Chelsea Manning has announced on Twitter that she’s going to be running for the Maryland US senate seat in the Democratic primaries, a welcome ray of light piercing the States’ bleak political climate. “We don’t need more, or better leaders,” she says, “we need someone to fight. We need to stop asking them to give us our rights. They won’t support us. They won’t compromise.”
When it comes to having rights unduly stripped, Chelsea speaks from experience. In 2012, the former US Army intelligence analyst blew the whistle on over 700,000 pieces of classified information about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, passing them onto WikiLeaks, after which she sentenced to 35 years in prison — more than any other whistleblower in history. After serving seven years of the sentence (often under reportedly horrific conditions), Obama ordered her release, stating that the sentence was “very disproportionate relative to what other leakers have received.”
Not that everything’s all the rainbows and smiley face emojis she splashes across her heartwarmingly optimistic Twitter account. As a transgender woman living under the Trump administration, Chelsea is part of a demographic that’s increasingly under attack from the President — from Trump’s rescinding Obama’s legislation allowing transgender people to use the bathrooms that match the gender they identify with, to trying (and thankfully, failing) to ban transgender people from the military.
“We need to stop expecting that our systems will somehow fix themselves. We need to actually take the reins of power from them,” Chelsea says. Concluding: “We can do better. You’re goddamn right we got this.”