Julia Curlee spent more than a year starting her working day at 11 p.m. She read through the night so that the United States' most sensitive intelligence would be on the vice president's desk by first light. That vice president was Mike Pence, a man with a long public record of opposing transgender service in the military. Curlee had every reason to be wary. She was, in 2013, the first transgender CIA officer to transition openly and stay with the agency. And yet, she told MS NOW, Pence never once made her feel small. "What I can tell you is how I was treated," she said, "which was with profound respect and dignity."

That detail matters, not because it rehabilitates Pence's public record, but because it tells you something about Julia Curlee. She is a careful, fair-minded person who reports what she observed rather than what she might have preferred to believe. She carried the immigrant creed her grandfather gave her growing up in Hawaii: "We came to this country with nothing, and we owe it everything." She held that through George W. Bush's administration, through Obama, through Trump's first term, and into his second. When colleagues urged her to resign after Trump returned to office, and when her own boss warned her she would be targeted, she decided her duty was to stay.

The daily cost of staying

Staying had a price. As a National Security Council director, Curlee was barred from the women's bathroom inside the White House. Every time she needed to use one, she had to leave the building and cross the street. "That was very difficult," she said. "To be reminded every day that I was not considered to be an equal, or that I didn't deserve to be treated and accorded the identity which I am." She did not complain. She did not want to hand anyone a pretext.

She was fired anyway. Seventy days into Trump's second term, a right-wing activist named Laura Loomer posted on X asking her followers to identify the transgender Biden-era holdover still working in the NSC intelligence office. Curlee does not believe Loomer acted alone. "Laura Loomer doesn't work in the White House. She doesn't sit in the Sit Room. Someone decided within the White House that the best way to get rid of me was to bring in an outside internet provocateur." Her boss told her she was fired, that the decision had come from the White House chief of staff, and that she should be discreet about it.

Then, two days later, they asked her to come back. They needed her to close out the budget and hand over her portfolio. She did. She showed up and did the work quietly, at their request, after they had fired her. "They wanted my service," she said. "They asked me to come back the Monday after I was fired because they needed me, and I did. But they didn't want anyone to know I was there."

What that sequence tells us

The White House's response to MS NOW was that Trump can remove any executive branch official at his discretion, and that anyone who writes a lengthy op-ed attacking the president clearly does not belong in public service. That framing treats Curlee's account as an act of disloyalty rather than what it plainly is: a public warning from someone who stayed long after it would have been easier to leave, and who is now speaking because most of her former colleagues cannot.

Think about what the sequence of events actually reveals. The administration fired her, then needed her enough to ask her back, then required her silence while she helped them. They stripped her of her position while depending on her competence. They told the public she was gone while privately asking her to keep the lights on. That is not a story about loyalty or its absence, but a story about an institution that consumed someone's service while publicly denying their worth.

"I was the wrong kind of American for them," Curlee said. "And that violated every bit of my belief in our creed, which is that a person should be able to rise as far as their talents can take them."

The fear she is describing is real

Curlee is speaking now because most of her former colleagues cannot. LGBTQ people inside federal agencies are watching colleagues be fired publicly and are drawing the obvious conclusions about their own futures. She calls it a palpable fear, and that word is precise: not a background anxiety, not an abstract worry, but something you can feel in a room. The chilling effect on institutions whose function depends on people being willing to surface difficult truths, to stay awake through the night reading the things nobody else wants to read, is not a side effect of these firings. It is the point.

Nearly a decade ago, writing under a pseudonym while she was still under cover, Curlee ended an essay in The Atlantic with a message for transgender young people: the CIA is always recruiting. She meant it. She travelled to college campuses and made that case in person, and she watched students understand that a door was open. That door, she said, has closed.

I find that genuinely heartbreaking, and I also find it important. Julia Curlee's story is not a political abstraction. It is the account of a person who gave everything she had to a country that could not decide whether she was an asset or an embarrassment, and who chose, in the end, to say so plainly, so that the people still inside would know that at least one person was prepared to speak for them.

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Dr Helen Webberley is a Gender Specialist, Medical Educator, writer, and advocate, and the founder of GenderGP. She writes about gender diversity, trans healthcare, and the lives at the centre of both.