Chelsea Manning: I Was Naive to Think the Military Would Help Me

Chelsea Manning said she thought joining the military in 2007 would help her discover who she was, but now says “it was a naive thought.” In an interview with Vogue released Thursday, Manning said she’s working on adapting to her new life as a free transgender woman after being released from prison in May, where she was serving a 35-year sentence for leaking millions of military documents to WikiLeaks in 2010. In the interview, Manning revealed she had tried to leak the documents to The New York Times and Washington Post, but neither seemed interested. “I did this all on leave. I had only 12 days [before returning to Iraq],” Manning said. She said she plans to finish the summer in New York, then move back to Maryland.