Chelsea Manning 'feels like a freak' with 2-inch prison haircut, sues Army

Michael Isikoff

Chief Investigative Correspondent

November 09, 2015

U.S. soldier Bradley Manning (left) leaving a military court facility on July 30, 2013, in Fort Meade, Md., and an undated photo courtesy of the U.S. Army showing Chelsea Manning. (Photo: AFP)

It would be hard to imagine the saga of Chelsea Manning getting any stranger — or more poignant. But it did one night in September when the former U.S. Army intelligence analyst, who is serving a 35-year prison term for leaking hundreds of thousands of classified government documents to WikiLeaks, broke down in tears after authorities at the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., told her she had to cut her hair.

It was the latest in what Manning — who was born a male named Bradley — saw as a cascade of indignities and injustices. Just weeks earlier, she had been temporarily deprived of recreational and library privileges after guards seized unauthorized reading materials (including a copy of Vanity Fair magazine with Caitlyn Jenner on the cover) as well as expired toothpaste in her prison cell.

Only now, as Manning perceived it, the U.S. military was messing with her right to be who she is — a woman — and reinforcing the idea that she is a misfit.

“I felt gross — like Frankenstein’s monster wandering around the countryside avoiding angry mobs with torches and pitchforks,” she wrote in a blog post from prison. Feeling “humiliated, hurt and rejected,” she felt like “giving up” and said she “cried and cried and cried and sniffled a little bit, and then cried some more.”

But Manning, in comments sent from prison to Yahoo News, says she has now overcome her despair and is once again ready to fight the U.S. government in court.

With the help of a premier civil liberties law firm, she is working on an appeal —likely to be filed early next year — of her 2013 conviction for violations of the Espionage Act. She will argue, among other points, that she was in fact a whistleblower who exposed U.S. government abuses and was never given the opportunity to present her motives during her court martial.

Simultaneously, Manning is pursuing a separate lawsuit challenging her treatment in prison. It is a novel case that could pose an awkward dilemma for the Obama administration, which has publicly championed the rights of transgender individuals, including those in prison, yet now stands accused of violating those rights when it comes to the most high-profile transgender inmate in U.S. custody.

In recently filed court papers, Manning, who began receiving hormone therapy at taxpayer expense earlier this year, alleges that prison officials are undermining her treatment for “gender dysphoria,” the medical term used for individuals who feel trapped in the wrong sex, by forcing her to cut her hair to the same 2-inch length as male prisoners, thereby depriving her of her ability to express herself in a “feminine manner.”

“Plaintiff feels like a freak and a weirdo,” Manning asserts in her complaint, “not because having short hair makes a person less of a woman — but because for her, it undermines specifically recommended treatment and sends the message to everyone that she is not a ‘real’ woman.”

Demonstrators hold signs calling for the release of imprisoned WikiLeaks whistleblower Chelsea Manning during a gay pride parade in San Francisco in June. (Photo: Elijah Nouvelage/Reuters)