For nearly two decades, Julia Curlee was one of the people who decided what the most powerful officials in the United States needed to know before they got out of bed.
She joined the CIA in 2007. She served through three wars, traveled to 35 countries, worked in war zones, and carried the President's Daily Brief onto Air Force One.
She briefed George W. Bush. She spent more than a year as Vice President Mike Pence's daily intelligence briefer, a job that meant starting her six-day workweek at 11 p.m. and walking into the West Wing before sunrise.
By January 2025, she was the senior career intelligence official in the White House.
Julia Curlee is also a transgender woman. And in a first-person account published August 17 in The Atlantic, Curlee lays out what that meant: the second Trump administration was happy to keep her, right up until the moment the public might find out she was there.
"The White House had needed me," she writes. Trump officials had known she was trans from the beginning. It only became a problem when it stopped being a secret.
The First to Transition Openly and Stay
Curlee wanted to be an intelligence officer since she was a kid. For years she assumed that dream couldn't survive the other thing she knew about herself.
She transitioned in 2013 and became the first CIA officer to do so openly and keep working at the agency.
Her first day at work as Julia passed without incident. Four years later she wrote about it for The Atlantic under the pseudonym Jenny Hall, arguing that living openly had made her better at her job — a piece the CIA reportedly went on to use in college recruiting.
Then came the assignment to Pence.
On paper it should have been a disaster. Pence had built a career opposing marriage equality and LGBTQ+ rights.
Curlee is a transgender woman, a wife, and a mother. She has said she initially feared the pairing.
What happened instead is the part of her essay that has received the most attention. Pence, she says, took notes, asked real questions, and treated her as the professional she was.
When the assignment ended, he welcomed her family to the White House, took her mother's hand, and said, "You must be very proud of your daughter."
On their last day working together she gave him a letter identifying herself as a transgender CIA officer, a wife and a mother who had served the vice president. His answer, as she recounts it, was that he was glad he'd passed the test.
No one, she writes, has affirmed her gender identity quite like Mike Pence.
That experience is exactly why she stayed. If public service could rise above politics once, it could again.
She went back to the White House under Joe Biden as a National Security Council director. And when Trump returned in January 2025, she stayed put.
69 Days
Her colleagues at the agency reportedly ran an office pool on how fast she'd be gone. They called it the "Fire Julia" pool.
Trump signed an executive order directing the federal government to recognize only two sexes on his first day back.
Curlee started leaving the White House complex and crossing Pennsylvania Avenue to use the restroom in coffee shops.
Three days in, roughly 160 NSC staffers detailed from other agencies were ordered out of the building. She remained. She pulled together what was left of her team and kept briefing.
Meanwhile the administration stripped her nondiscrimination protections, ended insurance coverage for gender-affirming care, and moved to list her passport gender as male — a change that, for a covert officer who had traveled to 35 countries, risked outing her to hostile foreign intelligence services.
She was visiting family in Roanoke, Virginia, on a Saturday in late March when the call came: her White House assignment was over.
No reason was given. In the same conversation, she was asked to come back Monday, because they still needed the work done.
After she hung up, she saw that far-right activist Laura Loomer had posted about a transgender "Biden holdover" inside the White House and asked her followers to help identify the person.
Curlee went back in anyway. She spent three more days finishing a budget project and handing over a portfolio she'd run for nearly two years.
The message she got, in her telling: they needed her service, but nobody could know she was there.
The whole arrangement had lasted 69 days. Days later, Trump fired several more NSC officials after a meeting with Loomer.
The Promise Julia Curlee Can No Longer Make
Curlee returned to the CIA and watched it change around her. By that June, she says, the agency's LGBTQ+ employee organization had been dissolved and the Pride flags were gone.
Earlier this year she left the career she expected to have for life. She's now a public service fellow at Lawfare, where she has written about the institutional damage the NSC purge did to national security.
The White House isn't disputing the story so much as the framing. A spokesperson told MS NOW that the president can remove any executive branch official at his discretion, and dismissed Curlee's essay as self-promotion.
A White House official said her assignment had been scheduled to end in mid-2025 anyway.
Curlee is careful about what she claims. She doesn't say she has proof that Trump or Loomer personally ordered her out.
She was never told why. What she has is the order of events — known and accepted while she was useful and quiet, expendable the instant she might become visible.
The hardest line in the essay isn't about her firing. It's about the kids she used to recruit.
In 2017, writing as Jenny Hall, she told transgender youth that the CIA was always hiring. In an accompanying Radio Atlantic interview, she took it back: she can no longer in good conscience tell any LGBTQ+ American to apply.
That's the cost of this policy, coming from someone who spent 20 years paying it. The country didn't just lose Julia Curlee. It lost every person like her who was listening when she made that promise — and every one who watched this administration break it.
