Chelsea Manning has made an impassioned critique against the US military’s new rules allowing transgender people openly to serve in the armed forces, arguing that the reforms fall short of true equality.



As the highest-profile transgender individual in the armed services today, Manning’s criticisms carry particular weight within the debate around opening up the military. The army soldier said she responded to the defense secretary Ash Carter’s announcement of the rule change on Thursday with initial relief, followed by a dawning concern.

Writing for the Guardian from her prison cell in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where she is serving a 35-year sentence for leaking US state secrets to WikiLeaks, Manning raised two main objections to the revised policies.

First, Carter said that new recruits would only be accepted if they had been deemed by a doctor to be “stable” in their gender for the previous 18 months, and had completed any medical treatment.

Manning objects to the requirement of a doctor’s stamp of approval in a gender certification process, warning that it will sustain a system in which control over trans people and their bodies is wielded by doctors and bureaucrats. Gender identity should be the prerogative of one person, and one person alone – the individual concerned.

“No one knows my gender more than I do. You do not know my gender better than I do. A doctor doesn’t know it better than I do. My parents don’t know it better than I do,” Manning writes.

The second area of concern raised by the soldier is more personal to her own current situation: what will happen under the new rules to trans military personnel who are incarcerated? The revised guidelines make no reference to this point, leaving Manning in potential limbo.

Since 2014 she has been suing the US government in federal court to be allowed to live fully as a woman while in custody. So far, her wishes have only been partially granted.

She has been given access to hormone treatment, cosmetics and speech therapy. But the military is continuing to hold her in a male lock-up within Fort Leavenworth, and insists that she must wear her hair at regulation length for male personnel.

The case is currently before a federal court in Washington DC where judges are considering whether or not grant a government motion to dismiss the lawsuit.

Chase Strangio of the ACLU, who is acting as Manning’s lawyer on the suit, said that the implications of this week’s rule change were still unclear. “We are still figuring out what this means for Chelsea’s case. We hope the government will now do the right thing and recognise her female gender identity in full,” he said.

So far, Manning has been concentrating in legal proceedings on her access to healthcare and grooming rights, and has not formally or legally objected to being confined in a male institution. That issue is complicated by the government’s insistence that there is no equivalent female prison equipped to detain a high-profile national security prisoner such as her.

A further complication is that in the civilian world, the federal Bureau of Prisons still places trans prisoners in institutions according to their gender assigned at birth. Trans women, for instance, are uniformly placed in male prisons, even though that potentially puts them at risk of violence or sexual assault.