Chelsea Manning's memoir. Content warning: rape
When Chelsea Manning was 11, one night she was doing her homework when her father came home and began yelling, hitting her with a belt, "drunkenly waving his twelve-gauge shotgun." The next day, the school saw she was bruised, but she "lied about the assault to the social worker, clearing my father's name." Her mother was also alcoholic. The following year, her parents decided to divorce.
She became a soldier in the U.S. Army. One night, a man who claims to be an officer raped her. He did so by threatening to accuse her of sexual misconduct, and she knew that "the mere accusation alone would sink my career, especially under Don't Ask, Don't Tell. There would have been all kinds of questions about what I was doing with him parked in the car." Thus, in the moment, perceiving no alternative, she allowed him to assault her, and she felt at the time that the "most profound betrayal" was "my own complicity." The next morning, she overslept her alarm, leading to "write-ups and punishments - no one offered help or asked questions." After that, she slept as much as possible and relied on caffeine and cigarettes while awake. "My personality broke," she writes.
After that, she discovered trans people posting videos of themselves online. To her, this seemed different from "abstract, dry medical reading about gender-affirming surgeries or the best cocktail of hormones to use." Seeing and hearing the faces and voices of trans people was "a reflection of myself - some future me, or some version of myself in a parallel universe." That's how she realized she was a trans woman.
I wrote more about this book. See: "A Queer Life Before WikiLeaks". It's a 6-minute read on Medium.
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