A recent FOIA request secured release of an article by an anonymous intelligence officer employed by the federal government’s Intelligence Community (IC), entitled “MY GENDER IDENTITY AND EXPRESSION MAKE ME A BETTER INTELLIGENCE OFFICER.”
Central to the theme of this apparently serious article appearing in an official publication of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), was the unnamed male author’s predisposition to dress in women’s clothes in his workplace, including the wearing of brassieres and high heeled shoes — actions that he asserts have “sharpened [his] skills as an intelligence officer” and “made [him] a better colleague.”
It would be easy to dismiss this crossdressing gobbledygook, published by Uncle Sam just one month ago, based on nothing more than its utterly nonsensical and bizarre thesis that an adult male donning high heels and a brassiere thereby gains knowledge sure to improve his analytical capabilities to assess foreign intelligence information.
The crossdressing article, however, does not represent or reflect a more fundamental problem infecting our Intelligence Community’s ability to provide accurate, timely and substantive intelligence for policy makers.
The far more dangerous document than the anonymous crossdresser’s silliness, is “Intelligence Community Directive 125,” issued on May 13, 2023, and titled, “Gender Identity and Inclusivity in the Intelligence Community.” It is this official directive from the most senior Intelligence Community official in our government that more broadly threatens to undermine the deadly serious business of gathering, analyzing and disseminating to policy makers sound foreign intelligence product.
Directive 125 goes far beyond justifying one crossdresser’s sartorial preferences. It mandates the manner by which senior Intelligence Community leaders must be guided in terms of “gender identity, transgender status, gender expression, and perceived gender” in virtually all human resource decisions, policies and results.
Directive 125 commands the CIA and all other elements of the Intelligence Community, to “maintain a work environment free from discrimination and harassment based on … perceived gender.” Basing personnel and other workplace policies on whatever a person’s “perceived” gender might be, inevitably invites confusion for managers. That confusion is compounded because those same managers cannot, by the terms of the Directive, require employees to “disclose their chosen name, pronoun, honorific, gender identity, transgender status, and gender expression.”
In other words, Intelligence Community managers are mandated to respect and not question an individual’s “perceived” gender, notwithstanding they cannot know what any given individual’s chosen gender is. These absurd requirements extend not only to all aspects of an agency’s workplace “environment,” but even to the early stages of the individual’s “recruitment, interview, and selection.”
When it comes to decisions regarding foreign assignments (an essential part of the foreign intelligence gathering process), no Intelligence Community “element” — let’s say, the CIA — can, consistent with the mandatory language of Directive 125, deny a crossdressing male employee a desired assignment to a country that might in some manner discriminate against crossdressing men.
Cost appears not to be a consideration in fulfilling Directive 125’s gender and transgender mandates. Not only, for example, is annual “transgender and gender identity awareness training” required for every agency that is part of the Intelligence Community, but each component must continually “collect, analyze, and, as requested, submit … voluntary self-reported gender identity-related demographic data on their workforce, including metrics related to hiring, promotion, and retention.”
Apparently, in the Biden Administration, you just cannot put a price tag on guaranteeing gender and transgender well-being in the Intelligence Community.
In what currently seems the now distant past, an important responsibility of our government’s foreign intelligence capabilities was figuring out the intentions of America’s enemies and adversaries, with the goal of avoiding harm to our national security. Getting inside the minds of foreign actors has always been difficult.
Now, however, as reflected in Directive 125’s mandates, individuals within our Intelligence Community are tasked with the far more difficult task of determining the perceived sexual preferences of those inside our Intelligence Community, including those who perceive themselves as “aromantic,” so as not to cause them offense in the broad confines of the Intelligence Community workplace, at home and abroad.
You truly cannot make up this nonsense, although for the sake of our national security it would be far better were it made up.
