Chelsea Manning to join The Guardian as an opinion writer

Katharine Viner, editor-in-chief at The Guardian U.S., announced today that Chelsea Manning will join the publication as a contributing opinion writer.

Delighted to announce: Chelsea Manning joins @GuardianUS as a contributing opinion writer, writing on war, gender, freedom of information

— Katharine Viner (@KathViner) February 10, 2015

Manning will write from Fort Leavenworth prison in northeast Kansas, where she is serving a 35-year sentence for leaking national security documents to WikiLeaks in 2010. She will not be paid for the work, Politico reported.

Manning, who served in the military under her birth name Bradley, was deployed in Iraq for a year and a half before her arrest in May 2010. After her sentencing in 2013, Manning announced that she was a transgender woman, and last May U.S. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel approved a plan to assist her gender transition while in prison. In September, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit for Manning against Hagel and other government officials, saying that she had not yet received the treatment she was promised.

Manning wrote an essay for The Guardian in December outlining some of the challenges that transgender people face in the U.S. legal system. She wrote:

“Despite ample evidence that trans people have existed in most cultures throughout history, and the medical consensus that trans people can live healthy, productive lives, many governments continue to impose barriers on trans people that can make it almost impossible to survive.”