Portugal Colonial - Julia Curlee, CIA officer fired by White House for being transgender

But after a far-right influencer publicized her transgender identity online, the White House immediately dismissed her.

"They needed me. They asked me to stay" when Trump succeeded Joe Biden in the presidency, Curlee told AFP in an interview, over a year after she was fired.

"But the moment (my gender identity) became public and a political problem with their supporters, that's when they got rid of me."

Curlee, who has since resigned from the Central Intelligence Agency after 20 years of service, recently shared her experience in a first-person essay published by The Atlantic magazine.

In her view, she was the victim of hypocrisy by Trump's Republican Party.

Trump himself promised to end "transgender madness," after campaigning on an agenda that included banning trans people from competing in sports, serving in the military and using bathrooms different from their birth sex.

"To live up to the hatred that they say they have, they had to fire me," Curlee said.

- 'It wasn't ever an issue' -

Now in her mid-40s, Curlee in 2013 became the first CIA officer to transition while working at the agency.

In 2017, during Trump's first term, she successfully made it onto the National Security Council (NSC), the White House's top advisory body on issues of national security, the military and foreign policy.

For a year she gave daily intelligence briefings to then-vice president Mike Pence, a staunch conservative with a history of opposing LGBTQ rights.

Despite her close proximity to Pence as a trans woman, Curlee noted that his views did not impact her work.

"He never made it a problem. Everyone in his staff knew that I was transgender, but it wasn't ever an issue," she said.

It made her think working under a second Trump administration would be possible, she added. "Obviously, I was wrong."

-'Humiliating' return to CIA -

Although Curlee decided to continue working for the White House after Trump won reelection in 2024 following an openly anti-trans political campaign, she lived with constant fear of being fired.

Three days after Trump's return to office, many NSC staffers were let go, but she was asked to stay.

"It was just being a handful of people, and it was complete chaos," Curlee recalled of those initial months.

For about 10 weeks Curlee continued her White House work, despite administration officials' public attacks against the transgender community.

"Senior staff at the new Trump administration, they all treated me very well," she told AFP.

But on a Saturday afternoon that March, while eating barbecue with family, she got a call from her new boss: "'You've been fired, but I can't tell -- I don't know why,'" she remembered him saying.

Earlier that day, prominent far-right influencer Laura Loomer posted on X: "SCOOP: A transgender, Biden holdover who hates President Trump is still working in the NSC intel office."

In response to an AFP inquiry on Curlee's dismissal, a White House spokesperson said: "Anyone who writes a 3,000-word op-ed bragging about themselves while attacking the President clearly doesn't belong in public service," refering to The Atlantic essay.

Pence spoke warmly of Curlee on Sunday.

"My wife and I believe in treating others the way that we'd like to be treated, with decency and respect," Pence, a devout Christian, told CNN. "And I was heartened to hear Julia reflect that that was the experience that took place in our office."

Curlee returned to the CIA for less than a year, finding going back to her old employer "impossible" for several reasons.

"I would spend my days walking across the CIA compound to the...unisex or family bathroom, which I could use, and it was humiliating having to do that," she described.

Now a fellow at Lawfare, a nonprofit publication covering national security, Curlee said she hoped her story broke the transgender "caricature" fueled by the American right to convince voters to back "an extremist agenda based on fear."

A.Aguiar--PC