The Wrong Kind of American

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.

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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. For the incoming Trump administration, the trans woman would man the gates.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve carried two dreams. The first came true in 2007, when I raised my hand, standing on the agency’s marble seal, and became a CIA officer. The second dream, I didn’t dare speak aloud; it came from ­an unexplainable conviction that I should have been born a woman. The longing, like homesickness, grew into an unbearable darkness.

On a sweltering June morning in 2013, I sat in the CIA parking lot, hands clamped on the wheel, preparing myself to live out my second dream. Terrified of my first day at work as Julia, I’d chosen a blue button-down and pants, hoping no one would notice I’d changed genders. At the turnstile, the guard smiled. “Morning, ma’am,” he said, and the badge reader flashed green. To use the lexicon of my trade, the after-action review would have read: “Nothing significant to report.”

In the years ahead—­traveling to 35 countries, briefing former President George W. Bush, becoming a mom—­being trans would sometimes seem like the most ordinary part of my life. But as much as I wanted to disappear into normal womanhood and the work, I knew there were others who needed to see that a life like mine was possible. So, in 2017, I wrote in these pages under the pseudonym Jenny Hall about how being openly trans at the CIA made me a better officer. CIA recruiters used the essay on college campuses, and new officers—­not realizing they were talking with the author—told me that it had inspired them to apply.

Soon after the essay ran, a call went out for volunteers to join the President’s Daily Brief staff and serve the new Trump administration. Working the PDB meant staying up all night to distill the most sensitive intelligence we possessed into a book that the president and our senior leaders read at dawn. It was one of the CIA’s most coveted assignments—a proving ground for our best analysts.

But the new administration was led by a president who had praised Vladimir Putin and compared the intelligence community to the Nazis. Almost nobody volunteered. I did.

Growing up in Hawaii, I dreamed of seeing the world. My grandfather gave me a simple promise: “Work hard, don’t complain; the country will take care of you. We came to America for small things. No pogroms. No leaky roof. Paradise was a bonus.”

Service before politics. Country before self.

I clung to this promise as I became a man, a husband, a father, a CIA officer, a wife, a mother.

For two years I served the Trump White House, arriving at work around midnight, six days a week, roaming the West Wing before dawn. My wife learned to live with the silence at the dinner table.

Sometimes I filled in on the road—­summers in Bedminster, winters in Palm Beach. On my first trip, I boarded at Joint Base Andrews and a card waited at my seat: Ms. Curlee, Welcome Aboard Air Force One.

Grateful for the welcome, I was less grateful to whoever had sat me in the middle of the White House press pool. So I stuffed my face with the best waffles of my life and kept small talk to a minimum. As we flew to Mar-a-Lago, the president’s aide beckoned me to the front of the plane. No one cared that a trans woman was briefing President Trump.

Then one morning, my boss walked in, a wide smile on her face. She had a new job for me.

“Julia, what would you think about briefing the vice president?”

“This vice president?”

Days later, I stood in his driveway at the Naval Observatory. I must be insane, I thought. Mike Pence had built his career on public opposition to marriages like mine—­to people like me. But for all our differences, he was the vice president. He needed the best intel support possible, and this was my country too.

“Mr. Vice President,” I said, “it’s an honor to meet you. My name is Julia”—like I’d practiced a thousand times.

“You’re abandoning me with her?” Pence teased his outgoing briefer, with a line I’d heard he used with other people. He turned to me. “Okay, Julia, tell me something I don’t know.”

“Sir, did you know that a third of Purdue’s computer-science grad students are Chinese nationals?”

He nodded once. “Get in the car.”

I grabbed my case and climbed into the Beast, the nickname for the executive limo. I hunted in vain for a seat belt as Secret Service radios squawked, “On the move.” I dug in my heels as the floor pitched. Pennsylvania Avenue, the PDB, and me—­alone with Mike Pence.

When I got home, my wife and I decided to keep my new boss’s identity a secret. 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.

For the next year, I briefed him nearly every morning. As soon as the coffee was hot, Pence was ready to work. He ripped through the briefing book, firing questions at me, scribbling in the margins.

Down the hall, the president was using his phone to light up Twitter. The vice president preferred to use our multibillion-­dollar intel apparatus to save lives. Some mornings he would push back on an assessment, but I would hold the line, explaining how the conclusions had been reached. That was the job. When my tour was almost up, he asked me to extend it.

One morning, as we approached the White House gates, the vice president turned to me. “Julia, do you know why they call it ‘the People’s House’?”

“No, sir.”

“Right up until the Civil War, anyone could come to the door and wait to see the president.”

As the steel gates opened, he leaned in. “You know, it’s a privilege to work here.”

“Yes, sir.” I held his gaze. “It is.”

When my tour finally ended, Pence invited my family to the White House. In his office, he took my mother’s hand and smiled: “You must be very proud of your daughter.”

Years before, my mother had told me that in her grief, she’d felt that—­somehow—I’d killed her son. Now I’d done the impossible: lived both dreams, becoming an intelligence officer and a woman. Now the vice president was holding my mother’s hand.

No one has affirmed my gender identity quite like Mike Pence. On my last day, I gave him a letter. I wrote: “I’m a trans­gender CIA officer, a wife and mother—­and I served the Vice President. Anything is possible in America.” I told him many people at the CIA hadn’t believed that a trans officer like me could serve someone like him.

“Well,” he said, “I’m glad I passed the test.”

In that moment, it felt like the battle had been won.

For years, friends told me people need to know that a gay trans woman had worked for Mike Pence and that the world hadn’t exploded. No—I was adamant—we serve in silence. But I kept the photos of that time.

After January 6, 2021, the vice president invited his former PDB briefers for a farewell picture in the West Wing. The place was quieter than I’d ever heard it. As we said our goodbyes, my voice shook.

“Sir,” I said, “what you did last week—­I’ve never been prouder to have worked for you.”

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He nodded. “Thank you,” he said. “That means a lot to me.”

We shook hands. The mob at the Capitol had chanted for his hanging. He’d done his duty to the country, certifying the vote. I’d done mine to him. That was the bargain. Service before politics. Country before self.

Two and a half years later, after a stint back at the CIA, I returned to the White House as a director for intelligence programs on President Biden’s National Security Council.

Days after Trump’s 2024 election victory, the intelligence staff gathered in our boss’s office. He was not a man who frightened easily. But he knew what was coming. “I need to strongly advise you to leave before Inauguration Day,” he said. “There’s a world in which you’ll be targeted individually.” He didn’t say my name. He didn’t need to. “They know how to use the tools this time. Install loyalists at CIA, FBI, and Justice—turn clearances and investigations into weapons.”

I told him I wasn’t resigning. Then the CIA’s deputy director sat me down. “Julia, look at me. You don’t have to do this. You have a target on your back that others don’t.”

“With respect, sir—this is what we do.”

He searched my face, looking for a crack. When he didn’t find one, he nodded. “Good luck.”

Days before the inauguration, Biden gathered the staff in the East Wing. “Now, folks, here’s the deal. Trump doesn’t know it yet, but he needs you. It’s important for the country.”

Of all the senior government officials who spoke with us before the new administration took office, Biden was the only one who asked us to stay.

On Inauguration Day, I stood in the West Wing to brief the new national security adviser, minutes after he’d taken office. Down the hall, the president signed an executive order banning me from restrooms in all federal buildings. I would start to plan policy meetings around bathroom stops across Pennsylvania Avenue.

The next day, my team fanned out to brief the new leadership on our nation’s highest secrets. Then these leaders stripped my insurance coverage for the estrogen that keeps me healthy, voided my discrimination protections, and declared me “male” to foreign governments on my passport. I would keep briefing them anyway.

On the third day came the purge—160 career NSC staff members sent home. Then new White House officials asked me to read them into classified programs; they called me around the clock, desperate for access to intelligence. Programs crucial to U.S. interests sat unmanaged; ­the officers who had been in charge of them had been escorted out. When NSC leaders realized what they’d done, it fell to me to call the people they’d humiliated and beg them to come back. They did.

One week in, the administration I served reinstated its ban on trans people in the military. Decorated officers such as my friend Colonel Bree Fram were thrown out for the crime of being honest. In the White House, people called me “in­dispensable.” I still was not welcome in their bathrooms.

A month later, 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 had cast as sexually explicit. The next day, I ran an intel briefing—­for her—­because that is what we do. The following week, the president stood before Congress and called trans children a lie.

Then, one Saturday, I was sitting in a rib joint in Roanoke, Virginia, when my phone buzzed. “Julia, sorry to bother,” my boss said. “I have bad news. Your White House tour’s over. Chief of staff called. I can’t give you a reason.”

I was elbows-deep in brisket, the sauce congealing. I’d beaten the “Fire Julia” office pool by about 68 days. I was being sent back to my home agency. My boss cleared his throat.

“Um, Julia—we still need you Monday. But please. Be discreet.”

Fired on Saturday. Needed on Monday. But stay invisible?

Then my phone exploded—a dozen friends forwarding the same tweet. “SCOOP: A transgender, Biden holdover who hates President Trump is still working in the NSC intel office,” the right-wing provocateur Laura Loomer had written. “If you are aware of this person and have their name, please send it to me and I will post their identity.”

Monday arrived, and cherry blossoms framed a perfect spring day in Washington. I reported to the White House. I had no badge, and my accounts had been revoked. I spent three marathon days helping the administration that had fired me finish the budget, and handing off the portfolio I’d overseen for two years. As I packed up, a string of senior Trump appointees stopped in to say goodbye. One took my hand. “Thank you for staying as long as you did,” he whispered. “Not many would have.”

That night, a list of hidden “enemies” in the administration provided by Loomer landed on the president’s desk. But 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. 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.

As I walked out the north gate with my small box of belongings, I finally understood the warning: “Be discreet.” 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.

One morning after returning to the CIA, I passed a tour group in our museum, clustered below a photo of me high on the wall, near one of the 33rd president. “Here next to President Truman,” the guide said, “is a PDB briefer on Air Force One. Our highest secrets, collected at vast expense and great risk.”

“How do you become a briefer?” someone asked.

The guide smiled. “Very competitive. Years of experience. Our best.”

The tour moved on to the Osama bin Laden raid. I stayed. My eyes drifted over the photo, from my face in black and white to the vice president’s PDB in my lap. I’d spent decades fighting for my place—from a beach boy who dreamed of seeing the world to an officer who served her country. Now my photo hung as an artifact of a time when the CIA proudly said the quality of the work was more important than the gender of the person doing it.

My eyes fell to the door below—the door to the restroom I was barred from entering.

Every year since my first day as Julia, I’d sent a Pride Month email to my colleagues. But by June 2025, they’d banned the CIA’s LGBTQ group. Pride flags that had flown for decades were suddenly gone. My finger hovered over the “Send” button. Two sentences:

“Happy Pride. You are not alone.”

I froze. Someone would report this email to drive me out of the agency, just like at the White House. Don’t end up the last openly trans CIA officer, I told myself. I deleted the email, 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. I’d weighed my family’s health insurance against two sentences of solidarity and chosen to surrender my integrity. The agency that had taught me to tell hard truths was now teaching me to be invisible. It was time to go.

I loved the agency. I loved its mission. I love it still. I served under four presidents and through three wars. I lived by my grandfather’s words: Work hard, don’t complain; the country will take care of you.

I kept my end.

In 2017, I closed my Atlantic essay with the words “And trans kids should know, CIA is always recruiting.” That promise has been broken. I cannot in good conscience advise LGBTQ Americans to join the CIA—and that sentence is the hardest thing I have ever written.

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.” 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.

Fear has done its work. Irreplaceable officers with crucial language and technical skills, and decades of experience, have walked out the door. Those who remain within an agency built to deliver hard truths are being muzzled.

Twenty years ago, I sat in a bunker in Iraq, praying I would survive the night, in a war begun after our intelligence community had failed to do enough to challenge what the White House wanted to hear. Our agency spent the next two decades repairing the trust that failure broke. I know institutions can be rebuilt. Officers can come back, but only if someone is willing to tell the truth. In the entrance of our Original Headquarters Building, across from the stars for every officer slain in the line of duty, you can still read the words carved in marble:

And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.

I know that the CIA friends I left behind are holding the line under im­possible circumstances. The country needs them more than ever. And I understand my colleagues who left but can’t speak up. Their livelihoods depend on clearances and contracts that can be revoked with a phone call. But we all swore an oath to the Constitution.

I’m afraid too. 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. 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.

Flailing regimes dehumanize minorities to distract from their failures. 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 PDBs about it. This will not stop with trans people. It never has.

But that caricature works only if people like me don’t exist—and I exist. I speak now because somewhere, a trans kid is watching. I want that kid to know that they are not alone. I was a trans kid too, and I’ll be damned if I let another generation grow up the way I did—told that they don’t belong, that they don’t deserve a job, a bathroom, a future. If I could brief presidents and serve in the White House—twice—so can they.

I had planned to spend the rest of my career serving my country at the CIA. This White House took my calling, but it will not take my pride, or tell me that I don’t belong, or that I must disappear. I once wrote under a pseudonym so I could keep serving. I write now in my own name for the same reason.

Julia.

This article appears in the October 2026 print edition with the headline “The Wrong Kind of American.”

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