Chelsea Manning

An intimate, revealing memoir from one of the most important activists of our time. In 2010, Chelsea Manning, working as an intelligence analyst in the United States Army in Iraq, disclosed classified military documents that she had smuggled out via the memory card of her digital camera. The army sentenced Manning to thirty-five years in military prison, charging her with twenty-two counts relating to the unauthorized possession and distribution of classified military documents. The day after her conviction, Manning declared her gender identity as a woman and began to transition. In 2017, President Barack Obama commuted her sentence and she was released from prison. In README.txt, Manning recounts how her pleas for increased institutional transparency and government accountability took place alongside a fight to defend her rights as a trans woman. She reveals her challenging childhood, her struggles as an adolescent, what led her to join the military, and the fierce pride she took in her work. We also learn the details of how and why she made the decision to send classified military documents to WikiLeaks. This powerful, observant memoir will stand as one of the definitive testaments of the digital age.

A Memoir

README.txt

bellamy-hill

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 world wanted me to be.

 meant at that point, and I bet the kids calling me that didn't really, either. It was just a 

 thing, we all thought, the worst insult you could use. I just wanted the whole thing to go away.

This was a job, one to be done effectively, but at the end of the day, it was mostly about protecting one another [...] while the politicians peacocked. [...] I learned quickly: our job wasn't to win, it was to come back home, to keep as many of our people and innocent civilians alive as possible. 

Humans are absurdly predictable, and any step a person takes outside their pattern, can potentially become a tool for coercion.

"...I began to understand that to some people, I'd become a cause, one that was more important to them than my fate as a flesh-and-blood person. There was the me who I was and wished to be--and there was the Private Manning that the world was imagining and reading about: a figurehead, a placeholder, a symbol. I feared that I'd be associated with views I didn't actually have."

"Fashion is a vital form of expression that broadcasts identity and puts power on display."

README.txt quotes

Join the club