Chelsea Manning, the US army soldier serving 35 years in prison for leaking a huge stash of state secrets, has won a small but significant victory in her bid to transition to living as a woman.



Manning has taken on the might of the US military, challenging its ongoing refusal to refer to her as a woman, and won. A court order from the US army court of criminal appeals instructs the military to refer to the soldier in all future official correspondence either using the gender neutral “Private First Class Manning” or employing the feminine pronoun.

As a result, the military is henceforth forbidden from referring to Manning as a man.

The court order marks another advance towards Manning’s goal of gender transition which she has had to fight every step of the way in the face of an intransigent army hierarchy. Last month, Manning, who has been diagnosed with gender dysphoria, was allowed to start hormone treatment, having struggled for years to convince her jailers to grant her the medical care that had been indicated.

The treatment marked a breakthrough for the US military, which continues to ban transgender individuals from service.



Manning was allowed to change her name legally from her male designation at birth – Bradley – in April last year. Even so, army lawyers continue to contest her new identity. Last month the US government filed a formal objection to Manning’s request to be referred to as a woman in all future filings.

In its submission to the court, government lawyers pointedly referred to the soldier as Bradley, and said that “unless directed otherwise by this honourable court, the government intends to refer to [Manning] using masculine pronouns”.

Manning’s legal advisers were jubilant about the outcome of the challenge. Nancy Hollander, who is leading the soldier’s appeal against conviction, said it was “an important victory for Chelsea, who has been mistreated by the government for years”.

Chase Strangio, a staff attorney with the ACLU who pressed a lawsuit against the army to force it to allow her hormone treatment, said that the court had “court rightly recognized that dignifying Chelsea’s womanhood is not the trivial matter that the government attempted to frame it as. This is an important development in Chelsea’s fight for adequate medical care for her gender dysphoria.”

Manning, who writes for the Guardian from her confinement in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, has written that “a doctor, a judge or a piece of paper shouldn’t have the power to tell someone who he or she is … We should all be able to live as human beings – and to be recognized as such by the societies we live in.”