README.txt

by Chelsea Manning

It’s hard to say when Stockholm Syndrome set in. The guards, as cruelly as they treated me, were the best friends that I had, because they gave me food. They gave me water. They even let me have orange juice sometimes.

I had been deconstructed, taken apart, and reconstituted, this time as someone unable to function. One day, I started to babble, to scream, to bang my head against the wall. Doctors had to intervene. I remember that this happened. I do not recognize the person in those memories.

I had changed the terms of the debate, pulled back the curtain. But while all that was happening, I knew nothing about it. I remained in a cage.

“You’re all over Fox News!” he said, as though I already knew. While I’d been caged, in utter solitude, the world had been talking about me, about what I’d done. The things I’d wanted exposed were no longer buried. They were out there, being discussed and debated. But at that moment, I was too stunned by my circumstances to understand or care. There was no triumphant flash of recognition for me. I was trying to survive, minute to minute, trying to understand my immediate needs and the risks I faced.

My depression deepened. I coped by dissociating, and it is difficult for me to describe emotions from that time. I can recall details of what happened to me, but not how they made me feel. The experience is blank—that is the horror and torture of solitary confinement. During

Still, for some Americans on the left, the most significant effect of the documents’ publication was the disenchanting revelation that Obama’s administration was, 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.

I was consumed with building our case. Not just out of hope for my own freedom, but out of a desire to get the facts straight. I cared about the way history would portray my actions, and I was terrified that the real truth of what had happened would be steamrolled by the government’s muscular public relations narrative.

The sheer deluge of mail I received marked me as different from other prisoners. The flow of cards and letters was overwhelming. I read them all. Most were kind, the writer expressing why my actions had affected them in a particular way. People sent me their life stories, in detail.

Most of the charges were about the actual act of disclosure—which I admitted I’d done. But the most controversial charge was “aiding the enemy.” It was an unprecedented application of law, basically accusing me of what amounted to treason for being a source.

Preparing for the court-martial became my life. It was a logic puzzle, not an existential morass. A tactical battle, with rules to be followed and leveraged. I didn’t want to deal with my emotions, but this was something I could focus on.

I told David we needed to hire a public relations firm. This wasn’t going to be just a court-martial. I felt that this was a war over the meaning of America, both here and abroad.

While it’s true that I felt overwhelmed by keeping my gender secret, there simply was not a causal relationship between that issue and my decision, and I worried that the argument we were forced to make gave ammunition to those who want to pathologize trans people, to suggest that being trans is itself a sickness or derangement. The truth of the matter was that, despite all the stresses that probably contributed in certain ways, I acted as I did because of what I saw, because of the values I hold.

I had been diagnosed, in my post-arrest psych evaluation, with mild Asperger’s syndrome, as well as the possibility of fetal alcohol syndrome. We discussed both as possibilities for incapacitation, but felt that each was a stretch. Bringing up the stress over my gender identity would help some on this front, but wouldn’t get us all the way there; it didn’t feel like enough to comprise a defense by itself. Besides, we worried that pervasive transphobia would mean that disclosing my gender would actually work against us.

I hit one of my lowest lows when that news broke. My family and friends had already dealt with losing me to prison. Now at least a few of them were grieving the person they had imagined me to be. More than that, I’d had my agency taken from me. I had lost forever the opportunity to identify myself to the world on my own terms.

On June 5, 2013, day three of my trial, one of the biggest news stories of this century hit. Edward Snowden, a government contractor for Booz Allen Hamilton, had sent classified NSA documents to reporters at The Guardian and The Washington Post. The Snowden leak showed that the United States was running a global surveillance operation in partnership with governments around the world.

Compelling the prison, and the military, to actually treat me as a woman was difficult. I filed the first necessary administrative request the moment I was processed into Fort Leavenworth after my court-martial, which meant entering into another protracted legal battle.

The other inmates were supportive of my pursuit of gender reassignment, not necessarily because they believed deeply in trans rights, but because compelling the government to allow me to take hormones was fighting back against the prison. A victory for me would be a victory for prisoners. Eventually, the prison allowed me to wear female underwear, but it was a concession so small it felt insulting. I wanted hormones—a fundamental change to my body and my biological workings—and they gave me a slightly different cut to a piece of cotton.

I became the first person in the military prison system granted access to hormones, and among the first handful in the military at large: they had, a few months before, begun relaxing the official policy.

The rush of new chemicals in my body unlocked more feelings, and I slipped into despair. I had never been depressed without also having testosterone to act as a chemical defense mechanism. It was wearying. And then, about three months in, the balance of hormones switched. It was worse than wearying. The familiar endocrine system that for my entire life had regulated my emotions had been dismantled, and it had not yet been replaced by anything coherent.

There was, perhaps surprisingly, a queer culture inside the disciplinary barracks, and it was more robust than I might have imagined. The mere act of seeking one another out helped break down the boundaries of the prison’s racialized grouping. We intuitively understood the possibility of a different, more inclusive set of organizing principles. On the other hand, many of the relationships we formed on the basis of that shared queer identity were superficial.

Sometimes I believed that I had everything I needed in prison. Books. Running. Access to hormones. Enough food to sustain me. Solidarity and fellowship. But I didn’t, of course: I didn’t have control over my life, didn’t have freedom, and was treated by the prison guards as less than dirt. In order to survive, I tried to avoid dwelling on any of that, but by 2016, six years since I’d first been locked up, it had become increasingly clear that prison was corroding my sense of possibility and connection with the future. I began to sink into despair. Anger bubbled up more often.

On the Fourth of July weekend in 2016, I tried to kill myself. The Obama administration had just announced it was overturning the ban on trans soldiers in the military. The secret that had made life so difficult for me in the service wouldn’t have needed to be a secret if this had been the law before; what would my life have been like? Would I have had an official support system? Would I have felt so much pain about who I was? I did not want anyone to have to endure what I had—the policy change was a net gain. But I couldn’t help but be furious at the official confirmation of what I had long known: my suffering, and that of all trans soldiers before, was unnecessary and unjustifiable.

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. By this time, I believed in worst-case scenarios; my life had been nothing but. 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.

world with this new identity. This meant much more than being a woman; I was a celebrity, and had been made, without consultation, a symbol of all sorts of things, a figurehead for all kinds of ideas. Some of that was fun—when I needed to figure out how to dress, a Vogue editor helped me. Annie Leibovitz photographed me for Vogue’s September issue, in my own swimsuit. Some of it—the director of the CIA pressuring Harvard University to uninvite me from a visiting fellowship, Fox News seizing upon my very existence as a cheap way to rile up its viewers—was much less so.