Bradley Manning, the Army private convicted of leaking classified military documents, wants to live the remainder of his life as a woman.

“I am female,” she said in a statement Thursday insisting the media use female pronouns to refer to her. “Given the way that I feel, and have felt since childhood, I want to begin hormone therapy as soon as possible. I hope that you will support me in this transition.”

Manning, 25, was sentenced to 35 years in prison Wednesday after having been found guilty of 20 charges ranging from espionage to theft for leaking more than 700,000 documents to the WikiLeaks website while working in Iraq in 2010. During her trial, Manning’s defense team argued that her struggles with gender identity as a gay soldier contributed to her decision to leak. Her attorneys presented an email to a former supervisor from April 2010 in which she said she was transgender and joined the army to “get rid of it.”

Manning has affirmed her intention to begin the gender transition with hormones, but it is unclear of how she will manage to do so, given that the military does not permit hormone treatment or further surgeries to realize a sex change. Fort Leavenworth military prison in Kansas, where Manning is due to serve out her sentence, said on Thursday that it would not provide trans treatment beyond psychiatric support, a move criticized as unconstitutional by activists and LGBT groups (an initialism that stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender.)

Manning’s lawyer, David Coombs, hopes that Fort Leavenworth will be ethical and provide hormone therapy for Manning. “If Fort Leavenworth does not, then I’m going to do everything in my power to make sure they are forced to do so.”

The Washington D.C. Human Rights Campaign aslo acknowledged the issue with a statement on Friday saying, “ As Pvt. Manning serves her sentence, she deserves the same thing that any incarcerated person does- appropriate and competent medical care and protection from discrimination and violence.”