LGBTQ officers in the intelligence community who claimed to have been “silenced or purged” by the Trump administration are seemingly plotting their return to intelligence roles, according to HUMINT founder and intelligence correspondent Sasha Ingber.
Ingber wrote in the Substack post that she recently attended a “resignation party soiree” at a gay karaoke bar in Virginia, which was partly celebrating former CIA analyst Julia Curlee. Curlee previously was the first-ever CIA officer to openly transition and remain serving in the role until she was laid off earlier on in President Donald Trump’s second term, PBS News reported.
The invitation for the party jokingly said: “Come join the Deep State plot against the regime,” Ingber wrote in the post.
“More than a sadness at being silenced or purged … an anger at being reduced to ‘DEI,’ at not being able to [keep] using their invaluable expertise to serve a country they had sworn to protect,” she wrote further. “A country they still believe in. A patient but razor-like resoluteness. For justice and the job.”
Ingber also suggested in a video posted to Substack that the people in attendance at the event seemed upset that they had been “reduced to an identity that was really only about appearance or sexual orientation.”
“That’s the absoluteness that I picked up on from people, a sense that for these people who were pressured and purged for participating in [diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI)], which is seen as such a crime these days,” Ingber said. “That they no longer have their work. That they were reduced to an identity that was really only about appearance or sexual orientation.”
“Because these are people who have expertise, who are valuable, who have more to offer, and who [want] to stay in their jobs,” Ingber continued. “That once this administration is out, that things are going to change and that they will have a shot again. That the resource group, which was provided to support them and the openness, maybe that can’t be built back exactly as it was, but there will be something else. There will be a way for them, if they want, to come back. And that is why I’m here sharing this with you.”
“It was an uncanny moment for me to realize that this fight, this DEl battle, if that’s what you want to reduce it to, is not over,” she added.
Curlee could not immediately be reached for comment.
The Substack post comes after Curlee wrote an op-ed published in The Atlantic on Aug. 17 in which Curlee asserts that “The Trump White House needed me—until the fact that I am trans became public.”
“As I walked out the north gate with my small box of belongings, I finally understood the warning: ‘Be discreet,’” Curlee wrote in part of the essay. “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.”
The Trump administration has notably been cracking down on DEI efforts across the U.S.
(DCNF)
