Fired Trans Lesbian Who Worked for the CIA Under Trump Speaks Out

Former CIA official Julia Curlee, who briefed top White House officials, has spoken out for the first time after she was fired by the Trump administration after she says MAGA influencer Lara Loomer found out she was transgender.

Curlee, who is also a lesbian, was let go 68 days into President Donald Trump’s second term.

In an essay published this week for The Atlantic, Curlee describes how she, a queer trans woman and mother, worked to provide top intelligence to then-Vice President Mike Pence and worked across four different administrations and through three wars. She’d previously written under a pseudonym for the magazine, writing that being trans made her a better CIA agent.

“No one has affirmed my gender identity quite like Mike Pence,” Curlee wrote. “On my last day, I gave him a letter. I wrote: ‘I’m a transgender CIA officer, a wife and mother — and I served the Vice President. Anything is possible in America.’ ”

Curlee wrote that the then-vice president responded, “Well, I’m glad I passed the test.”

In the essay, she describes staying on for Trump’s second administration even though many told her to leave the CIA before.

It was soon after the administration began that she recalls the orders that stripped her from using the correct bathroom in federal buildings, taking away her insurance coverage for gender-affirming care, and forcing the wrong gender on her passport.

She also recounts in the essay how there was a “purge” of 160 National Security Council staff while she was kept to manage what happened afterward.

“Programs crucial to U.S. interests sat unmanaged; the officers who had been in charge of them had been escorted out,” she writes. “When NSC leaders realized what they’d done, it fell to me to call the people they’d humiliated and beg them to come back. They did.”
In the essay, she also writes about the specific purge of those involved in an LGBTQ+ group chat that the administration said was “sexually explicit.”

“The next day, I ran an intel briefing — for her — because that is what we do,” Curlee writes.

Eventually she was fired while on vacation. Her boss, she writes, told her, “I can’t give you a reason.”

What she gathers, though, is that Loomer posted a tweet about her.

Loomer posted trying to find out Curlee’s identity, writing to her followers that a transgender “Biden holdover who hates President Trump” was working at the White House. 

“Trump officials had known I was trans from day one. This hadn’t been an issue until it was public — and then nothing else I’d done mattered. Not my service, not my war-zone tours, not even which restroom I used,” Curlee writes.

Now she’s had to reassess what her career will look like.

“I had planned to spend the rest of my career serving my country at the CIA,” she writes. “This White House took my calling, but it will not take my pride, or tell me that I don’t belong, or that I must disappear. I once wrote under a pseudonym so I could keep serving. I write now in my own name for the same reason.”