Quotes from Chelsea Manning

Gender presentation should reflect the person that you are. When you lose control of your gender presentation, you lose an important aspect of your identity and existence.

I sometimes feel less than empty; I feel non-existent. Still, I endure. I refuse to give up.

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.

As I rebuild my life, I remind myself not to relive the past.

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.

Our society's dependence on imagery says a lot about our values.

I've been a huge fan of Marc Jacobs for many, many years, even going back to when I was wearing men's clothing. He captures a kind of simplicity and a kind of beauty that I like - projecting strength through femininity.

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.

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.

Living such an opaque life has forced me never to take transparency, openness, and honesty for granted.

The U.S. needs legislation to protect the public's right to free speech and a free press, to protect it from the actions of the executive branch, and to promote the integrity and transparency of the U.S. government.

Being closeted often put me in situations where I couldn't concentrate or even think straight.

As a young kid, I spent a lot of time exploring the world around me. I lived a few miles outside of a tiny town in central Oklahoma. I would often run amok though the fields of wheat, the patches of trees, along the railroad tracks, and on red dirt roads.

I began to fear that I was forever going to be living in a hot desert cage, living as and being treated as a male, disappearing from the world into a secret prison, and never facing a public trial.

After years of hiding and holding off because of the trial, I finally announced my intent to change my name and transition to living as woman on 22 August 2013 - the day following my sentencing - a personal high point for me, despite my other circumstances.

I am Chelsea Manning. I am a female. Given the way that I feel, and have felt since childhood, I want to begin hormone therapy as soon as possible.

Joy, confidence, and security can't begin until we are able to just be ourselves.

The one place I never felt at all comfortable in the military was in private circles of conversation. There's a tendency, especially among young men, to objectify and denigrate women behind closed doors.

The U.S. intelligence community is in a very poor position to be trusted with protecting civil liberties while engaging in intelligence work.

We should all be able to live as human beings - and to be recognized as such by the societies we live in.

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.

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.

The real power of mass data collection lies in the hand-tailored algorithms capable of sifting, sorting, and identifying patterns within the data itself. When enough information is collected over time, governments and corporations can use or abuse those patterns to predict future human behavior.

In my experience, working as an intelligence analyst with my own pool of sources numbering close to 100, by far the most effective forms of human intelligence collection are rapport-building and direct questioning.