Julia Curlee briefed presidents and became the White House’s senior career intelligence official. Then a far-right campaign targeted her for being transgender.
Julia Curlee spent nearly two decades carrying the country’s secrets.
She worked in war zones, traveled to 35 countries, briefed presidents, and boarded Air Force One with the President’s Daily Brief. She was trusted to decide what some of the world's most powerful people needed to know before beginning their days.
But in a remarkable first-person account published Monday by The Atlantic, Curlee describes how the second Trump administration came to view something else as dangerously sensitive: the fact that one of its most experienced intelligence officials was a transgender woman.
Her identity was never a secret inside the government. Trump officials had known about it during his first term, when Curlee briefed senior White House officials and became Vice President Mike Pence’s daily intelligence briefer. It became intolerable, she writes, only when the public might learn about it.
“The White House had needed me,” Curlee writes. “Trump officials had known I was trans from day one.”
Curlee joined the CIA in 2007 and became the first officer at the agency to transition openly and continue serving. She had dreamed of becoming an intelligence officer since childhood. Her other lifelong conviction — that she should have been born a woman — seemed, for years, incompatible with that calling.
She transitioned in 2013. Her first day at work as Julia passed without incident. Four years later, she wrote about the experience in The Atlantic under the pseudonym Jenny Hall, explaining how living openly had made her a more effective intelligence officer. The CIA later used the essay in college recruiting, according to Curlee.
Then came an assignment to prepare and deliver the President’s Daily Brief during Trump’s first administration. The work required arriving around midnight, studying intelligence through the early morning, and entering the West Wing before dawn.
Curlee eventually became Pence’s briefer. It was an unlikely pairing. Pence had spent years opposing marriage equality and LGBTQ+ rights. Curlee was a gay transgender woman, a wife, and a mother.
Yet Pence, she says, treated her as a trusted professional. He took notes, asked questions, and invited Curlee’s family to the White House when her assignment ended. There, he took her mother’s hand and said, “You must be very proud of your daughter.”
For Curlee, the moment proved that public service could rise above politics. She could serve an administration whose policies she opposed, and its leaders could recognize her expertise and humanity.
That belief brought her back to the White House under President Joe Biden, where she served as a National Security Council director. It also persuaded her to remain when Trump returned to office in January 2025.
As Biden’s political appointees departed, Curlee became the senior career intelligence official in the White House. She helped prepare the incoming administration to assume power, even as colleagues warned that she could become a target.
On Trump’s first day back in office, he signed an executive order directing the federal government to recognize only two sexes. Curlee began leaving the White House complex and crossing Pennsylvania Avenue to use restrooms in nearby coffee shops.
She stayed.
Three days into the administration, roughly 160 National Security Council employees detailed from other agencies were abruptly ordered to leave the White House. Curlee was spared. She assembled what remained of her team and continued briefing officials.
The arrangement lasted 69 days.
Curlee was visiting family in Roanoke, Virginia, when she received a Saturday phone call telling her that her White House assignment had ended. She said that officials did not explain. In the same conversation, they asked her to return Monday because they still needed her work.
After hanging up, Curlee saw that far-right provocateur Laura Loomer had posted about a transgender person “Biden holdover” inside the White House, accused the unnamed official of hating Trump, and asked her followers to help identify the person.
Curlee returned to work anyway. She spent three more days completing a budget project and transferring the portfolio she had managed for nearly two years.
“We need you. We need your service. But we don’t want anyone to know you are here,” she writes of the message she received.
Curlee does not claim to have proof that Trump or Loomer personally ordered her removal because she is transgender. She was never given a reason. But her account leaves little ambiguity about the sequence: Her identity had been known and accepted while her work remained useful and private. Once it threatened to become public, her service no longer protected her.
Days later, Trump fired several other National Security Council officials after meeting with Loomer, who had urged him to purge officials she considered insufficiently loyal.
Curlee returned to the CIA. There, she watched the agency dismantle its LGBTQ+ employee organization, remove Pride flags, and impose the administration’s restrictions on transgender workers. Earlier this year, she finally left the career she had once expected to hold for life.
In an accompanying Radio Atlantic interview, Curlee delivered a painful reversal of the message she once offered LGBTQ+ young people.
“Now I could not in good conscience advise any LGBT American to apply to work at CIA,” she said.
