For more than a year, Julia Curlee’s six-day workweek started when the vice president’s ended: at 11 p.m. every day.
That was part of her patriotic duty: to be awake and reading through the night so the United States’ most sensitive secrets would be on the vice president’s desk by first light. And the man who sat behind that desk was Mike Pence. He had a long public record of opposing same-sex marriage and transgender service in the military, which initially worried Curlee, who, in 2013, was the first transgender CIA officer to transition openly and stay with the agency.
But Pence, she told MS NOW, never once made her feel small.
“I don’t pretend to know what he truly believes in his heart,” said Curlee, who is now a public service fellow at Lawfare, a nonprofit covering national security law and policy. “What I can tell you is how I was treated, which was with profound respect and dignity.”
Curlee is speaking out now because most of her former colleagues cannot.
“There is a palpable fear,” she said, pointing to former colleagues, including members of the LGBTQ community, who “have been fired in public.”
Curlee has had a desire to serve since childhood. Growing up in Hawaii, she said, her grandfather instilled in her what she called the immigrant creed: “We came to this country with nothing, and we owe it everything.” She held to that through four administrations, beginning in 2007 with George W. Bush. But things changed when President Donald Trump returned to office last year. Her boss warned her that as a transgender woman, she would be targeted, and colleagues encouraged her to resign. But Curlee felt it was her duty to stay.
For this National Security Council director, her commitment to serve came with small daily humiliations. Barred from the women’s bathroom, she had to leave the White House and cross the street to find one she could use.
“I won’t lie to you, that was very difficult,” she said. “To be reminded every day that I was not considered to be an equal, or that I didn’t deserve to be treated and accorded the identity which I am.”
She never complained. She did not want to give anyone a pretext to send her away.
Two months into Trump’s second term, a jarring post appeared on X. Right-wing activist Laura Loomer wrote that “a transgender, Biden holdover who hates President Trump is still working in the NSC intel office,” asking her followers to send her the person’s name so she could post it.
Curlee believes the post did not originate with Loomer.
“Laura Loomer doesn’t work in the White House. She doesn’t sit in the Sit Room,” Curlee said. “Someone decided within the White House that the best way to get rid of me was to bring in an outside internet provocateur.”
Seventy days after the president took his oath of office, Curlee was told by her boss that she was fired, and that the decision had come from the White House chief of staff.
Notably, Curlee was fired on a Saturday but was still asked to report to work two days later. She spent her final few days closing out the budget and handing off her portfolio. Her supervisor had one additional ask: be discreet.
“They wanted my service,” she said. “They asked me to come back the Monday after I was fired because they needed me, and I did. But they didn’t want anyone to know I was there.”
“I was the wrong kind of American for them,” she said. “And that violated every bit of my belief in our creed, which is that a person should be able to rise as far as their talents can take them.”
White House spokesperson Anna Kelly told MS NOW that Trump “can remove any executive branch official at his discretion. Trump administration officials are entrusted with advancing the America First agenda that nearly 80 million Americans elected him to implement. Anyone who writes a 3,000-word op-ed bragging about themselves while attacking the President clearly doesn’t belong in public service.” A White House official said that Curlee’s end-date was scheduled for mid-2025.
Nearly a decade ago, writing under a pseudonym because she was still under cover, Curlee ended an essay in The Atlantic with a line meant for one kind of reader: transgender kids should know the CIA is always recruiting. She meant it. She had traveled to college campuses to make that pitch, and she said she watched students hear it and understand that a door was open.
That door, she said, has closed.
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