primary in a U.S. senate race, that she is running in in Maryland.

This is not to say that the issues that Chelsea Manning raised and put out to the public have been solved or changed, there are continuous reports of the exact kind of war crimes Manning told us about, committed by the United States every week. The political Culture has not so much changed as for these systemic issues to be addressed, but within Chelsea’s story there is hope that the change required to begin fixing these problems is possible. She is another example of how the left is beginning again to gain momentum. To compare the life of Chelsea Manning with that of Hillary Clinton, and to compare their beliefs and values is all one should have to see in order to understand why many people didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton. She was representing the democratic party & is a woman, but she did not represent the downtrodden, Clinton is the embodiment of liberal feminism. The sort of feminism that our political culture has allowed recently because it does nothing to disturb the actual power structures. Chelsea Manning was an outcast who decided to challenge the world’s largest terrorist organization (The United States Military) whilst Hillary Clinton voted for the Iraq War, pushed for war in Libya, and supported the idea of intervention in Syria.

Many articles and websites describe Manning as a whistle-blower, which is a term coined by Ralph Nader and references the referee in sports who blows the whistle when a foul or penalty has been committed (Maxwell, p. 102). In other words, a whistle-blower is someone who leaks or releases information with the intent of pointing out a rule or regulation which has been broken or ignored in hopes that something will be done to restore order. What Chelsea Manning did does not really fit this definition, she was not trying to put away her personal interests and she certainly was not just trying to fix a problem. To Manning, what she leaked was about informing the populous of the terrible things our military does in an effort to show people, as she herself had recently realized: we are not and have not just been “the good guys”. What Chelsea had in mind was not restoration of rules that had worked before… but of transformation. She was attempting to show that the U.S. military on a broad scale does not operate morally nor do its actions properly reflect what we are all taught to believe.

Chelsea has not been without controversy already within the year that she has been free. She had been invited to Harvard’s Kennedy School as a fellow at the Institute of Politics, she would have been the first transgender fellow for the school… but after hearing word of her invitation, former and current CIA directors resigned from the institute over the invitation of a ‘‘felon’’ and a ‘‘traitor” which lead to the Dean of the school dis-inviting her (Maxwell p. 105–6). The political culture of Ivy League colleges is often very hostile to progressive or revolutionary ideas/people because of this very reason; a large number of former and current federal government members work at, donate towards, and went to those schools. This leads to situations much like Chelsea’s, where the students want to hear from a voice, but because that voice speaks truth to power it gets shut down “by the powers that be”.

Chelsea Manning is just an individual, but her story has ramifications past that of most individuals. She was brought into a world that told her that the way she was born and the way she wanted to live were wrong, like many she rebelled against this and found comfort in like-minded anti-authority hackers… but out of partial necessity like a lot of young people, she joined the Army. The Army was an opportunity to get a “free” education afterwards via the G.I. Bill, but once in that institution she realized that it too was against her. In a hope to have a real positive impact on the world, she exposed vital truths about America’s wrong doing in the Middle East, which she was rewarded for by having the book thrown at her and being sentenced to decades in prison. Through literal torture, mistreatment and multiple attempts of suicide… she survived and through a random act of logical reasoning, an otherwise apathetic President released her from prison. After all of that, it would make perfect sense for a person to want nothing to do with the spotlight or challenging the status quo… yet Chelsea immediately joined the fight for progress once she had regained her freedom. The importance of her story is truly becoming less and less about those files she leaked 8 years ago, and more about how she continues to push forward for equality, civil rights, and proper justice. This run for Senate has been seen as hypocritical by some due to Chelsea’s tendencies toward anarchist political thought, but her platform certainly represents those views (Close prisons and free inmates; eliminate national borders; restructure the criminal justice system; provide universal health care and basic income to name a few). Many also see this senate race as possibly more of a protest candidacy than a genuine run for a senate seat. Regardless of the reasons, the primary against an incumbent democrat is on June 26th, 2018 and Chelsea has said that she will not run independent if she loses the primary.

Chelsea Manning and her story, though just one person, shows us so very much about the society we live in. Being queer effected just about every aspect of her life experience, and though looking at individual cases may not be the most beneficial to “political science” (voting statistics, opinion polls, demographics etc.) there is absolutely value in learning and telling the stories of queer/LGBT people.

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Savage, Charlie. “Chelsea Manning to Be Released Early as Obama Commutes Sentence.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 17 Jan. 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/01/17/us/politics/obama-commutes-bulk-of-chelsea-mannings-sentence.html.