Julia Curlee, a former senior CIA analyst who is transgender, is opening up about being fired by the White House for no stated reason last year despite serving under President Donald Trump during his first term.
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In an essay shared in The Atlantic on Monday, Curlee recalled learning she had been fired from her post on the National Security Council in late March 2025, the day that far-right personality Laura Loomer called for the firing of a trans “Biden holdover who hates” Trump.
“The White House had needed me. 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,” wrote Curlee, who spent two decades with the CIA and was a daily briefer for former Vice President Mike Pence.
“Not my service, not my war-zone tours, not even which restroom I used.
I was the wrong kind of American.”
With the second Trump administration’s attacks on gender-affirming care, passport restrictions for trans people and more, Curlee described working in the new administration while trying to hold on to her belief in “service before politics” and “country before self.”
“I had planned to spend the rest of my career serving my country at the CIA. 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.”
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Julia Curlee was the first CIA officer to transition openly and keep working at the agency. The Trump White House needed her—until her identity became public. She recounts her time in service in The Atlantic’s October issue:https://t.co/TBp5rSbixd pic.twitter.com/zs7iZCHCQ3
— The Atlantic (@TheAtlantic) August 17, 2026
Elsewhere in the essay, Curlee recalled feeling as if she was “insane” for briefing Pence — long criticized for his career of anti-LGBTQ+ policies — during Trump’s first term.
She described giving the former vice president a letter on their last day working together that read, “I’m a transgender CIA officer, a wife and mother—and I served the Vice President. Anything is possible in America.”
Pence, she recalled, told her, “I’m glad I passed the test.”
“No one has affirmed my gender identity quite like Mike Pence,” she penned.
Curlee revealed that she wrote in The Atlantic under the pseudonym Jenny Hall back in 2017 where she declared that trans kids should know that the CIA was “always recruiting.”
“That promise has been broken. I cannot in good conscience advise LGBTQ Americans to join the CIA—and that sentence is the hardest thing I have ever written,” she wrote on Monday.
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Read Curlee’s essay in The Atlantic here.
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