“Becoming Chelsea Manning” by Matthew Shaer
“Let’s protect sensitive sources… Let’s protect nuclear information. Let’s not hide missteps. Let’s not hide the misguided policies.” —Chelsea Manning
This past summer, I read an enthralling article by Matthew Shaer about Chelsea Manning in The New York Times Magazine (June 18, 2017 issue) that I haven’t been able to shake off since perusing. Chelsea Manning, a former United States Army soldier, was convicted of violating the Espionage Act in 2013 and sentenced to 35 years in prison. Manning’s crime, which has not ceased to astound governmental officials and the American public since, was the handing over of nearly 250,000 American diplomatic cables and 480,000 Army reports from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to WikiLeaks. However, amidst the mixture of animosity and admiration Americans harbor for Manning and the general condemnation of her actions from partisan leaders (President Trump declared her a “TRAITOR” and mixes pronouns via Twitter while Hillary Clinton strongly denounces her crimes), it came as a surprise when Obama pardoned Manning shortly before the former President left office. “Let’s be clear,” Obama said in January, “Chelsea Manning has served a tough prison sentence. So the notion that the average person who was thinking about disclosing vital classified information… would go unpunished, I don’t think would get the impression from that sentence she has served.” Manning was released on May 17, 2017 and is free after her nearly seven years in mentally and physically grueling prison conditions.
Remarkably, the largest leaker of classified information in American history happens to be a transgender woman. Manning, who was born Bradley Manning in 1987, felt the call to leave her conservative upbringing in Oklahoma and enlist after watching the ceaseless barrage of footage from the Afghanistan war on the nightly news. She was determined to expose the true nature of counterinsurgency warfare which she believed was not as simple as good versus bad. Manning expresses how the media’s presentation of war is often portrayed as statistical data and that death tolls are laced with complicated terminology; in the army, she was seeing people behind the numbers and that desire for truth prevailed over the possibility of consequences.
Once caught, those consequences were inescapable. Manning, who was known to the public as either a whistleblowing martyr or an un-American criminal, initially spent nine months in solitary confinement at Marine Corps Brig in Quantico, Virginia. After being denied hormone replacement therapy and a U.N. investigation that deemed her conditions cruel and inhuman, Manning remained in the men’s prison but was able to be supplied undergarments, hormone treatment, and makeup from the American Civil Liberties Union. When referenced on the news or in articles, a grainy picture of her pre-transition in a blonde wig with makeup and downcast eyes would be the only image available that corresponded with her gender identity. The picture was spontaneously sent to a higher-up, captioned “This is my problem… It’s the cause of my pain and confusion…”
The extensive reporting by Shaer was conducted a few days after Manning’s May release. Shaer embraces the juxtaposition of Manning performing trivial actions like ordering a white-chocolate mocha from Starbucks and then inquiring about her adolescent confusion regarding gender dysphoria. Most striking are the first official portraits of Chelsea Manning published, allowing readers to put an apt image to the notorious name. The photographs, taken in black and white, attest to Manning’s desires to expose the middle area in which everything exists. There is no black and white; there is only gray. And within those gray spaces, one must formulate a belief system that at times is hypocritical and dual in nature. “From my perspective, the world’s shaped me more than anything else,” Manning states. And it was her mission to know that what’s doing the shaping is the unvarnished, unadulterated, and ugly truth.
— Salvatore Casto
The Junction Journal 