Who is Chelsea Manning? It's weird! TM

By Chris Perez April 8, 2015

The Army made her feel “like a joke” — but they couldn’t keep her silent.

Chelsea Manning — formerly known as Bradley E. Manning — the ex-Army intelligence analyst sentenced to 35 years for leaking a treasure trove of secret documents to WikiLeaks, has given her first public interview with the press from military prison in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

Speaking through the mail to Cosmopolitan magazine, Manning opened up about her recent experience behind bars and her lifelong desire to live as a woman.
“I don’t know how [this struggle] shaped my life and who I am, but it’s absolutely a factor in the decisions that I made before and including when I enlisted in the Army,” she explained.
Manning — who began transitioning into a woman last year through the use of hormones, makeup, and female clothing — also describes feeling disconnected most of her life.

“I had always known that I was ‘different.’ I didn’t really understand it all until I got older,” she said.
Manning tells Cosmo that she joined the Army with hopes that the macho environment would distract her from thoughts of living as a woman. But she got a rude awakening in 2007 during basic training in Missouri. “I absolutely was caught off guard by the intensity,” she remembered. “There were points when I was humiliated pretty badly.”

Serving in Iraq, though, would prove to be a turning point emotionally for Manning. The experience “made me absolutely certain of who I am,” she said. “Dealing with…reports of people dying around me every day — to the point it becomes just a statistic to many people — made me realize just how short and precious our lives really are…So what better day to start being ourselves than today, right?

Yeah, it sounds tacky, but it’s absolutely true. When I went on leave in January 2010, I was comfortable dressing as a woman in public. I wouldn’t have been able to do that before I deployed to a combat zone.”

http://nypost.com/2015/04/08/chelsea-man...m-behind-bars/?

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Here's the before and after, Bradley and now Chelsea:

"I had always known that I was ‘different.’ I didn’t really understand it all until I got older,” she said."

Yeah and now she understands "it all". Woah! Chelsea just stay away!