MAY 11, 2015 The day she nervously told her boss that they needed to talk in the summer of 2012, the young intelligence analyst was mindful of the ordeal of the transgender woman at the Central Intelligence Agency who came before her. The story had become C.I.A. lore. In the late 1980s, a standout senior analyst who became the butt of jokes when she came out resigned after enduring months of cruel glances and crude remarks. The Opinion Page Trangender Toda ntopinion @ntopinion Newletter Part 1 The Challenge Part 2 In the C.I.A. Your Storie Trangender Voice Forthcoming More part coming. Jenny, the young officer, who is a Middle East expert, hadn’t heard yet about Diane Schroer, the former Army officer who set an important legal precedent for transgender federal employees by suing the Library of Congress in 2005. She didn’t know what, if any, legal protections and benefits transgender employees at the C.I.A. were entitled to. All she knew with certainty was that going through life as a man had become unbearable. “I was terrified,” she said in an interview, which the C.I.A. arranged on condition that she be identified as Jenny, an alias for the undercover officer. “I wasn’t sure if I transitioned, whether I would have a career. Maybe I would be here, but marginalized, and no one would take me seriously again.” Jenny’s transition began as the federal government was starting to take bold steps to protect and support transgender employees. That remarkable evolution was set in motion by a handful of trailblazers, key among them Ms. Schroer, who stood up to the kind of discrimination that ended careers in the federal work force. Fran Moore, the director of intelligence at the C.I.A. at the time, took a personal interest in Jenny when she heard that an officer intended to transition at work. The agency, which had been a hostile place for openly gay employees just a couple of decades ago, has become far more welcoming. But this was uncharted territory, so Ms. Moore discreetly assembled a team to ensure that Jenny’s transition on the job would be smooth. But she worried about whether the culture at the agency had changed as much as she hoped. The first openly gay officer at the agency, a computer expert named Tracey Ballard, came out in 1988, when openly gay Americans were barred from holding security clearances. The C.I.A.’s entrenched culture of homophobia didn’t start easing until that rule was repealed in 1995. Ms. Ballard’s admission led to a lengthy investigation and for years made her an outcast. Today, she leads the agency’s gay, lesbian and transgender group, which is one of the most active employee organizations within the C.I.A. Alongside Ms. Moore, she spent months working out the logistics of Jenny’s transition. Some parts were easy, like changing her name in personnel records and swapping out her badge. The more complex part involved notifying Jenny’s team and promoting a culture of tolerance. Their aim was to dispel Jenny’s worst fear: that she would turn into the office laughingstock. What they achieved should be a model for employers. Transitioning in a supportive environment might not have been as likely if Ms. Schroer, a retired Army Special Forces colonel, had not applied for a job as a terrorism analyst at the Library of Congress in 2005. Shortly after accepting the job, she took her prospective supervisor to lunch to explain that she was transgender and intended to start the job as Diane. The manager called the next day to say that, after a sleepless night, she had concluded that Ms. Schroer was not the right candidate for the position after all. Ms. Schroer’s experience was far from unique. One woman, who became a mentor for Jenny, had risen to a senior job at the United States Geological Survey, acting as the agency’s liaison with the White House. But she was sidelined when she came out as transgender in 2003; her supervisor even put up a “complaint box,” where colleagues who were uncomfortable or disgusted with her transition could slip notes. Many did. The Schroer case, brought by the American Civil Liberties Union, broadened federal employment protections for transgender people. In court, the Justice Department lawyer representing the government refused to use female pronouns to refer to Ms. Schroer and sometimes used male ones. “It was such a long, emotional road,” she said. “It takes so much of your faith in humanity away.” In September 2008, in a landmark ruling, a Federal District Court judge, James Robertson, concluded that the Library of Congress had discriminated against Ms. Schroer, in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. The decision, which was not appealed, established that the government discriminated against Ms. Schroer on the basis of her sex change and ordered that she be paid nearly $500,000. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission began ruling similarly in cases before it, initially in 2012, in response to a complaint by a transgender police officer in Arizona whose job offer from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives had been rescinded. That year, the Office of Personnel Management issued guidance to federal agencies on how to handle the transition of transgender employees. In 2014, O.P.M. began asking its insurance providers to stop excluding transitionrelated care from their policies, citing the “evolving professional consensus that treatment is considered medically necessary.” As a child, Jenny was mesmerized watching the female gymnasts on TV at the 1988 Olympics. “I decided I was going to be some gymnast defecting from an Eastern bloc country and coming to the United States, joining the women’s gymnastics team,” she said, laughing. “There was an international intrigue side.” As she grew older, Jenny suppressed the feelings of nonconformity that torment people with gender dysphoria. At the time, she said, the word transgender evoked images of sex workers. “I wanted to grow up to be in foreign affairs, to be a C.I.A. officer, and I didn’t think that people like that could go on to have careers.” The Sept. 11 attacks, which happened while she was in college, strengthened her interest in pursuing a career in intelligence. She joined the agency soon after graduating. A few years into the job, the latent unease about her gender identity turned into demons. Her supervisor, a woman, looked relieved when Jenny finally blurted out that she was transgender, having feared that Jenny was about to resign or reveal she had terminal cancer. She began telling colleagues during a series of awkward conversations over coffee. Some seemed befuddled, but most were supportive. When she asked a female colleague what it was like to be a woman at the C.I.A., the coworker deadpanned: “The 23 percent pay cut is rough, but the bathrooms are nicer.” For a year after telling her boss, while undergoing hormone replacement treatment, Jenny lived as a woman at home but continued to dress as a man at work. After coming out, she began meeting older transgender women in the federal work force who had transitioned during bleaker times. A rocket scientist who works as a federal contractor advised her to assemble a conservative wardrobe for work, modeled after what older women at the office wore. It would make the transition more palatable for colleagues, the scientist said. Jenny sat in her car for 20 minutes at the C.I.A. parking lot on June 12, 2013, the first day she came to work using her new name and wearing women’s clothes, paralyzed by fear. “Well ... here goes everything,” she had written earlier on Facebook. There were a few doubletakes in the hallways, plenty of warm, supportive gestures and no nastiness. That night, Jenny cried with joy as she left work to meet friends at a karaoke bar to celebrate. Today, the fact that Jenny is transgender has become an afterthought for colleagues and imperceptible to strangers. During a recent visit to the agency clinic before a trip, a nurse spotted the word transgender on her medical file. The nurse, who was not familiar with her story, couldn’t help but ask: “Why would you want to become a man?”
dailybridgerton
pixelskylines
ellievsbear
turnnoffyourmind
vaporwave
