Charlie Markbreiter in the Los Angeles Review of Books:
In 2009, A US security intelligence operative stationed in Iraq began to notice some gaps in the American government’s “surgical precision” drone strategy. “I was trained to be an all-source analyst,” writes Chelsea Manning in her memoir, README.TXT (2022). “I’m used to collecting the full context and getting—and sharing—as much detail as possible.”
Manning’s childhood and adolescence in many ways exemplified the white millennial trans experience. While transness is culturally synonymized with coastal cities, Manning, like many trans people, grew up elsewhere; she was born to a former Navy intelligence officer and his Welsh wife in Oklahoma City in 1987. Not only did Manning’s father, Brian, instill “rigid cis gender sensibilities”; he also evoked a thoroughly militarized model of masculinity. Little Mermaid dolls were replaced with small fighter jets.
As it was for many isolated, closeted trans people in the aughts—not even out to themselves, let alone to anyone around them—the internet was Manning’s escape. First, it was forums: trolling, lolz, meeting other gay people. Then she became skilled at coding. Back in meatspace, she was aggressively bullied for being gay; her family eventually kicked her out. In Chicago’s Boystown gayborhood, she experienced IRL queer romance and community for the very first time.
More here.
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