Just months into Donald Trump’s second term, after he’d declared war on transgender people on day one, more than 100 intelligence officers had been fired over conversations on an internal government chat system that included discussions of transgender issues and other LGBTQ-related topics. The administration claimed, rather dubiously, that the chats were “sexually explicit.”
And Julia Curlee was pushed out of her White House assignment. Last week she wrote about her experience in The Atlantic and also gave several media interviews in which she warned the White House is putting the country in danger by undermining U.S. intelligence.
She was a trusted, high-level CIA officer who’d spent almost two decades briefing presidents and top officials and traveling the world, including to war zones. She is also transgender, and in Trump’s second term, she says, that ultimately made her unacceptable, no matter how valuable she might be.
The Signorile Report is free and reader-supported. If you’ve valued reading The Signorile Report, consider becoming a paid subscriber and supporting independent, ad-free opinion journalism. Thanks!
She could see it coming as the environment changed around her. “Every year since my first day as Julia, I’d sent a Pride Month email to my colleagues,” she wrote, referring to when she’d transitioned, in 2013. “But by June 2025, they’d banned the CIA’s LGBTQ group. Pride flags that had flown for decades were suddenly gone.”
And then Curlee, who’d been open about her gender identity for years, became the target of Laura Loomer and other MAGA extremists. Soon thereafter, she was told her White House tour had ended, with no explanation given.
Never mind that she had been there during Trump’s first term and was immensely trusted by the White House.
As she explained, during Trump’s first term she was Vice President Mike Pence’s daily briefer. And everyone knew she was trans.
“The White House had needed me,” Curlee wrote. “Trump officials had known I was trans from day one.”
Some transgender people have criticized Curlee for working for Trump—and Pence—at all. I’ll leave that debate to trans people themselves. But it’s worth remembering that Curlee was a career intelligence officer who served through Republican and Democratic administrations. And there are many career professionals throughout the intelligence agencies and the federal government who stayed in their jobs under presidents whose policies they may abhor, including Trump’s both terms, precisely because they believed their job is to serve the country, protect its institutions and do what they can from within.
That actually makes what happened to Curlee more significant: She wasn’t a Trump political appointee who suddenly found herself on the wrong side of MAGA. She was a career professional who’d been valued for her expertise across Democratic and Republican administrations—until her identity became unacceptable to the current regime.
And that brings us back to Mike Pence.
Curlee, who is also gay and married to a woman, discussed in The Atlantic how she and Pence obviously had vastly different views on transgender rights, marriage equality and sexual orientation, but that he treated her with respect and dignity.
He also needed her: She was a valuable CIA briefer who gave him vital information. On her last day assigned to him, Pence invited her to the White House along with her wife and her mother, who’d initially had a difficult time accepting her transgender daughter. Pence took her mother by the hand and said, “You must be very proud of your daughter.”
Pence is no doubt an ardent religious conservative with a long history of zealously opposing LGBTQ rights, including as governor of Indiana, when he signed the odious Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and before that as a member of Congress. He’s someone to whom none of us should ever entrust our rights. But there is a difference between what Curlee experienced with Pence and what she experienced in Trump’s second term.
Pence was asked about Curlee and her article in The Atlantic during an appearance on CNN this week. He spoke well of her, even as he was clearly uncomfortable with the topic, and eventually he said:
My conservative values are fairly well-known, but maybe some people didn’t quite know that among our Christian values is, my wife and I believe in treating others the way that we’d like to be treated, with decency and respect.
Let me be clear: On one level, that’s a lot of bullshit, as Pence and other religiously bigoted politicians have always said things like that while using their power to oppose LGBTQ rights—as Pence did as governor.
But there’s a distinction between the religious-right politics represented by Pence and former President George W. Bush—politics that were very hostile to LGBTQ rights—and what we’re seeing from Trump today: the obsessive demonization of transgender people and a broader effort to erase LGBTQ people and identities from government and the larger society altogether.
Bush, an evangelical who pushed for a federal marriage amendment, saw fighting same-sex marriage—which was opposed by most Americans in 2004 and would not be recognized nationwide until 2015—as a political opportunity. His poll numbers were sinking, and it was an issue on which his party’s conservative base was intensely focused.
But Bush did not rescind the executive order his predecessor President Bill Clinton had signed protecting federal employees from discrimination based on sexual orientation. President Obama would later add protections for transgender federal employees as well.
Trump went in the opposite direction in his second term. Upon taking office he revoked Obama’s executive order and other LGBTQ nondiscrimination policies, part of the broader effort to erase LGBTQ people—and particularly trans people—from the federal government.
And we know that Pence not only didn’t object to Curlee briefing him; he believed she was valuable despite knowing she was transgender. He even asked her to extend her assignment.
If Pence had ever become president, would he have supported LGBTQ rights? Certainly not, based on his political record. He opposed marriage equality and other LGBTQ protections throughout his career. But Curlee’s experience with him demonstrates something notable: A politician with deeply conservative religious beliefs and a hostile record of opposing LGBTQ equality could nonetheless recognize a transgender woman as a woman, treat her with respect and value her professional expertise.
That makes what is happening now all the more disturbing.
There’s something about Trump’s vicious demonization of transgender people—and the broader erasure of LGBTQ identities from government—that goes beyond the religious-right politics we’ve seen before. More than in his first term, he does what the most virulent and extreme elements of his base demand.
Julia Curlee’s story makes that contrast impossible to miss. Mike Pence opposed her rights. But he also looked her mother in the eye and told her she should be proud of her daughter.
And years later, Donald Trump’s second administration purged that same daughter—no matter how valuable she was.
The GOP doesn't care about intelligent people. Sharp people are a threat to the ignorant. So they look for loyalists and do the Heritage Foundation's bidding. Project 2025 is the fruit of their greed and insanity.
The hypocrisy of the tRump regime and Repugs in general is breathtaking. They are removing the best and the brightest from the ranks of the intelligence community while our country is under attack from the Iranians and those supporting them. What could go wrong? Perhaps another 911? It is absolute idiocy.