Chelsea Manning, the US army soldier who released hundreds of thousands of secret documents to WikiLeaks, has filed a lawsuit in a federal court that charges her military jailers with violating her constitutional rights by denying medical treatment for gender dysphoria.



The legal complaint, lodged with a US district court in Washington DC, accuses the army of repeatedly ignoring her pleas for appropriate treatment for her condition. It names as defendants: the secretary of defence Chuck Hagel, major general David Quantock of the army corrections command, and colonel Erica Nelson who commands the disciplinary barracks in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where Manning is held.

“Every day that goes by without appropriate treatment, [Manning] experiences escalating anxiety, distress and depression. She feels as though her body is being poisoned by testosterone,” the suit says.

Lt Col Alayne Conway, an army spokeswoman, said that as a matter of policy the military did not comment on pending litigation.

Manning was first diagnosed as having gender dysphoria – formerly known as gender identity disorder – in May 2010, just days before she was arrested at the Forward Operating Base Hammer outside Baghdad where she was stationed as a US army intelligence analyst. She is now serving a 35-year sentence in military custody for crimes related to the massive WikiLeaks dump of state secrets.

Last September she was again diagnosed with gender dysphoria – in her case, the innate sense of being female even though her sex at birth was male – by Dr Ellen Galloway, chief of the mental health division at the disciplinary barracks. Yet despite making numerous requests for treatment, none has been forthcoming.

In July, the Associated Press reported that Hagel had given the green light to “rudimentary” treatment, but since then the only concession the military has made is to allow her to wear female underwear and sports bras. Meanwhile, she has not been allowed to express her female gender outwardly by growing her hair longer or through other forms of grooming customary for female prisoners.

She has also been denied the other pillars of gender dysphoria treatment, the lawsuit states, including specialist psychotherapy, hormone therapy and surgery to change her primary and/or secondary sex characteristics. The suit makes the chilling warning that “gender dysphoria intensifies over time. Incarcerated individuals, particularly male-to-female transsexuals like [Manning], are at a particularly high risk of engaging in self-harm including self-castration when treatment is withheld.”

Chase Strangio, a staff attorney with the ACLU which is representing Manning in the legal action, said in a statement that it had become clear that her treatment had been “governed not by doctors but by Washington officials and dictated not by medicine but by politics”. He added that “treating severe gender dysphoria with sports bras is like treating a gunshot wound with a Band-Aid”.

The ACLU argues that the withholding of treatment is a breach of clear rules for responding to gender issues such as Manning’s set out by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health.

The lawsuit contains an account of Manning’s personal struggle with her condition. “From a young age she experienced the persistent sense that she was ‘different’. In school she was teased and called names such as ‘girly-boy,’ ‘faggy’ and ‘queer,’ because she did not conform to expectations of how a boy should look and act.”

It was only in 2009, shortly before she was posted to Iraq, that she came to terms with being a transgender woman. She first made public her gender identity the day after she was sentenced in August 2013. Through her lawyer David Coombs she told NBC television: “I am Chelsea Manning. I am a female.”

Last month the department of defense put out a statement in which it said it had approved a request to provide “required medical treatment for an inmate diagnosed with gender dysphoria”. The Pentagon said it could not discuss an individual’s case under privacy rules, but that in general “treatment for the condition is highly individualized and generally is sequential and graduated”.