Chelsea Manning will become a contributing opinion writer for The Guardian, U.S. editor-in-chief Katharine Viner announced Tuesday.
Viner announced the hire on Twitter, where she wrote that the U.S. Army whistleblower would write a column covering topics related to "war, gender, and freedom of information":
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In 2013, the former U.S. Army private was sentenced to 35 years in prison for leaking hundreds of thousands of classified military documents to WikiLeaks. Shortly following her sentence, Manning, formerly known as Bradley Manning, came out as transgender, and she published a Guardian essay about gender identity, writing that the U.S. government was denying her fundamental civil rights because of her gender identity.
"A doctor, a judge or a piece of paper shouldn’t have the power to tell someone who he or she is. We should all have the absolute and inalienable right to define ourselves, in our own terms and in our own languages, and to be able to express our identity and perspectives without fear of consequences and retribution," she wrote. "We should all be able to live as human beings -- and to be recognized as such by the societies we live in."
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