My transition, prison and PTSD: How Chelsea Manning survived it all

As a blizzard blew on a February afternoon in 2010, a 22-year-old US army intelligence officer on leave from Iraq sat down in the cafe of a Barnes & Noble store in Rockville, Maryland. Over the following hours, Bradley Manning wrestled with the shop’s stuttering Wi-Fi to upload stashes of military files to WikiLeaks, the whistleblowing site set up by Julian Assange. By the time she was done, she had released nearly half a million reports of enemy engagements, explosions and body counts.

On her return, she made WikiLeaks other offerings, including videos of apparently gratuitous killings during a US helicopter attack on Baghdad and of a strike on an Afghan village that killed perhaps 147 civilians. Her hope, hoped against hope perhaps, was that by airing these disasters, the consoling, half-accepted narratives of America’s wars of liberation would skew towards her perception of things, which was that they were a chaotic, self-inflaming and unwinnable attempt to establish American regional hegemony by fear.

Instead, most verifiably, her torrential leak changed Manning’s life. The Pentagon and US president Barack Obama saw in their young, unhappy, perhaps misguided, but undoubtedly brave recruit, another enemy. Arrested that May, she was confined for 49 days to a cage she believed better suited to a large animal.

There followed incarceration in a marine base in Quantico, Virginia, where, a United Nations investigation later ruled, her treatment violated her human right not to be tortured. In 2011, she was transferred to Fort Leavenworth military prison in Kansas, her home for the next six years.

Loading

At her 2012 court martial, Manning was convicted of espionage and theft (although exonerated of abetting the enemy) and sentenced to 35 years in jail. Twice in 2016 she tried to take her own life, the second time while in solitary confinement – a punishment, as she saw it, for surviving her first attempt.

Bradley Manning is now Chelsea Manning. I won’t be using her “deadname” again. For continuity’s sake and out of respect, I’ll also keep to feminine pronouns even though much of her story happened before her transition from male to female.

She was released in 2017 when Obama, conceding the punishment had been disproportionate, used presidential clemency to commute her sentence and release her. But during those seven years in jail, had she not wished she had never stepped into the bookshop?

“That’s not how I saw it,” the 35-year-old says. “I thought for sure that my life was never going to take off in general. I had been homeless. I had been working two jobs to try to make ends meet and feeling like I had no direction. That’s what drove me into the military. I’ve always had this sense of futility that nothing will ever go right, that I’ll never be successful, that nothing will ever work and that bad things are just always going to happen to me. That’s how I feel. I think that my life could have been better if a few things had been different.”

“I’ve always had this sense of futility that nothing will ever go right, that I’ll never be successful, that nothing will ever work and that bad things are just always going to happen to me.”

By a few things, she must mean her parents. Her father is a violent former navy man about the same height as her (158cm) with extreme notions of masculinity. Her Welsh mother was an alcoholic. Her history – family estrangement, homelessness, low-paid jobs, dropping out of college, relationships formed mainly online, gender confusion – was, she thinks, merely “an extreme version of what many people in my generation went through”. Yet how hard her life must have been for her to believe the US military might offer respite.

Her backstory lies at odds with the petite and elegant young woman I am sitting with. She wears her hair long, undoubtedly a reaction to the crew cuts enforced in jail. She began transitional hormone therapy in prison but received “bottom surgery” in 2018. “It was pretty straightforward. I had a good doctor. I don’t talk about it much.”

The army had diagnosed her with mild Asperger’s syndrome. Does she think she is neurotypical? “I don’t think I’m as neuro-atypical as I’ve been portrayed. The two diagnoses that I’ve been able to address now are complex PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder] and, obviously, gender dysphoria, which I spent the subsequent years after the court martial addressing finally. My life is just so much better now and so much more functional.”

Although the army had to be persuaded of the gender dysphoria? “Yes, but shockingly I think I was more successful getting treatment for that than getting acknowledgement of the fact that I had complex PTSD. I think there’s a hesitancy for the military to acknowledge that its training is a PTSD factor: it is essentially putting people under conditions that give them traumatic amounts of stress.”

Loading

And surely, I say, there would have been something wrong if she had not been sent slightly crazy by what she had seen in her job. The intelligence she analysed was not just numerical data but video footage, written reports, and testimony from enemy prisoners and informers.

A particular incident hit her hard and personally. In December 2009, a night raid to capture a target she had been tracking for weeks went badly wrong because the soldiers used two-year-old information rather than the data she had newly updated. In consequence, they stormed the wrong address in east Baghdad, killing a dozen presumably innocent people while the intended target disappeared.

“I felt my head being done in every single day. It was chaos. It was drinking from a fire hose.”

To her superiors it was a “dry haul”, a “mission fail”. To her it was a trail of unnecessary deaths that might have been avoided had she not gone on a dinner break at the crucial moment. Was that when she realised the job was doing her head in? “No, I felt my head being done in every single day. It was chaos. It was drinking from a fire hose.”

A few weeks later, on New Year’s Eve, she decided to act. Her downloaded Iraq and Afghanistan war logs were transferred to a storage card. Thirty-six days later she was in Barnes & Noble. She sent her “README.txt” file with a cover note to WikiLeaks explaining it revealed “the true nature of 21st-century asymmetric warfare” but adding that the files had been “sanitised of any source-identifying information”. Her view remains that the data cost no US lives, and her eventual prosecutors singularly failed to prove otherwise. The damage to the reputation of the United States was another matter.

Did she assume she would be found out and punished? “I mean, yes and no. I think I knew it would be found out. At the very least, forensics could get you down to my office.

“But the consequences? Nobody had ever gone to prison for this before. I was the first, and there were no examples of a person being confined in solitary confinement for a year.”

The isolation was brutal. In the cage, she did not know what she had been charged with, had no access to a lawyer, no access to the news. Of all her later punishments in prison – sleep deprivation, verbal abuse, fights – her spells of solitary confinement were what she feared and hated most.

Her greatest consolation was mail from well-wishers; she received 270,000 letters in custody. She’s not sure why the army treated her so viciously, but her guess is that the idea of leaking secrets online was new and the government wished to strangle it at birth.

Nevertheless at Fort Leavenworth, Manning, who describes herself as an extrovert, gradually regained her ability to socialise. Preparing for the court martial with her lawyers provided another route back to civilisation. Some of the legal conversations were about her gender dysphoria. She announced she was trans in 2013 and, following legal petitions, in 2015 she became the first person in a US military prison to receive feminising hormone therapy.

Two years after being released from prison in 2017, while recovering from her gender reassignment surgery, she was held in contempt of court for refusing to testify before a grand jury into the 2010 leaks. For one more year she was jailed, this time in a civilian women’s prison, but again she suffered a period of solitary confinement.

“I spent so many years trying to earn his love and it just was never going to work out.”

I assume prison is also a microcosm of the toxic masculinity she had first experienced from her father?

“Yeah, definitely. My father was very harsh with me, very intense. I wanted him to love me and to respect me. I wanted to feel unconditional love but I felt it was very conditional and dependent on what I did. I spent so many years trying to earn his love and it just was never going to work out. He was quite abusive with me.”

She has no relationship with him now. Her mother died two years ago, from alcoholism. Not unexpectedly. She had previously survived two major strokes.

Manning’s belief that bad things are always going to happen has translated into fears for America in general. Secrecy, she thinks, is no longer the real battle, but verification is. Everything is online, but far from everything is true. She feels less inclined these days to engage with social media or share information and would prefer to give a lecture than compose a post that goes viral.

She lives in Brooklyn in a neighbourhood peopled by musicians, writers and artists but keeps a place in Maryland where her father’s sister, to whom she is close, lives. For a living, she owns a small private security consultancy that assesses risks for private clients and provides security, physical and digital.

She doesn’t currently have a partner but doesn’t seem unduly worried about it. “I’m in my mid-30s. I feel young.

Loading

I also feel the dating scene is getting older. One of the problems I’m having as a public figure is that there’s often an interest in who I’m dating. I have no interest in having my private life, which is quite emotionally involved and difficult to navigate, viewed under the microscope of the press.”

And that terrible feeling that nothing good will happen to her, what of that?

“I feel less of that now,” she says.

“I feel much more grounded in the past few years. People ask me why my book stops at 2017, at the commutation of my sentence. It’s because that’s where my life really begins.”

Lifeline 13 11 14.

If you are a current or former ADF member, or a relative, and need counselling or support, you can contact the Defence All-Hours Support Line on 1800 628 036 or Open Arms on 1800 011 046.

README.txt: A Memoir (Penguin) by Chelsea Manning is out now.

This is an edited version of a story that first appeared in The Times Magazine.

Make the most of your health, relationships, fitness and nutrition with our Live Well newsletter. Get it in your inbox every Monday.