The Highs and Lows of Trans at State

In 2022 I was asked to contribute a chapter to the compendium, Surviving Transphobia.  The editor understandably shortened my contribution, but I was never consulted on the edits until I was presented with page proofs in August 2023.  Some of the edits are unfortunate, simplifying or making a muddle of the original text, and one glaringly inserts a word that makes me cringe.  To be specific, in my opening fourth paragraph I quote Ambassador Bill Burns: 

In the words of Ambassador Bill Burns, diplomacy is America’s foreign policy tool of first resort.  

In the edited version this became: 

As ambassador Bill Burns notoriously [emphasis added] wrote, “Diplomacy is America’s foreign policy tool of first resort.”

To be clear, I entirely agree with Ambassador Burns, and the insertion of notoriously distorts my meaning, giving it a negative connotation that I disavow.

Given this and other unfortunate edits, I am providing the original, unedited text here.  The editor has promised to work with me on corrections in a second printing.  In the meantime, I ask that anyone who may have purchased the book get out a black sharpie.  There is nothing notorious about removing notoriously at the request of the author.

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The Highs and Lows of Trans at State

Robyn Alice McCutcheon¹

I am contributing this article as a transgender American who served her country openly as a commissioned Foreign Service Officer (FSO) at the U.S. Department of State. For over fifteen years I lived and worked in Moscow, Bucharest, and throughout Central Asia, not to mention in Washington, DC. At the time I retired as an FS-02 mid-level FSO in 2019, I held the diplomatic title of First Secretary, roughly the equivalent of a lieutenant colonel in the military

“Whoa, Foreign Service? What in the world is that?” you ask. “Do you mean the French Foreign Legion?”

No, I did not serve with a rifle somewhere in the deserts of Africa under a French flag. The Foreign Service is that arm of the U.S. Department of State that staffs our U.S. embassies, consulates, and other diplomatic missions. Sometimes referred to as America’s Other Army.² Foreign Service Officers (FSOs) are America’s diplomats.

I offer this thought to transgender Americans who want to serve the American people. Military service is not the only option. The old adage applies: The pen is mightier than the sword. In the words of Ambassador Bill Burns, diplomacy is America’s foreign policy tool of first resort.³ Interests in languages, cultures, and international relations are a prerequisite, but being transgender is no obstacle. More than that, the Foreign Service may be one of the most welcoming branches of the U.S. government for all colors of the LGBT+ rainbow.

Was it always that way? Of course not. The Foreign Service was a male bastion from its inception. Women were largely excluded, and women who married were required to resign as recently as 1971. In the 1950s the Department rooted out all gay FSOs it could identify in the so-called Lavender Scare.⁴ Careers were destroyed with tragic consequences. A few of the outed gay FSOs committed suicide. The witch hunt lessened after the 1950s, but it was still official policy as recently as the early 1990s to revoke security clearances from gay FSOs. The reasoning went that being gay and in the closet left an FSO open to blackmail. Perversely, being gay and out of the closet was seen as giving leverage that foreign intelligence services could exploit.

In 1992 a few brave FSOs stood up, declared themselves openly as gay, and founded Gays and Lesbians in Foreign Affairs Agencies (GLIFAA).⁵ Several of the founders were dismissed when they came out openly, but the organization persisted. One of their greatest successes came in June 2009 when Secretary Hillary Clinton introduced a policy on Same Sex Domestic Partners (SSDP), under which partners of gay and lesbian FSOs were granted all spousal benefits to the maximum extent allowed by U.S. law. In 2017 Secretary John Kerry issued a formal apology for the decades of discrimination against gay and lesbian FSOs.

So what about trans? Fuggedaboutit. As far as anyone knows, there was no trans person in the Foreign Service into the first years of the 21^st century. Indeed, the status of any trans person anywhere in the U.S. federal government was at best tenuous, and I mean “at best.”

Dismissal for anyone coming out as trans was more the rule than the exception, and this only began to change when Diane Schroer filed suit against the Library of Congress in 2005. Why did she file suit? Because the Library had revoked a job offered to her when she told her future supervisor that she would be reporting for work presenting in a gender different from the one in which she had applied.

With the help of Sharon McGowan from the ACLU, Diane Schroer won. On September 19, 2008, the United States District Court for the District of Columbia ruled that the Library had illegally discriminated against her. In its decision, the court found that discrimination stemming from gender identity or presentation is sex discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

At about the same time the District Court handed down its decision, Dr. Chloe Schwenke, at that time a senior staffer at a contractor to the State Department’s sister agency USAID, announced she was transitioning. She was fired. After being let go, Chloe went to glifaa. Together they successfully lobbied to have gender identity added to the employee non-discrimination policies at State and at USAID. Secretary Clinton signed gender identity into Department policy in the summer of 2010, and President Obama appointed Chloe directly to USAID. Together with Amanda Simpson and Dylan Orr, Chloe became one of the first high-level trans appointees in the U.S. government.⁶

So where was I in all of this? I can answer in four words: deeply in the closet.

Eisenhower was in his first administration when I entered this world. When I first heard a term to describe what I felt deep inside, that term was transsexual. I don’t reject it even today insofar as I did, ultimately, go for corrective surgeries. I have trouble with the term transgender because gender is the one aspect of my life that has never changed. I identified as something closer to female from my earliest days. If anything changed, it’s in how society views me. You could say that I transitioned society so that it sees me as I always knew myself to be. I transitioned society and now live – pun intended – in a TS world.⁷

What I really thought in the 1960s and 70s was that I was insane. How could anyone be transsexual? That was the stuff of tabloid headlines, something to run away from even as I wondered when my breasts would start to develop. I played with the other girls at school recess until teachers made me go out to the sports field where I knew I wasn’t wanted. Instead, I would go to the edge of the field and sit down alone, usually with a book. What would people think if they knew what was going on in my head?

Only in college when I read Jan Morris’s Conundrum did I understand I wasn’t the only one like me in this world. I reached out to gender clinics and for nearly a year lived a double life, appearing as male to friends and professors but as female at a solitary night job. I took long bicycle rides through the countryside, trying to make sense of my feelings and what I now knew to be possible.

In graduate school I ran from the word, the white noise of feelings that could only be drowned out but never entirely driven away. In academics and work I found the socially acceptable drug to mute the feelings. A double major in college, two Masters degrees, and an intense career in space flight dynamics were only part of the formula. I threw myself also into Russian and Soviet history, getting research grants, working in Soviet archives, and publishing in academic journals. Along the way I married a friend, herself a history graduate student, even though I had never dated. A mutual interest in history and international affairs is what brought us together.

Being a round-the-clock activity machine can only get one through for so long. The sand in my hourglass ran out in 1990. That spring I was part of the launch and early mission support team for Hubble Space Telescope. I also had a publication deadline for a major history paper. On top of this, I was now a parent who was going through on-the-job training with a year-old son.

I spoke the trans word to my spouse for the first time that summer. I had been at the University of Illinois with a writing grant to finish my history article, but I found I was unable to work. It wasn’t writer’s block. At the time of my greatest career successes and joy at being a parent, the contradictions inside me were yelling, "Enough, this can't go on!"

A day after speaking the word, I found myself in a psychiatric ward at a local hospital. My spouse declared me persona non grata and threw me out of the house. The consequences of speaking the word were as bad as I feared, even worse. I stood at the edge of a DC Metro station platform and wondered if it might not be best to end it all instead of facing the condemnation of family, friends, and co-workers. In the end it was my own sister who took me to the hospital out of fear I might put my thoughts into action.

This was my first encounter with psychiatry. It was not a pleasant one. I don't remember the name of my psychiatrist. I recounted to him my history of gender-confused feelings going back to earliest childhood. He sat stony-faced, never commenting. We met daily for a week. Only at the last session did he pronounce his verdict, telling me, "What you are is overworked and depressed." He was convinced there is no such thing as gender dysphoria, so he prescribed an antidepressant. He released me to the care of my spouse, assuring her I would be fine. I went back to work after having disappeared for a week. No one said a word about my unexplained absence.

Continuing discussions with my spouse made it clear that I had to choose. Pursue transition or take the pills. It was also clear that if I went for the former, I would find myself divorced with no access to our son. It was a stark choice. So I chose to stay married, be a parent. I chose to ignore my own desires, to accept the diagnosis of depression, to take the pills and go on for the good of all.

Our son grew. In 2004 I made a radical career change to the U.S. Department of State as an FSO. Why? Well, why not? Hubble was using only the mathematical part of my brain while I pursued my interests in Russian language and Russian/Soviet affairs as a sideline.

Transition? It was not on the agenda. I thought it was too late, that I was too old. I said nothing about gender issues when interviewed for a security clearance. I lied through omission, and I feared that the secret would come to light one day. But when? In 2000 a NASA scan of its computer systems determined that someone at one of its Maryland facilities had been visiting pornographic websites. A warning went out to all staff. No one was named, but I knew it was me. The warning identified a URL for a website with information about gender transition as the pornographic site. What would the State Department do if it found out about my gender-conflicted life story?

In my first year at State I was a Political Officer on the Russia Desk. I had jumped from being a respected, senior analyst on Hubble to being, “Hey, you!” I was the most junior person on the Desk as I concentrated on understanding Russian intentions vis-à-vis Georgia.

A year later the State Department sent me to Moscow. For the first year I did visa interviews, cringing at the thought that I held lives in my hands. In my second year I covered the Russian nuclear energy industry after someone realized that a rocket engineer who had worked on Hubble could be put to better use. In the tumult of embassy culture and never-ending assignments from Washington, I found my peace on a bicycle. On weekends I would ride to the outskirts of Moscow to ride on the bicycle track that had been built for the 1980 Olympics. On one long summer weekend I bike-packed to Borodino, camping along the way in woods where I hoped no one could see me from the road.

In 2008 I moved on to our embassy in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, where the State Department in its wisdom had assigned me to cover economic and business issues. When I objected that I knew next to nothing about either economics or business, the wry retort was, “Neither do the Uzbeks. You are well matched.”

The fear that one day my trans secret would come to light was realized in 2010. In 2007, with our son now in college, my spouse and I had moved toward divorce. Conducted long distance from Tashkent, the divorce proved to be messy. My trans history complete with my 1990 psychiatric ward sojourn was woven through the discovery materials. It became a factor in the property settlement agreement in which I gave up, essentially, everything. Word got out. I was summoned for an interview, more accurately an interrogation, with Diplomatic Security. I found myself on leave without pay as my fate was decided.

I expected the worst from Washington, but I wasn’t aware that the world for trans persons was changing. I knew nothing about Chloe Schwenke. Although I was stripped of a follow-on posting back to Moscow, I was allowed to take what the Foreign Service calls a down-stretch to a position below my grade in Bucharest, Romania, as an Information Management Specialist – i.e., as a data tech instead of as a political officer. As I watched the foliage change colors in fall 2010, it dawned on me that my biggest issue was that I had a secret. What if I came out openly?

Lifelong experience as a bicyclist had taught me important lessons about visibility. I learned the lessons of urban bicycling the hard way. I hugged the curb, trying to stay out of everyone's way – which resulted in repeated mishaps and injuries as motorists pushed me into the gutter or off the road entirely. As I gained experience, I learned that bicycle safety means taking one's rightful place in the traffic lane and being visible. It is far safer to position oneself as a vehicle, taking as much of the lane as needed. Motorists might not like seeing me in their lane, but they accept me as something that cannot be ignored and pushed to the side.

Could these lessons from my two-wheeled life be applied to my life as a trans person? In college I had gone forth as myself only in the shadows, scared to death what would happen if anyone recognized me. In my trans life I had hugged the curb, doing my best to stay out of everyone's way. Now I applied the same, hard-learned rule of riding a bicycle: Be visible, be assertive, and join the traffic. I had as much right to walk down the street as anyone. “Yes, I am trans, and I don’t care who knows or what anyone thinks.”

That’s how it happened that at Embassy Bucharest on November 10, 2011, I became the first FSO to transition gender while posted overseas. One senior embassy official wanted me out of the country on psychiatric grounds, but the State Department’s regional psychiatrist from Budapest pronounced me sane, only trans. Washington fretted about how the Government of Romania would react and instructed the embassy’s Political Counselor to meet in person with the Americas’ Desk at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The Department insisted on press guidance that both the Embassy and the Department crafted late into the night on the eve of the transition announcement. The guidance included the following potential question that it feared could be asked by the press:

The Department of State previously sent a gay Ambassador to Romania, Michael Guest. Is the Department sending a message to Romania with the appointment and now this transgender issue?

That question alone illustrates just how concerned Washington was that a transition taking place at an overseas embassy could cause embarrassment.

Washington’s concerns evaporated when the transition announcement caused barely a ripple either within Embassy Bucharest or the Government of Romania. Moreover, Washington quickly came to see me as an asset with access no one else had to the Romanian LGBT+ community. Over the next two years I penned numerous cables on LGBT+ rights in Romania with titles such as Roma and Gay: A Triple Stigma, Transgender Community Comes out of the Shadows but Remains a Fractured Minority, Moldova Makes Progress on Transgender Rights, and Anti-LGBT Protesters Win a Battle, Lose a War? In 2012 and 2013 I organized the Embassy’s participation in the annual Bucharest Pride march that had, in previous years, been subject to attack from anti-LGBT protesters.

Moreover, my Bucharest apartment became a regular meeting place for the local community, in one case after the release of several activists who had been arrested for protesting in front of the Russian Embassy. Olympia, a young trans woman who had been beaten by her non-accepting father, took up residence in my guest bedroom.

In 2013 I returned to Washington for a one-year assignment at the Nuclear Risk Reduction Center (NRRC) that oversees our nuclear arms control treaties with Russia and conventional arms treaties under the umbrella of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. That was the day job even if it was 24/7 shift work. The highlight of the year, unfortunately, was Russia’s invasion and annexation of Crimea, which for the NRRC meant having to produce in rapid succession accurate translations of reports from Ukraine for use by policymakers in the Department, the National Security Council, and the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

The real job, however, was at glifaa, which had elected me president. An entirely new glifaa board came into office with me. There were new vice presidents for State and for USAID, a new communications director, a new social director, and a new secretary/treasurer. Most importantly, Selim Ariturk came onto the glifaa board as policy director. With a penetrating analytical mind, Selim was an excellent strategist, the perfect person to craft policy. We often disagreed, but I admired the way Selim’s mind worked. Over the coming year we discussed and debated often, looking for consensus that satisfied us both and, we hoped, glifaa members around the globe.

In September 2013 we convened a Sunday retreat of the glifaa board to discuss priorities and strategies. We chose three issues to top our list:

• Post-DOMA strategy and the fate of SSDP,
• Privileges and Immunities (Ps & Is) for spouses and domestic partners, and
• Removal of the transgender exclusion from Federal Employee Health Benefit (FEHB) insurance plans.

The first issue had been a sleeper surprise. The SSDP policy enacted by Secretary Clinton in 2009 accorded family benefits to registered SSDPs, but the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) put limits on what SSDP could offer. Employee insurance and retirement programs still excluded same-sex partners. FSOs rotating back to Washington could not bring partners who did not have U.S. citizenship or residency.

The nationwide LGBT+ community celebrated in June 2012 when the Supreme Court overturned DOMA in United States v. Windsor. Same-sex couples could now enjoy the full rights and benefits of marriage. Same-sex married couples had achieved equality with opposite-sex couples in the eyes of the law.

The key word here was married. FSOs live and work largely overseas, often in countries that are unabashedly homophobic. What happens if an FSO finds a partner in a country that does not recognize same-sex marriage? If this couple flies to the US to marry, what happens when they return to post? Could the now married partner be subject to social or legal retribution?

These were serious questions that worried gay and lesbian FSOs. The devil was in the details of how the Department of State would interpret SSDP in the post-DOMA world. Our glifaa board urged the Department to go slow, to leave SSDP in place until the details could be worked out.

The second issue, Ps & Is, followed from the first.⁸ As far as gay and lesbian FSOs are concerned, the countries of the world are divided into three tiers:

1. Those that wonder why the US had been so slow to recognize same-sex marriage;
2. Those that will never recognize same-sex marriage under any circumstances; and
3. Those that waffle in the middle, not recognizing same-sex marriage but, valuing their relationship with the US, are willing to grant some form of status to FSO same-sex partners as long as it can be done quietly.

Our glifaa board advocated for reciprocity, a policy by which the US would deny accreditation to a foreign diplomat’s family member if that country had denied Ps & Is to the same-sex spouse of an FSO.

I personally put the transgender exclusion on the advocacy agenda. Most of my glifaa board members didn’t know that an exclusionary clause dating to the 1970s denied coverage of trans health issues to all federal employees, FSOs included. Just as I was learning the issues facing my gay colleagues, they were now learning the issues facing trans Americans.

We wrote white papers for each issue, building a lobbying blueprint for the year. Lobby we did, meeting repeatedly with officials on mahogany row, the power corridor where the Department’s top officials have their office suites on the seventh floor of Main State. We went all the way to Secretary John Kerry’s Counselor Heather Higginbottom and Chief of Staff David Wade. We met repeatedly with Undersecretary for Management Pat Kennedy and Acting Director General Hans Klemm. These were the people who had it in their power to change policy.

Selim set the agenda and tactics for each meeting. We decided early that I would advocate for the issues affecting our gay and lesbian members. Selim, State VP Christopher Hoh, and USAID VP Jay Gilliam would take the lead in advocating for removal of the transgender exclusion. It was a strategy that cemented us as a board. The old adage is true: the best way to learn a subject is to teach a course in it.

Our results varied, but we did better than we might have expected. We slowed Pat Kennedy’s rush to roll back SSDP in the post-DOMA world. He heard us even if he often did not agree with us. Like the little Dutch boy with his finger in the dike, we were able to keep the edifice of SSDP in place for another year.⁹

On Ps & Is we finished the year as we started. Pat Kennedy feared that reciprocity could lead to tit-for-tat visa wars. Behind-the-scenes negotiation for individual cases remained the official State position, but Pat Kennedy mandated that each post send an annual assessment of conditions for LGBT+ families. He also directed posts to advocate strongly with host governments on behalf of same-sex FSO families, and glifaa assisted with a number of those cases. Ps & Is remain a glifaa issue to this day.

Our most unexpected success proved to be elimination of the transgender exclusion. SSDP and Ps & Is depend only on the Department of State, but the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) administers FEHB plans. How could we influence the policies of an agency entirely outside the Department?

Our answer was to use what openings we did have. Both Pat Kennedy at State and his counterpart Elizabeth Kolmstetter at USAID agreed to send letters to OPM Administrator Katherine Archuleta laying out the case for removing the transgender exclusion. OPM could ignore glifaa, but it could not ignore Pat Kennedy and Elizabeth Kolmstetter. OPM wrote back that the issue was under study with no time frame for a decision. We expected this, but the letters gave us a back channel.

The Foreign Service has its own union, the American Foreign Service Association (AFSA). AFSA, in turn, has an associated benefits arm, the American Foreign Service Protective Association (AFSPA) that administers the Foreign Service Benefit Plan (FSBP), an FEHB plan tailored to overseas FSO life.

We sent copies of the Pat Kennedy and Elizabeth Kolmstetter letters to AFSPA and asked that it request OPM approval to remove the transgender exclusion from FSBP. After all, this is our health insurance program for our Foreign Service family, and the top management officials at State and USAID were asking that the exclusion be removed.

Glifaa wasn’t alone in pushing to eliminate the transgender exclusion. We reached out to LGBT+ employee associations at other federal agencies. We worked in concert with the National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE) and with the Human Rights Campaign (HRC). We all knew we had to keep up pressure from as many directions as possible.

As winter turned to spring, we didn’t know if our back channel gambit would bear fruit. Time was running out. The annual commemoration of Pride was coming, and Secretary John Kerry would be our guest of honor for this well-attended event that includes reporters. As glifaa president, I would introduce the Secretary, and that introduction gave me leverage. I allowed word to leak out that if there was no progress on the transgender exclusion before Pride, I would denounce this discriminatory clause -- in the presence of the Secretary and the press.

The gambit worked. Less than a week before Pride, NCTE’s Mara Keisling convened a conference call. OPM had relented. It would allow individual FEHB plans to drop the exclusion on the condition of no publicity. Mara said it was glifaa’s advocacy that had made the difference. Instead of denouncing OPM at Pride, I thanked AFSPA for its unfailing support of the Foreign Service family.

My overseas State Department career ended with a posting to Astana, Kazakhstan, in 2014-17 as the Regional Representative for Environment, Science, Technology, and Health (ESTH). I, a trans woman, now ran my own section with my own budget and travel that took me to all five post-Soviet ‘stans covering issues as diverse as climate change, water management, and global health security.

As in Romania, my apartment became a group home and a gathering place for the LGBT+ community. I added LGBT-related meetings when I traveled regionally. Unregistered, below-the-radar interest groups existed in Almaty. Bishkek was home to Labrys, an official NGO and the leading organization for LGBT+ rights in Central Asia. I met with community members in Dushanbe. In Tashkent I met with a transgender man, an artist and actor who told me how the trans community survived in this authoritarian country. In Turkmenistan it was more difficult, but I did manage to meet with a woman activist in Ashgabat, the two of us going on a long evening walk in a city park until she detected that we were being followed. We separated quickly. Two women walking together in Turkmenistan are suspect by definition.

These meetings usually happened in the evenings, on the margins of my official meetings and events. I was conscious, however, that my duties as Regional ESTH Officer included the letter H for health. There was overlap. I incorporated HIV/AIDS into my reporting, meeting with state-financed HIV treatment centers when I traveled.¹⁰

I joined forces with the Embassy Astana’s human rights officer. Together we got funding from Washington for a roundtable on trans rights that included representatives from the Ministry of Health and the Republican Psychiatric Institute. Jamison Green, at that time president of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), came to Astana as our U.S. expert on trans issues. That roundtable was the first small step in a dialog that continues to this day.

As with Olympia in Romania, in Kazakhstan I found myself deeply involved in the fate of one individual: Sultana Kali. Her story and my role in it illustrate the gulf between the hopes and the reality of a mid-level FSO’s ability to change the life of an individual in the country where she serves.

I met Sultana in March 2016 at the welcome dinner I hosted on the eve of the trans roundtable. She spoke at the roundtable the next day. With poise and dignity, she told how she had been expelled from her high school in Pavlodar in 2015 after coming out as transgender. She had been only a year away from graduation.

Might it be possible to find a school somewhere that would accept Sultana? Surely there must be at least one school in Kazakhstan that would accept a trans student? I offered my help to Sultana and her mom Natasha, and we set to work.

I was wrong. Through the summer of 2016 I found all doors politely but firmly slammed in my face. That included the international schools and the elite Nazarbayev University. No official would admit to being transphobic. Instead, they alluded to administrative problems and traditional Kazakh values. The admissions officer at Nazarbayev University recommended that Sultana study abroad. The director of an international school recommended an American community college. That is what we decided to do.

I moved Sultana and her mom into my apartment. Natasha kept us fed through the winter of 2016-17 as we worked on college applications and fundraising. In the end, Lane Community College in Oregon accepted Sultana and gave a small scholarship for her essay, "I Just Want to Live an Ordinary Life -- and Create a Revolution."

In June 2017 Sultana went for her visa interview. With a college acceptance and sufficient funds for the first year, the issuance of a visa should have been a given.

I was wrong again. After a three-minute interview, the Consular Section chief at Embassy Astana refused the visa, saying Sultana didn’t have enough money to make ends meet for four years of college in the US.

I assured Sultana that we could overcome this hurdle. Nothing in U.S. immigration law says international students must demonstrate sufficient funds for four years, but consuls are not required to explain their decisions. Sultana submitted a second application. This time, I filled out an attestation of support committing to cover expenses for all four years.

Sultana went for the second visa interview in July. Refused again. The vice-consul didn’t even glance at the additional documentation. Not one to give up, Sultana tried a third time, this time after Senators Tammy Baldwin, Ben Cardin, and Susan Collins had made inquiries on her behalf. Denied again.

I despaired. There was nothing I could do internally. Department rules forbid FSOs from intervening in visa cases. What, I wondered, had the consular officers seen in Sultana as she stood at the interview window, handing over forms, bank statements, and passport?

In 2017 Sultana still carried a passport bearing a male name and gender marker. Was she rejected as an openly trans woman, someone whom consular officers suspected would remain in the US illegally, an intending immigrant? Under the law, that finding would make her ineligible. Since I can’t ask directly, I will never know.

But I know this: Of 16 Kazakhstani students accepted by Lane Community College between 2010 and 2016, Sultana was the first to be turned down for a visa.

All I could do was make noise, not permit this visa denial to pass quietly. I published several pieces in the HuffPost,¹¹ going right up to the line of accusing consular officers of inherent bias. The Kazakhstani edition of Esquire picked up and published the intentionally inflammatory Russian language interview I had given to journalist Botagoz Omarova.¹² This forced Embassy Astana to respond, albeit with characteristically bland verbiage that privacy concerns prevented it from commenting on individual cases. I wrote an internal Department dissent cable that earned me a meeting with the Deputy Assistant Secretary in the Bureau of Consular Affairs. Nothing changed.

I drafted a resignation letter and nearly sent it. With less than two years until retirement, I had nothing to lose. So why not scream my head off wherever I could? Just as with gender transition in 2010-11, I might as well go down fighting. To its credit, the Department cleared each of the HuffPost articles. They were not of official concern even if I did use fighting words.

If there is a positive side to my failed attempt to get Sultana Kali into college in the US, it is that Sultana landed well. On paper she still has only an 11^th grade education, but she is better spoken in English than most Americans. Today she is part of an LGBT+ project administered by Columbia University and in 2019 traveled to Estonia as a Kazakhstani representative to a regional conference. She also became one of the first Kazakhstani citizens to succeed in changing the gender marker in her passport, a success that stemmed from the 2016 trans roundtable.¹³

I am retired now. Being an FSO is one of the few careers left in the US that has mandatory retirement for age at 65. After seeing more of the former Soviet Union in my working life than I had of the US, I finally have the time to discover my own troubled country. In 2019 I celebrated retirement by bike-packing from Washington, DC, to my home in Maine. Since then I have bike-packed across the US from Atlantic to Pacific twice, and in 2023 I rode from Alaska to Montana. As should be clear by now, the bicycle has been my instrument of inner peace from the beginning of my life, the vehicle that allowed me to survive decades of being closeted trans and then the pressures of life as a diplomat.

That’s my story, the highs and lows of being trans at the Department of State. I leave it to the reader to write the continuation. I joined the Foreign Service late in my career. A young trans or otherwise gender non-conforming person taking the Foreign Service Officer Test today has the potential of rising to the level of Ambassador.¹⁴ It is my ardent hope that I will still be here to shake his, her, or their hand. Several trans Americans have already followed in my diplomatic footsteps, and I know they are only the start.

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1Robyn Alice McCutcheon is a retired Foreign Service Officer who served in Washington, Astana, Bucharest, and Tashkent. Although Ms. McCutcheon was employed by the U.S. Department of State, the views expressed in this column are strictly her own and do not necessarily represent the views of the Department of State or the U.S. Government.

2Nicholas Kralev, America’s Other Army: The U.S. Foreign Service and 21st-Century Diplomacy (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2015).

3William J. Burns, “The Lost Art of American Diplomacy,” Foreign Affairs, May/June 2019; William J. Burns, The Back Channel: A Memoir of American Diplomacy and the Case for Its Renewal (Random House, 2019).

4See, for example, https://adst.org/2015/09/the-lavender-scare-homosexuals-at-the-state-department/.

5In the years since, GLIFAA has become glifaa in lower case to emphasize that it is no longer an acronym. On its website and in all its literature, it is now glifaa, lgbt+ pride in foreign affairs agencies. The change happened during my tenure as the organization’s president in 2014-15 and was adopted to reflect inclusion of the full LGBT+ spectrum.

6Chloe eloquently chronicles her own life journey in SELF-ish: A Transgender Awakening (Red Hen Press, 2018)

7Drawing from the realm of classical physics, I used a transformation matrix to rotate society to my own reference frame.

8Diplomats are granted privileges and immunities in the countries to which they are accredited so that they can represent their home countries without being subject to host country law. The Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations (1961), which defines the framework for the conduct of diplomatic relations, codifies international law on diplomatic immunities and privileges.

9The Department ultimately phased out SSDP in 2017. The phase-out did, however, include a grandfather clause allowing new couples to stay under the SSDP umbrella until the American FSO rotates through Washington, at which time the couple is required to marry if they wish to continue being recognized as a couple.

10The HIV crisis in Kazakhstan stems mainly from intravenous drug use, but the percentage stemming from sexual contact of all kinds is growing. At the HIV center in Karaganda, I asked the deputy director about the LGBT+ community. He acknowledged there is a problem that is heightened by stigma, but he said they were making some inroads in the gay community. When I asked about transgender women and men, he said there were none in his region. When I pressed, he took umbrage, saying that of course he would know a transgender person if he saw one.

11HuffPost articles: “Why Is The U.S. Denying This Young Trans Woman A Student Visa?” ibid.; “U.S. Consuls Already Have The Tools To Discriminate In Visa Decisions,” 3/7/2018, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/opinion-mccutcheon-visa-discrimination_n_5a9cc6e2e4b089ec353bee8d; and “A Transgender American Diplomat Who Does Not Exist,” 11/10/2018, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trans-student-visa-kazakhstan_b_5a0a2626e4b0bc648a0d5569.

12The Kazakhstan edition of Esquire does not maintain an archive of older articles, but the Internet portal Vteme.kz picked up the theme in “ТРАНСнациональная трагедия [TRANS-natsional'naya tragediya],” 11/21/2017, http://vteme.kz/publ/analitika/ehnigma/transnacionalnaja_tragedija/34-1-0-133. Video of my Russian-language interview with journalist Botagoz Omarova can be found at “Трансгендерной девушке, ЛГБТИК+ активистке, Султане Кали отказали в выдаче учебной визы в США [Transgendernoi devushke, LGBTIQ+ artivistke, Sultane Kali otkazali v vydache uchebnoi vizyv SShA],” 8/27/2017, http://101tv.kz/video_news/723-transgendernoy-devushke-lgbtik-aktivistke-sultane-kali-otkazali-v-vydache-uchebnoy-vizy-v-ssha.html. An English-language interview with the Kazakhstani LGB organization kok.team can be found in “Robyn McCutcheon: 'The dark times ushered in by Trump will pass,'" 10/9/2017, https://www.kok.team/en/2017-10-09/robyn-mccutcheon-the-dark-times-ushered-in-by-trump-will-pass.

13A 2018 Russian-language TED talk given by Sultana Kali can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2XT2uCb2qI .

14https://careers.state.gov/work/foreign-service/officer/test-process/

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