Bradley Manning: I want to live as a woman named Chelsea

[Jazzy]

Bradley Manning plans to live as a woman named Chelsea and wants to begin hormone therapy as soon as possible, the soldier said Thursday, a day after being sentenced to 35 years in prison for sending classified material to WikiLeaks.

Manning announced the decision in a written statement provided to NBC's "Today" show, asking supporters to refer to him by his new name and the feminine pronoun. The statement was signed "Chelsea E. Manning."

"As I transition into this next phase of my life, I want everyone to know the real me. 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," the statement read.

Manning's defense attorney David Coombs told "Today" in an interview that he is hoping officials at the military prison in Fort Leavenworth, Kan., will accommodate Manning's request for hormone therapy.

"If Fort Leavenworth does not, then I'm going to do everything in my power to make sure they are forced to do so," Coombs said.

In a statement, the Army said it "does not provide hormone therapy or sex-reassignment surgery for gender identity disorder."

Coombs did not respond to phone and email messages from The Associated Press on Thursday.

Manning's struggle with gender identity disorder -- the sense of being a woman trapped in a man's body -- was key to the defense.

The sentencing fired up the long-running debate over whether Manning was a whistleblower or a traitor for giving more than 700,000 classified military and diplomatic documents, plus battlefield footage, to the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks. By volume alone, it was the biggest leak of classified material in U.S. history, bigger even than the Pentagon Papers a generation ago.

Full article

This is just laughable. What kind of a defense to an espionage charge is gender identity disorder? Who the hell does Manning think is going to pay for hormone therapy? He's probably claiming he's really a woman so he doesn't get raped in prison. Even that isn't going to work Manning!

What are your thoughts on this?

 

[DrLeftover]

Of course he now expects the taxpayers to pay for his "sex realignment surgery".

And, of course, we probably will.

 

[Sinon]

I don't know about the US, but here in the UK if a prisoner is formally diagnosed with something like that, the government (read: taxpayers) pick up the bill.

 

[Bryd0]

Couldn't stop laughing at that, and I can't believe he's actually serious about it.