Seriously? “The Army uses this address…” She announced the change in preference as to how she be addressed this week. The Army is a huge, slow moving machine. The implication that they’re doing something wrong or disrespecting her wishes or preference because a massive institution hasn’t changed the contact information for one person within days of an announcement of preference (with, as far as I can understand, no legal change in her name) is just stupid.
Dude. She’s in prison there. We don’t presume respect or empathy from the institution that’s locking her away for 35 years.
It’s an unfeeling system. Whether or not she deserves to be in prison is a separate matter entirely. The battle to successfully transition while incarcerated will be a tough and interesting one but, given what we know, she hasn’t taken the legal step of changing her name with the courts. I imagine the task of updating or cross-referencing military records with a name change involves no small amount of effort and I can’t see why the Army or a federal facility should change the way they reference someone based on the newly developed preference of that person with no legal change to back it up. What if she want’s to change her name every day, or every week. Should someone be tasked with keeping track of what she, and any other person currently incarcerated in the facility prefers to be called?
It’s a non-issue until a legal change is made. I fully support media outlets respecting her wishes, but there are practically endless procedural and paperwork reasons for the government not to do so until some legal action in that direction is taken or completed.
I’m just wondering how long people will continue to refer to her as “PFC Manning.” Wasn’t busting her to E-1 part of her sentence?
Excuse my ignorance, what do PFC and E-1 mean? Completely not au fait with US military jargon
I would assume E-1 is the rank everyone starts with as a new recruit, so “reset to level 1”.
I don’t understand why you are doxxing her. Is this, like Foop posted, supposed to be a comment on how they haven’t made the administrative change to Manning’s name yet, or are you posting this for other reasons? I think, even if you presume most of the mail she gets will be supportive (not sure you can make that assumption), this feels irresponsible.
It’s not exactly doxxing as I think it’s reasonable to assume that most of the posters here would send messages of support. She’s enough of a public figure that it can;t be too difficult to locate a mailing address with a google search. I think it was posted with the intent to imply that there was something wrong in a huge organization having not immediately reacted to one person.
“E1” is technically a pay grade, associated with the lowest enlisted rank in each of the armed services. In the army, it’s “Private”. In other services, it may be different. For instance, in the navy, it’s “Seaman Recruit.”
Manning held the rank of specialist–equivalent in pay (E4) to a corporal, but with no supervisory responsibility.
I don’t know Xeni’s intentions, but I got no implied critique of the military from that post. It seems like one way to have that information for google to find is to post it on a website like boingboing. I appreciated it, and am glad to easily have the address to use, plus the information that it should probably include Chelsea Manning’s legal name. Sure there are probably other sources of this information, but is there a problem with having it posted at boingboing as well, given Xeni’s coverage of the whole thing?
You can find anybody’s details with a little internet research, but posting those details on a popular site and calling for people to send mail feels like stepping over the line, even if your intent is support and positivity. I wouldn’t want it for myself, anyway.
I also think it’s naive to underestimate the number of bigots who would seize on this as an opportunity to give Manning a hard time. Obviously Xeni and Boing Boing are supporters and that is not their intent, but I guarantee this will bring in hate mail and death threats from ignorant hateful people.
I’ll also admit that my first thought was to the number of people who would send negative mail, but I guess this just means I should send something positive to do a small part in balancing it out (or, better yet, overriding the negative altogether).
This seems to really bother you.
In her statement, Manning said she looks forward to corresponding with people. It seems like you’d need the correct address to do that. They’ll bounce back mail that isn’t addressed just right.
Doxxing? What do you think we’re going to do, send her 100 Papa Johns? Once you’re incarcerated, your address is pretty much a matter of public record. It’s called Habeas Corpus.
Somebody should try Chelsea Manning c/o Bradley Manning…
To everyone grousing about BoingBoing publicizing Chelsea’s mailing address, it’s fairly much tradition for supporters of political prisoners or the wrongfully imprisoned to give out mailing addresses. People in prison have limited contact to the outside world and it’s nice to hear from supporters.
If you have nice things to say to Chelsea and are going to use her correct pronouns inside the letter, please do. As oldsma mentioned, she did say she’d like correspondence.
It’s often that way for civilian prisons too. People who write CeCe McDonald letters have to use the name the prison has her down for.
You are just determined to be offended about a plain statement of fact.
