Chelsea Manning "feels like a freak" in prison due to short haircut

Chelsea Manning is still cooling his heels in Leavenworth for betraying his country and revealing classified information, but things apparently aren’t going so well as he serves out his sentence. Having already lost out on his copy of Vanity Fair and a tube of toothpaste, Manning is now sending his attorneys back to court for the umpteenth time because he has to have the same military style, two inch maximum haircut as the rest of the men locked up there. (Yahoo News)

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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…

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.”

The new court filing actually includes the phrase, “Plaintiff feels like a freak and a weirdo.” I’m not sure if you’re going to find a judge anywhere in the land to take up that argument, but if we didn’t have a stack of Chelsea Manning cases clogging up the courts the world would feel unbalanced. (Before you ask, Private Manning, who is still a male, changed his name to Chelsea legally so we no longer refer to him as Bradley.)

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As the report above indicates, however, this particular case will bring up some prickly issues for the Obama administration. The White House has been out there, loud and proud in support of the entire “transgender rights” question all year in an effort to be on the right side of history on this issue. But Manning may be the second most famous such figure in the country after Kaitlyn Jenner. (Who also legally changed his name.) Will the Obama administration overrule their own military commanders and the rules of conduct for the Army and declare that an exception be made for Manning?

And let’s just say for a moment that he does. Would that be a direct acknowledgement from the federal government that Manning, still in possession of not only all of his original “equipment” but an X-Y chromosomal pair in the 23rd slot, is actually “a woman” now? Will the Army have to transfer him to a female inmate section? That’s going to open up a whole new can of worms, and one which I have long maintained needs to be not only opened but forced into the court system at the highest level.

With so many other cases being shoved into both the legislative and judicial arenas by the SJW, we need an answer on this once and for all because the situation has already festered well past the boiling point. If Barack Obama wants to declare this man to be a female based on nothing but his personal feelings and “self-identification” and in defiance of science and abject reality, he should do so. And somebody should be able to challenge that in court and dump it in the lap of the Supremes as quickly as possible. If they want to agree then we’ve pretty much reached the end of the ride in terms of sane civilization, but let’s roll the dice and find out. The Chelsea Manning Haircut vs United States hearings could be a defining cultural moment for generations to come.

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