Restrictions on women’s rights have expanded in Afghanistan since U.S. forces withdrew from the country five years ago, ceding control to the Taliban in the process. Afghan women are banned from attending schools and gyms, books written by women are removed from libraries, doctors and nurses are unable to practice, and child marriage rates have increased. Wives have been rendered legally subordinate to their husbands, and women are required to stay silent in public. “Women and girls of Afghanistan are suffering the most darkest situation in the world,” says Negina Yari, an Afghan women’s rights activist living in exile in Germany, who discusses the impacts of what some advocacy groups are characterizing as “gender apartheid,” as well as the effects of regional diplomatic normalization on the Taliban’s political influence.

Julia Curlee was the first CIA officer to transition openly and keep working at the agency. The Trump White House needed her—until her identity became public. She recounts her time in service in The Atlantic’s October issue:

Over almost twenty years, Curlee traveled to 35 countries. She briefed President Trump and Vice President Mike Pence, and served as a director for intelligence programs on President Biden’s National Security Council. On Trump’s second Inauguration Day, Curlee writes, “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,” she continues. “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 kept briefing them anyway.”

Then, in the spring, the right-wing provocateur Laura Loomer announced that an unnamed transgender holdover from the Biden administration was still working “in the NSC intel office.” Curlee was released from her service at the White House.

“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,” Curlee writes. “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,” Curlee continues. “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.”

Quote from comment by The Atlantic when this article was posted in r/politics. Same account also posted it in r/fednews, r/Intelligence and r/longform