Chelsea Manning Quotes
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If you deny my request for a pardon, I will serve my time knowing that sometimes you have to pay a heavy price to live in a free society. I will gladly pay that price if it means we could have a country that is truly conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all women and men are created equal.
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The U.S. intelligence community is in a very poor position to be trusted with protecting civil liberties while engaging in intelligence work.
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I am Chelsea Manning. I am female.
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The fight for justice for the transgender community is largely invisible to our fellow citizens, despite the rampant systematic discrimination of trans people - those whose gender identity differs from the sex they were assigned at birth.
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Privacy is not a luxury in America: it is a right - one that we need to defend in the digital realm as much as in the physical realm.
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Joy, confidence, and security can't begin until we are able to just be ourselves.
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The evidence is overwhelming that it should be deemed as such: solitary confinement in the U.S. is arbitrary, abused, and unnecessary in many situations. It is cruel, degrading, and inhumane and is effectively a 'no touch' torture.
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There are very few distinctions between el bueno and el malo en la prision militar. Instead of the good and the bad, there is the boring and la repeticion - the repetitive. The routine is as endless as it is numbing.
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I knew that I was different. I gravitated more toward playing house, but the teachers were always pushing me toward playing the more competitive games with the boys. I spent so much time wondering, 'What's wrong with me? Why can't I fit in?'
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Shortly after arriving at a makeshift military jail at Camp Arifjan, Kuwait, in May 2010, I was placed into the black hole of solitary confinement for the first time.
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Having a birthday around the holidays was never easy and, with every successive year, it felt more and more as if celebrating my birthday got thrown into the December holiday mix as an afterthought.
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Our society's dependence on imagery says a lot about our values.
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By the time I enrolled in the military at 20, I had spent years in denial about who I really was. I was openly gay and would go through periods of cross-dressing, and had even thought about transitioning, but I was in such complete denial.
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Our nation has had similar dark moments for the virtues of democracy - the Trail of Tears, the Dred Scott decision, McCarthyism, and the Japanese-American internment camps - to mention a few. I am confident that many of the actions since 9/11 will one day be viewed in a similar light.
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Being closeted often put me in situations where I couldn't concentrate or even think straight.
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We need to stop hoping that our systems will right themselves. We need to actually take the reins of government and fix our institutions. We need to save lives by making change at every level.
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Freedom used to be something that I dreamed of but never allowed myself to fully imagine.
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When I wanted to serve my country, I was forced to hide the most basic and human aspect of my life and my identity from the people to whom I was supposed to be the closest - and with whom I had to trust my life. I also had to hide from myself.
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I used to get these horrible feelings; like, I just wanted to rip my body apart, and I don't want to have to go through that experience again. It's really, really awful.
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The people who are in the military work very hard, often for not much money, to make their country better and to protect their country. And I have nothing but respect for that.
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Patriotism is often the cry extolled when morally questionable acts are advocated by those in power. When these cries of patriotism drown out any logically based dissension, it is usually the American soldier that is given the order to carry out some ill-conceived mission.
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I loved being in my sister's room. I really admired her and wore her clothes to play in, played with her dolls, played with her makeup. She had a mirror with settings to see what you would look like in different lighting. I thought that was amazing.
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There's this idea out there that, had I not been trans, the leaks and stuff would never have happened. But to my mind, those are two completely separate things. Had I been out, I think I still would have been attracted to the military, but I would have been more comfortable and gotten along with people better.
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I came out publicly as transgender and began hormone replacement therapy while in prison. When I was released, however, there was no quantifiable history of me existing as a transwoman. Credit and background checks automatically assumed I was committing fraud.