README.txt

by Chelsea Manning

For me, at least, being trans is less about being a woman trapped in a man’s body than about the innate incoherence between the person I felt myself to be and the one the world wanted me to be.

What really bothered him, and a lot of people like him—libertarian conservatives, I guess you’d say—was that the federal government had killed people, including women and children, in Waco, Texas, during their botched intervention there in 1993, when I was six. The words Waco, David Koresh, Janet Reno, and ATF left most of us with a bitter taste. Our community shared a pervasive fear of the feds coming in again and interfering in our lives, taking away our firearms, going from house to house and forcing a new way of life on conservative, working-class people. I don’t think people who are not from that part of the world understand just what a formative event the standoff at Waco was, or that it still feels like recent, urgent history to many.

One hot spring day when I was seven, a clear day without a cloud in the sky, I heard a huge boom outside. It wasn’t a freak storm, it turned out, but a Ryder rental truck loaded with ammonium nitrate exploding in Oklahoma City, thirty miles away.

Terrorism, thanks to the close-to-home tragedy of the bombing, loomed large over my childhood. I saw from an early age that loss of life could be senseless, and that Americans could damage our own country as much as or even more than an outside threat could. After all, my first taste of terrorism was the work of not foreign radicals but a common American white guy, a right-wing extremist in the middle of nowhere.

Violence, by then, was the undercurrent to my life. My father beat the crap out of me; he abused everyone close to him. He used a belt or a flyswatter on me, and sometimes the beatings felt random, confusing, unrelated to anything that I’d done. He was mad at the world, and taking it out on me. What had I done wrong? Why didn’t he love me? I never got answers. When I’d cry from the pain, he would tell me he wouldn’t stop beating me until I stopped screaming, stopped showing weakness. I would force myself to shut down, my skin bruised blue all over.

When I looked up, my father was standing over me, drunkenly waving his twelve-gauge shotgun. I tried to run out the front door, but my father, in his paranoia about the government coming to get us, had installed a dead bolt. My mother, who was also drunk, tried to intervene, to tell him to stop. He turned to her and started to yell, and I was able to finally get the door open.

It wasn’t the end of that incident. I didn’t get my homework done, and I was bruised—both of which my social studies teacher noticed. She pulled me aside and I told her what had happened. The teacher got the state involved: a social worker came to the school to investigate, but that wasn’t what I wanted. As difficult as things could be with my parents, I loved them, and I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else— especially not at a foster home. I lied about the assault to the social worker, clearing my father’s name. Still, our relationship remained distant. He never showed affection, never gave me the validation I so desperately sought from him.

In private, I harbored an even bigger secret. My experimentation with gender presentation had expanded beyond sneaking into my sister’s room. I’d go to little stores in town—the mall was too far away, and I didn’t want to ask one of my parents to take me there—and steal things to try on in front of my mirror at home: makeup, bras. I’d stuff socks into the bras to see how I looked. But when I was done, I’d throw it all away and promise myself I would never do it again.

The internet was the only place I could explore my identity without worrying about the consequences. My family got AOL dial-up service early—1993 or so—and the chat rooms I navigated through our 14.4k modem started to fill up with people who felt like my people. I understood this world, felt free in it. There were no consequences here. The rooms were full of tinkering hackers, and we’d talk about games or movies in between questions about troubleshooting and coding tips and hardware setup suggestions. Often the conversation would turn to regular life, ideas—it was intelligent conversation of the kind that I craved.

I was a pain in the ass as a kid. I was smart, and I was arrogant. Standing out academically—especially in geography, science, math—became something I depended on to make my different-ness a good thing. I won the science fair, held down the academic-bowl squad, and became the first person from my school to ever win that competition at the state level. I thought I could learn anything, and if I didn’t know something, it was just a matter of time until I would. I read the encyclopedia for fun, to teach myself facts. When I was a little older, I began methodically working my way through the Western canon of philosophy, starting with the Greeks.

I had the movie’s central question circulating in my head: Do we become monsters in response to monstrosity?

My mother couldn’t handle life on her own. At age fourteen, I started to handle her bank account, her tax forms, the monthly checks for our bills. She was on the other side of the world from where she’d grown up, scrubbing toilets and failing to make ends meet, and the man who’d been her whole reason for leaving home had left her for another woman.

Ten months after their divorce, just as I was set to start high school, my mother bought airplane tickets we could barely afford: we were moving to Wales, back to the scene of her childhood, to a place where there would be people to take care of her. I didn’t want to leave.

I was on my way into the King’s Cross Underground station, just under the grand façade and through the turnstiles, when all hell broke loose. I didn’t see any fire or explosions, but I knew something was horribly wrong. I followed everyone else running away, back out to the street. The sky buzzed with helicopters. I’ll never forget the police and fire sirens; the tone and pitch of the city changed in an instant. I didn’t have anywhere to go or anyone to talk to. I was just a dumb kid with a backpack.

When I finally told him, struggling to get the words out, turning red, stopping and starting, he just said, “Okay?” and threw up his hands. It was meant not in a reassuring way, but in the most neutral way imaginable: he wasn’t surprised, he wasn’t even upset, he just didn’t care. It hurt how matter-of-fact he was.

I wasn’t just living on the margins, I was falling off the edge. I figured that I was going to end up in jail sooner or later, and that it wouldn’t be that bad. I didn’t care about having a record. Three hots and a cot sounded about as stable as sleeping around for food and shelter. I didn’t regret coming to Chicago, but I needed this particular adventure to end.

I hadn’t been in touch with anyone from Oklahoma while I was in Chicago. But I had the possession most important for survival: my laptop. I used the free internet at the Chicago Public Library (I couldn’t check out any books; because I was homeless, I couldn’t get a card), or unprotected wireless networks.

One day, toward the end of the summer, I got a call from a Maryland number I didn’t recognize. I answered out of curiosity. “Oh my god, I’ve been trying to reach you!” said a woman on the other end. It was my aunt Debbie, my father’s sister. She’d tracked me down because my mother had asked her to. She was furious with my father for kicking me out. This was relief I hadn’t realized I wanted. I cried. She cried. She said she had just wanted to make sure I had a place to stay, and when I told her that I was on the street, living in my father’s truck, she suggested I come stay with her in Potomac. She wired me money at a Western Union, enough for gas and food, and I drove east, with no plan beyond showing up on the doorstep of a woman I hadn’t seen in years.

Through it all, my already debilitating gender dysphoria was getting more acute. The best explanation I’ve ever heard is that it’s like a toothache that never goes away.

I had begun talking to my father on the phone, trying to repair the damage, to have a relationship with him again. Things started smoothly. He liked small talk. Then he offered advice—how could I build a life, grow up into something steadier? Join the navy, he kept saying, join the navy. Hell, join the air force. He saw the military as the fix-it-all solution to my problems: the military offered stability, tuition money down the line, a career. And it would man me up, he kept repeating. It had done that for him.

I am now convinced that what the army is actually trying to do in basic training is mimic the effects of low-level PTSD.

People sometimes say the floodplain of the Tigris looks like the moon, covered in silty, fine sand. But to me, it looked like Oklahoma, all empty plains and dun-colored palette and dust clouds that touched everything.

American freedom—the thing we’re exporting to the Middle East—is defined by the ability to buy things.

I live with the fact that people died because of my team’s work. And I didn’t struggle with that in the beginning—it was the job. I loved seeing that I’d changed the battlefield. There was pride in dismantling an enemy group. At first. But the loss of life—not “our” lives, just life—added up. One set of deaths eats me up—precisely because I wasn’t there.

People needed more information to understand what was happening. I even saw it on my own Facebook account. My friends—fairly liberal people—posted links to op-eds that reflected a deep misunderstanding of what was actually going on. They seemed to believe that simply having a Democratic president instead of a Republican one could solve something. Liberal, Obama-voting Democrats appeared to think our involvement in Iraq was suddenly working out just fine, at least since their guy had taken the oath of office.

With enough grief and adrenaline and fear, we can all become amoral, even malevolent.

Publicly, the government justified my isolation by claiming it was to protect me from self-harm, which they connected to gender dysphoria.

in certain concrete ways, at least as violent and secretive as the Bush administration had been. My disclosures brought to light Obama’s use of drone strikes in Yemen and the increasing restriction of the press’s access to information. For many, it became difficult to justify the government’s many sins, and it was difficult not to count my prosecution among them. For my part, I had no time to notice or care, even as the news cycle raged around me.

But privately, according to subsequent reporting, she spent hours on the phone with diplomats all over the world telling them that, in fact, no one was in danger because of the disclosures, despite the painful news cycle. And internal government reports, including one commissioned by the White House and one by the State Department, showed that none of the revelations had, as a practical matter, hurt our place in the world. The media, for its part, continued to benefit hugely from the disclosures, writing ever-juicier exposés; and at the same time reporters more or less continued to accept the government line about my actions. I was both the most important source they’d had in years and the biggest threat to American interests abroad.

After so long in solitary confinement, I struggled with the most fundamental things. Regaining normal speech was challenging. I couldn’t remember how to talk without shouting and sandwiching my responses around the rank of my interlocutor: Yes-Sergeant-yes, as the Marine Corps guards had demanded. It drove everyone at the JRCF nuts, but I was too well trained. Little by little, I regained my balance. I willed my own self into existence again, and not for the last time.

When President Trump was elected, in November 2016, I wasn’t as surprised as everyone else seemed to be. After living in prison in Kansas with a bunch of conservative-leaning white folks, I knew something sinister was happening. Some people were unwilling to say it in public, but in private, this was the man they had been waiting for.

I could see the world trending toward nationalism and fascism, fueled by spreading fears of immigrants, Muslims, people of color, queer and trans people. The rule of law had been perverted to override the rule of the people—and soon, the rule of law would be almost meaningless. The country was going in a bad direction, and I just couldn’t take it. In part, that’s because I knew the new president might directly affect my life.