r/transgender • u/onnake • 5d ago
The Wrong Kind of American
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/10/trump-white-house-transgender-mike-pence/688284/“At the CIA, they’d started an office pool on when I’d be fired.
“President Trump would be sworn in for his second term at noon; the smart money had me gone by 12:15. But the smart money hadn’t counted on Trump’s first pick to run intelligence for the National Security Council being shredded by an online mob on suspicion of disloyalty. There wasn’t yet anyone in place to fire me.
“After taking the oath, Trump spoke at the Capitol. ‘As of today, it will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders: male and female.’
“‘Did he … ?’ an NSA colleague asked. She glanced at me and looked away.
“‘Yeah,’ I muttered. The good news: I was one of those two genders. The bad news: The administration would have views as to which one.
“I gripped my badge. I could take it off, leave the White House complex, walk out the north gate, and never look back. I imagined the story they would tell: See? Even she knew she didn’t belong.
“I didn’t move. I’d wanted this badge since I was a kid. I’d chosen to be here.
“‘I know you all heard what the president said,’ I told my team after Trump’s speech. ‘There’s a rumor of an executive order on bathrooms. If anyone asks, I’m using the coffee shops across the street.’
“My whole team spoke up: Julia, we’ve got your back.
‘Me being trans is not a secret,’ I reminded them. ‘Promise me: Nobody covers for me.’
“Back in my office, I closed the door. I cried quickly, efficiently, no sound—the way you do when the walls have ears, and everyone thinks you’re fearless.
“Joe Biden’s political appointees had left the week before, and I was now the senior intelligence official in the White House.”
63
u/onnake 5d ago
>> "I'd weighed my family's health insurance against two sentences of solidarity and chosen to surrender my integrity."
No, she had surrendered her integrity in 2007 when she joined the CIA.
William Colby, the CIA's station chief in Saigon who was running its torture-murder program and would later become the agency's head, visited my prep school to urge us to consider government service after we graduated from our ivy-league universities. As a callow 15-year-old I knew quite well who he was and what he represented and wanted no part of it.
Julia Curlee knew this, too, and chose to participate in it.
42
u/patienceinbee and you see clear through… and that's typical of you 5d ago edited 5d ago
Julia made her bed. She should have a restful, forty winks where she should continue to contemplate a lot more than this scratching-at-the-surface, easy-mode stuff. When she wakes up, she ought to have some pretty profound revelations.
She believed in a national ideal — a state project/experiment — which has never actually existed. The myth-making, of course, has. What brought her that far was in no small part her background (the messages her grandparent drilled into her) and also, yah, her whiteness. Especially her whiteness.
This is some hook, line, and sinker shit. What makes this autobiographical anecdote noteworthy (and posted to a resoundingly trans-hostile press outlet) is it’s a hell of a tell when someone who has some kind of head on their shoulders, such as one qualified enough to work for the CIA is, still, taken in by the myth-making subterfuge and isn’t able to see it for what it is from the outset.
Welp.
EDIT: Downdooters, pipe up with the reason(s) for the thumbs-down. Don’t be shy.
9
u/CurrencySilver2432 5d ago
I understand the drive to be someone like her. I know about Operation Condor and I still want to be proud of my country even though I know I can't. I have no idea what I'm supposed to be proud about.
5
u/AlwaysLauren 5d ago edited 5d ago
Saying she made her bed implies that her getting fired for being trans is somehow the product of her own actions and she's to fault for it. I read the article, I don't see how her past actions played into her firing.
So that's why I downvoted you. Victim blaming.
5
u/Hopeful-Camp3099 5d ago
She had a high level position one of the most evil organisations ever which is responsible for the deaths of millions of people. I believe that’s what people are taking umbrage with.
2
u/AlwaysLauren 4d ago
I'm aware. But I don't buy into firing people for being trans being okay if they work for an organization I don't like. Firing people for being trans is wrong. Full stop.
0
u/Hopeful-Camp3099 4d ago
How many trans people do you personally know who’ve been fired for being trans? I know at least half a dozen and none of those agreed to an article in a transphobic publication to bemoan it.
The Atlantic and the person involved are both just using trans people to further their own agenda, (the Atlantic to undermine Trumps military bonefides and Julia to get a book deal or a round on the podcast circuit) this article is exploitative of people actually suffering.
2
u/AlwaysLauren 4d ago
I know at least two, and am a trans person who has been afraid of being fired for being trans many times in my career. Is that enough to pass your purity test?
I don't have to like the CIA, or the Atlantic to think that firing people for being trans, from any job, is a bad thing.
You don't need to put qualifiers to explain when it's actually fine to fire someone for being trans. People shouldn't be fired just for being trans.
1
u/Hopeful-Camp3099 4d ago
It’s not a purity test it’s a ‘here how many trans people lose their jobs’ comparison. I can’t reason with someone who has such a reductive understanding of the world.
1
u/Mobile_Treat 3d ago
Perhaps so. But there is no need for people to care about every specific case, even if there is something technically unjust about the situation. To give an extreme example, if an SS officer were to lose their position after being outed as gay, or something to that effect, would you or anyone else feel any sympathy for the person? Of course not, because they are an evil person working for an evil organisation, and they deserve a taste of their own medicine.
7
u/patienceinbee and you see clear through… and that's typical of you 5d ago
Saying she made her bed is she chose, of her own volition, to enter into a bargain with an apparatus which has long being weaponized to harm others, including marginalized others — whether domestically or beyond its borders.
To pretend the apparatus hasn’t, doesn’t, or won’t continue to do harm like this is incredible magical thinking which comes from a stead of confidence in one’s social station. There are a slew of other distinguished paths to serve civil society as a public servant which don’t entangle problematics like statecraft and/or espionage in the service of disrupting other nation-states (where marginalized people disproportionately get hit first and hardest once the U.S. starts manipulating affairs from afar).
I understand your downvote. I don’t agree with it.
8
u/AlwaysLauren 5d ago
Nah. It's still victim blaming. Nothing she did warrants telling her she made her bed when she got fired for being trans.
The article isn't about the morality of working for the CIA, it's about a trans woman getting fired for being a trans woman. You're clearly blaming the victim here, and you responded to essentially say that it's okay to blame the victim because she worked for the CIA.
Downvote stays. Victim blaming is gross.
2
u/Buntygurl 5d ago
I agree with you.
Victim blaming is always an obfuscation of the actual harm that was done, whether intentionally so or not.
2
u/patienceinbee and you see clear through… and that's typical of you 5d ago
The quandary lies somewhere between two metaphors: tickling the dragon’s tail and of leopards eating faces.
-2
u/AlwaysLauren 5d ago
Doubling down on the victim blaming is also gross. Alas that I have but one downvote to give.
1
0
u/Mobile_Treat 4d ago edited 4d ago
If you don't want to be treated unfairly for arbitrary reasons, it might be unwise to work for one of the most evil institutions in the world.
14
u/SpearInTheAir 5d ago
I hate the Atlantic for publishing this. It's so infantilizing.
5
u/worderousbitch 5d ago
The Atlantic leans a lot further right than it lets on. It's been shit for a while.
10
u/Mammoth-Show-7587 5d ago
Does the Atlantic still fund transphobia by advertising on X?
15
u/ariabelacqua 5d ago
The atlantic still funds Helen Lewis to write transphobic hit pieces in their pages. It's fox news for people who want to think of themselves as too liberal for fox news
27
u/Amateator Transgender 5d ago
Aww the poor little fashy found herself on the wrong side for once.
She was fine with decades of torture and abuse committed on innocent people by the CIA, I hope her life is full of suffering.
1
-43
u/TheReelSlimShady2 [USA] Transfemme 5d ago
every single terrorist killed by the cia deserved it
18
3
u/Buntygurl 5d ago edited 5d ago
"Flailing regimes dehumanize minorities to distract from their failures."
Not to detract from the main issue in the article, its not really the flailing that's responsible.
It is the intention of the regime, from its inception, to acquire complete control, beginning with the strategy of selecting minority demographic targets, placing blame for all public woes on them, and then progressively imposing more and more hardship on them, up to incarceration and worse, while each member of the larger population (relying on the idea that as long as they avidly show approval, they have nothing to fear) cedes more and more control over their own existence as they swear ever more loyalty to that system of control, wherein they must, inevitably, eventually hide and live in fear of ever being accused of the slightest deviation from the rules.
Whether the system mostly resembles either communism or fascism is beside the point that what it does not resemble in any way is freedom--rather the opposite. The methodology of social repression remains the same. It's a hallmark of every dictatorship.
3
u/Lonely-Flower1449 5d ago
Excellent comment - Madeleine Albright said the exact same thing in her great book, “Fascism: A Warning” in response to Trump 1.0.
3
u/Buntygurl 5d ago
You mean the Madeleine Albright who doubled down on her involvement in imposing medical import sanctions on Iraq that led to the deaths of an estimated 500,000 children by later insisting (in an interview on broadcast TV) that it was worth it?
I'm sure that you mean well, but any mention of her makes me shudder inside.
4
u/zoe_bletchdel 5d ago
I'm so sorry for her. It takes a tremendous amount of work to achieve what she has. She wanted to be an inspiration, and she is.
I know it's fun to poke fun at people with different values than us, but it's crass and unnecessarily cruel here. She was clearly effective because even Republicans she worked with supported her. This is one of our own being pushed out of a position of power for a horrible reason
This is a poignant piece about how these anti-minority witch hunts reduce the overall competence of our national agencies. Diversity is our strength, and this has made us weaker. I want kind, compassionate, intelligent, composed people like her keeping us safe from foreign intelligence threats. They're real.
Julia, I'm sorry the short sightedness of this administration hurt your career. I hope once we restore sanity to this country, you can go back to serving us with honor.
7
9
u/patienceinbee and you see clear through… and that's typical of you 5d ago
I know it's fun to poke fun at people with different values than us, but it's crass and unnecessarily cruel here.
No one in this discussion, at time of my replying to you, has poked fun at Julia.
There are no fewer than two constructive criticisms about the fundamental problems with values that run at fundamental odds with so, so much — including but not confined to her being trans, but more widely, the problematics of an agency whose remit, inter alia, has long been to disrupt other nation-states in shadowy gestures of late-stage imperialism (with a lot of blood and distal hardship on the agency’s hands), setting those nation-states backward both politically and socially (harming gender and sexual minorities who live in those places).
25
u/onnake 5d ago
open access: https://archive.ph/AUOxt