Trans CIA analyst explains how Laura Loomer got her fired from her job briefing Trump officials

Transgender CIA agent Julia Curlee spent two decades in the agency, serving four presidents through three wars and travelling to 35 countries. She provided daily intelligence briefs to Vice President Mike Pence during President Donald Trump’s first term, and worked for the first 68 days of Trump’s second term as the White House’s senior CIA official providing morning intelligence briefings to high-ranking officials (even as Trump administration members signed orders to strip her nondiscrimination protections, ban her from federal restrooms, end her insurance coverage for gender-affirming care, and list her passport’s gender as “male” — potentially outing her to hostile foreign governments).

Curlee always believed in “service before politics” and “country before self,” she wrote in an essay published Monday in The Atlantic. But around March 29, 2025, the White House chief of staff fired her after influential anti-LGBTQ+ conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer posted a message on social media asking for the identity of a trans “Biden holdover who hates President Trump” working in a national security office. When she returned to the White House the following Monday, her badge and government accounts had been revoked.

Curlee — who joined the CIA in 2007 and was first CIA officer to transition and serve as an out trans person — was never given a reason for her dismissal. She wrote in her essay, “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. Not my service, not my war-zone tours, not even which restroom I used. I was the wrong kind of American.”

“An internet activist like Loomer doesn’t come up with names on her own, or just walk into the Oval to give them to the president,” Curlee wrote. “Someone in the building had helped her. Most of those fired, including my boss, were rock-ribbed Republicans, experts in their fields, who had been courteous and professional.

In her essay, Curlee noted that in 2017, she wrote an pseudonymous essay in The Atlantic under the pen name Jenny Hall about how being out as trans made her a better CIA agent. CIA recruiters shared the essay on college campuses to attract new candidates.

She felt “insane” for providing briefings to Pence, someone who “had built his career on public opposition to marriages like mine,” she wrote. She kept her position a secret, noting, “In my community, his name was shorthand for everything we feared. I could imagine the optics, and God help us if someone called a reporter.”

“But for all our differences, he was the vice president. He needed the best intel support possible, and this was my country too,” she added.

When her time with Pence ended, Pence invited her family to the White House. There, he held the hand of Curlee’s mother, smiled and said, “You must be very proud of your daughter.”

On their final day, Curlee gave Pence a letter that stated, “I’m a transgender CIA officer, a wife and mother—and I served the Vice President. Anything is possible in America.” When she said that many CIA members never believed a trans office could serve someone like him, Pence told her, “Well, I’m glad I passed the test.”

“No one has affirmed my gender identity quite like Mike Pence,” she wrote.

When Trump won the 2024 election, Curlee’s boss told her and her colleagues, “I need to strongly advise you to leave before Inauguration Day. There’s a world in which you’ll be targeted individually.” When she refused to resign, the CIA’s deputy director told her, “You don’t have to do this. You have a target on your back that others don’t.”

Days before Trump’s second inauguration, then-President Joe Biden gathered her and other White House staff, and told them “Trump doesn’t know it yet, but he needs you. It’s important for the country.” Biden was the only senior government official who asked her and her colleagues to stay.

Working during Trump’s second term, she watched as Trump banned trans people from the military and as Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard fired 100 intelligence officers (many of them trans) for taking part in an LGBTQ+ group chat that conservative media dishonestly called “sexually explicit.”

“I was offered an untenable bargain: Don’t make trouble. Take the insults—deviant, diversity hire, man in a dress—from those who have never faced enemy fire, who asked for my assistance in private and then signed the orders to erase people like me because ‘transgender ideology’ was a threat to Western civilization,” Curlee wrote.

After her dismissal from the White House, she considered sending a Pride Month email to her colleagues which read, “Happy Pride. You are not alone.” But the Trump administration banned the CIA’s LGBTQ group in June 2025. If Curlee sent the email, someone could use it to drive her out of the CIA entirely

“I deleted the email,” she wrote, “breathing through the urge to do something heroic and stupid. In the screen’s dark reflection, I saw my face—exhausted, angry. That was the moment I knew I had to resign…. The agency that had taught me to tell hard truths was now teaching me to be invisible. It was time to go.”

She now writes that she cannot in good conscience advise LGBTQ+ Americans to join the CIA.

“The agency has been gutted as part of a deliberate plan, the director of the Office of Management and Budget once boasted, to put the people who defend our country ‘in trauma,’” she wrote. “Analysts have been fired in public or questioned by the FBI; decade-old assessments have been denounced by the CIA director in the press. The president calls analysis ‘virtual treason’ when it contradicts his preferred reality, and uses the CIA to undermine public confidence in American elections.”

“I’m afraid too,” she continued. “This administration has already taken most of what I had to lose. I know that the White House and its online mob will come for me. My ancestors fled pogroms; they knew a fear I never expected to feel in the United States.”

“Flailing regimes dehumanize minorities to distract from their failures,” she concluded. “When the economy collapses or a war goes badly, they find a tiny group of people, make them the enemy within, and rally the country against them. This is how it’s gone in Iran. Hungary. Russia. I wrote [presidential daily briefings] about it. This will not stop with trans people. It never has.”