The female face of WikiLeaks: How Chelsea Manning became an icon of LGBT
Harvard abolished Chelsea Manning lectures last week - Transgender and the main informant WikiLeaks, which came out of prison this spring. The university offered Manning a freelance research position, but changed his mind after two people from the CIA (US Central Intelligence Agency) immediately announced a boycott of Chelsea. CIA director Mike Pompeo declined to speak at Harvard so as not to "defame the trust" of American intelligence, speaking in the same hall with the "traitor." And Michael Morell, the former deputy director of the CIA, resigned from the position of a senior university researcher. In response, Chelsea Manning tweeted that she was still proud to be the first transgender woman who was invited to Harvard. We explain why Chelsea Manning is one of the main characters of our time and how she influenced LGBT people, politics and prisoners' rights.
Chelsea (born Bradley) was fascinated by technology in childhood. Her father, a computer engineer, introduced her to the Internet - for a while she even worked in an IT startup. In general, before serving in the army, Chelsea tried to find herself - she studied at a public college, worked in a network coffee shop and shopping centers.
In 2007, Chelsea was then 19 years old, the Big Wave happened in Iraq. President George W. Bush said that the failure of the United States in Iraq was due to the fact that not enough American servicemen had participated in the war, and the command of the field was constrained. Later this operation will be called one of the main geopolitical miscalculations of the country since the time of Vietnam. Manning considered herself a patriot (her father, too, had once served in the army) and decided to go into service. “I didn’t understand who I was, and I thought that the army could help. Now it sounds naive, but then it seemed to me right,” Chelsea says.
Manning was trained as an intelligence analyst in special camps in the states of Missouri and Arizona, where she encountered, with her words, humiliations due to homosexuality and non-compliance with masculine standards. After studying for about a year, she worked with secret data in the military garrison of Fort Drum in New York, but only thought about how to get into a real war. Soon, she was sent to Iraq, to a military base near Baghdad - she was barely 22 years old, and she had at her disposal many secret documents and videos related to the military operations of the Pentagon.
The intelligence analyst service seemed Chelsea exhausting and monotonous. She later said that she was serving night shifts in dark rooms and processing large amounts of information, often without thinking that it was not about numbers, but about living people. "I was so loaded that I didn’t really read the data. In this work, you need to quickly separate the necessary information from the useless at the level of instinct," says Manning. At some point, Chelsea decided that the American army was violating the rules of the game: "In a certain sense, I began to see not data, but real people." She says that at first she tried to reach the authorities - she demanded copies of videotapes, which showed shelling of civilians and journalists. “Of course, it’s very important to report such things to management. But in my case it didn’t work,” Chelsea says. Manning downloaded 400 thousand documents about the Iraq war and 91 thousand about the war in Afghanistan. Chelsea recorded this data on a disk with the inscription "Lady Gaga" in order to carry the data imperceptibly from the guards, and went on vacation.
During the holidays, Manning sent encrypted data to the WikiLeaks project, which was impressed by the publication of documents on the events of September 11 (the informant explains that she tried to share information with journalists from The New York Times, The Washington Post and Politico, but the publications reluctantly contacted). After the secret documents were drained, Manning returned safely to work and remained there for some time after being published on the WikiLeaks archives. Manning was detained in 2010 (with the filing of her friend, hacker Adrian Lamo), charged with 22 counts (one of them is “helping the enemy”, for which they can be sentenced to death). First, Chelsea was detained at a military base in Kuwait, and then transferred to a 6.5 square-meter solitary cell in a prison in Virginia. At the trial, Manning pleaded guilty to 10 counts and said she passed on secret information to show the Americans the true face of the war. In 2013, Chelsea was sentenced to 35 years in prison.
Without the help of Manning - undoubtedly, the main informant Julianna Assange - WikiLeaks would never have achieved such popularity, so the state always considered Chelsea a traitor. Nevertheless, human rights activists (even such a giant like Amnesty International) stood up for Manning, who considered her act an attempt to protect human rights and tell about the hypocrisy of power. Chelsea Manning’s life in prison became a favorite story of American journalists — she made a transgender transition and officially changed her name, made two suicide attempts and won her release. In the fall of 2016, Chelsea appealed to US President Barack Obama to soften the sentence until his term of office expired. Manning received a positive response in January 2017, three days before the inauguration of Donald Trump - the White House considered that Manning had confessed enough, moreover, she had served part of the punishment and did not become a defector like Assange. In the spring, Manning was already free.
Now Manning is an icon of not only left anti-militarists and supporters of cyberdemocracy, but also of the entire LGBT community. Her struggle for the right to have an operation to correct the sex in the prison was followed no less than by legal proceedings.
Chelsea quite early began to doubt her gender. Watching her sister Casey, she dreamed of wearing the same clothes and doing makeup, but for a long time did not dare. Although by the age of 13 she realized her homosexuality - she was helped by anonymous chat rooms and LGBT forums, where she would later get acquainted with future partners. At school, Manning was hounded for "non-conforming" behavior for a man, and there were enough problems in the family. Her parents divorced quite early, and her mother with alcohol addiction tried several times to commit suicide. At age 19, Chelsea moved to an understanding relative in Washington, began to regularly visit a psychologist and get acquainted with the local active queer community. However, the decision to go serve made her adaptation as a transgender more painful.
At the service, Manning did not speak openly about her orientation - at that time the famous law “Do not ask - do not speak” (which obviously did not suit her) was still in force. But after the transfer of documents to WikiLeaks, Chelsea felt more confident - at first she walked in women's clothes for the first time in Washington, and later sent these photos to the military leadership by email and demanded to call her Brittan.
After the arrest, Manning began to fight for the right to be a transgender. During the next move from one place of detention to another, she made a public camingout. "I want everyone to know me for real. I am Chelsea Manning. I am a woman," read the statement on the NBC television. Prison specialists confirmed this and diagnosed a gender identity disorder. However, Chelsea continued to be treated like a man - they cut their hair short, gave out men's clothes, and instead of hormones, which are used to change sex, they were given only antidepressants. Because of this, Chelsea tried to commit suicide twice - these events and the efforts of her lawyers helped to get hormone therapy started, an official name change and the right to wear lingerie. Later, Manning went on a hunger strike demanding a surgical operation to correct the genitals.
Each step in the struggle for the right to be a transgender woman was given to Manning hard - the state machine resisted her needs, but still she was released victorious, broadening ideas about the rights of prisoners, transgender people and citizens of modern states in general. Manning inspired many people who were protesting at the Pentagon building, collecting one hundred thousand signatures demanding to reduce the term of imprisonment, money, to provide Manning for the first time after leaving prison.
Now at large, Chelsea is discussing her new wardrobe with Vogue (by the way, the magazine admires her looks and style), c Yahoo has a beautician, witty social networks and “is not going to be alone”. But her life is unlikely to be limited to shopping and idle life in New York - now she is considered a full-fledged symbol of resistance to Donald Trump, talks about the virtues of free health care for all and does not forget to remind: "We have more power than them."
Photo: Wikimedia Commons 1, 2
