Trans CIA Agent Opens Up About Briefing Trump Admin amid Their LGBTQ+ Attacks, Including Mike Pence’s Surprising Affirmation
Trans CIA Agent Opens Up About Briefing Trump Admin amid Their LGBTQ+ Attacks, Including Mike Pence’s Surprising Affirmation
Rachel McRadyTue, August 18, 2026 at 7:43 PM UTC
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Trans CIA official Julia Curlee served Mike Pence and Donald TrumpCredit: The Atlantic/YouTube; Win McNamee/Getty -
Former CIA official Julia Curlee says she was fired after a far-right personality threatened to out her as transgender
Curlee worked under four presidents and says former Vice President Mike Pence treated her with respect despite his personal views on LGBTQ+ issues
She claims Trump officials knew she was trans but only acted after her identity became public, overshadowing her service
Former CIA official Julia Curlee is speaking out for the first time since she was let go by the Trump administration 68 days into the president’s second term.
The openly trans agent served under four presidents and through three wars, but writes in a new essay for The Atlantic that she was only pushed out after far-right Internet personality Laura Loomer threatened to out her on X in early 2025.
In her new essay, titled “The Wrong Kind of American,” the wife and mother reveals she served as a senior intelligence official during both of Trump’s terms. In addition to working on the Presidential Daily Briefs (PDB), which required her to work through the night and present the president with daily intelligence updates every day at dawn, Curlee went on to work for then-Vice President Mike Pence.
“No one has affirmed my gender identity quite like Mike Pence,” Curlee writes in her essay. “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.’ ”
She added that Pence’s response was, “Well, I’m glad I passed the test.”
Former Vice President Mike Pence and President Donald Trump in 2017.Credit: Olivier Douliery - Pool/Getty
Curlee also writes of thanking Pence for upholding the Constitution and validating the results of the 2020 election, despite the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, during which rioters threatened his life. She told Pence at the time, “I’ve never been prouder to have worked for you,” to which she says he replied, “Thank you. That means a lot to me.”
After serving as the director for intelligence programs on President Joe Biden’s National Security Council, Curlee then found herself choosing to stay on when Trump returned to the White House in 2025, despite being advised by many, including her then-boss, to leave before Inauguration Day.
She recalls the president signing executive orders banning her and other trans people like her from restrooms in federal buildings, stripping her of insurance coverage for estrogen, voiding discrimination protections and having her declared “male” on her passport, all while she was still briefing the administration and being called “indispensable” in the White House.
Curlee also detailed “the purge,” as she called it, when 160 career National Security Council staff members were fired while she was kept on to manage the ensuing chaos.
“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.”
She also recalled then-National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard firing 100 intelligence officers, many of them trans, for taking part in an LGBTQ+ group chat that the administration deemed “sexually explicit.”
“The next day, I ran an intel briefing — for her — because that is what we do,” Curlee writes.
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She eventually received a call from her boss while on vacation with her family, during which she was informed that she was being removed from her White House position and allegedly told, “I can’t give you a reason.”
The apparent reason, which Curlee soon learned, was Loomer’s identity-outing tweet.
Curlee says she was told to “be discreet” and asked to return to help “the administration that had fired me finish the budget, and handing off the portfolio I’d overseen for two years.”
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Curlee claims, “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.”
Though she’d previously encouraged other members of the LGBTQ+ community to go into the intelligence field, Curlee now says she “cannot in good conscience” continue to share that advice.
“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.”
In a subsequent video interview for The Atlantic, Curlee explained her decision to serve within the Trump administration despite its opposition to the trans community.
“I believed fiercely in the idea of nonpartisan civil service to whoever was the president,” she shared.
She also called former Vice President Pence an “excellent intelligence customer,” who “really impressed me with how seriously he was taking the job.”
And while she did not account for his personal views, Curlee added of Pence, “I experienced being treated with great respect.”
on People
Source: “AOL Breaking”
