As Robyn McCutcheon sat down to watch President Trump’s swearing-in ceremony last January, she threw back a shot of Cognac to steady her nerves. The first American diplomat to come out as transgender, she was bracing for an upsetting inaugural address.
After all, the new president had pledged to roll back foreign assistance, impose protectionist tariffs and abandon climate change investments — policies that would undermine much of the work she had championed representing the United States abroad. That was hard for her, but she expected all of it.
But she was caught off guard when, minutes into his address, Mr. Trump touched on the issue most central to her legacy.
“As of today, it will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders: male and female,” he said.
Ms. McCutcheon was watching from a rented apartment in Astana, the futuristic capital of Kazakhstan, the nation where she had spent some of the happiest years of her State Department career. Now retired, she was back in Kazakhstan to see friends and perhaps establish a part-time home in the region.
When the speech ended, Ms. McCutcheon rose from the stiff sofa. It was nearly 11 p.m., the temperature just below zero. Her thoughts churned as she looked out on the snow-draped skyline and a frozen sliver of the Esil River.
What did Mr. Trump’s transgender policy mean? Would the passport identifying her as a woman be confiscated? Was medical care for transgender people at risk? Would it feel safe to return to her bucolic retirement cabin in Maine?
“I think I’ve lost my country,” Ms. McCutcheon, 71, recalled thinking that night. “This is not the America I thought I had represented or that I grew up in.”
The question now was whether to go back at all.
An Early Attempt to Come Out
Ms. McCutcheon’s first inkling of her desire to become a woman came in a dream when she was 5 or 6, living in an old farmhouse in Rockland County, on the outskirts of New York City. Lost in the woods, she found a warmly lit house only girls could enter and was welcomed inside. For years, she yearned for a replay of the dream, in vain.
In later years, she strapped a funnel to the vacuum cleaner and pressed it to her chest to see if it would make her breasts grow. As an astronomy student at the University of Virginia, she began privately wearing women’s clothing after reading “Conundrum,” a memoir by the transgender writer Jan Morris.
But as college graduation neared, she tossed out the wardrobe and tried to tune out what she called her gender “white noise” by preparing for demanding postgraduate studies, which led to degrees in celestial mechanics and Russian at Yale and Georgetown.
Working as an independent researcher early in her career, Ms. McCutcheon traveled to the Soviet Union to study the mistreatment of astronomers during the Stalin era. She now believes she was driven by an unconscious desire to understand how people had faced oppression. She later worked for a government contractor that played a key role in building and deploying the Hubble Space Telescope.
She married a woman in 1982, hoping it would throttle her gender dysphoria, but their strained marriage made her secret feel more daunting. In 1990, soon after their only son was born, Ms. McCutcheon had a few shots of vodka and came clean to her wife, who she said was hurt and angry.
Soon, Ms. McCutcheon sought treatment at a psychiatric hospital at the urging of one of her sisters after she came close to jumping in front of a train. A psychotherapist told her that the root of her problems was workaholism and depression, not gender dissonance.
In the years that followed, Ms. McCutcheon attended Sex Addicts Anonymous meetings in a futile attempt to feel different. Later, she joined an online forum called No Transition, a support group for closeted, married transgender people.
The offramp to finally transition came in 2004, when, at 50, Ms. McCutcheon accepted a job as a career diplomat at the State Department.
From Security Risk to Celebrated Diplomat
Ms. McCutcheon had long loved to travel, particularly to Russian-speaking countries. And going on overseas postings alone allowed her to trade an unhappy home life for a new, globe-trotting career.
Her initial job, at the Office of Russian Affairs, led to assignments in Moscow and Uzbekistan. Ms. McCutcheon was scheduled to return to Moscow, but the plan soon unraveled. She had filed for divorce, and her wife had referred in court filings to her gender distress and dressing in women’s clothing.
When that information reached officials at the State Department, they questioned Ms. McCutcheon about her personal life, probing for details that could make her vulnerable to blackmail in Russia. Her assignment was rescinded on unspecified security grounds.
With her diplomatic career in peril, Ms. McCutcheon managed to get an unglamorous posting at the embassy in Romania working in information technology.
Soon after arriving in Bucharest in the fall of 2010, Ms. McCutcheon confided in the nurse at the embassy clinic about her gender struggles. After hearing her story, the nurse leaned in and gave Ms. McCutcheon a hug, urging her to reach out to the State Department’s L.G.B.T.Q. employee group, glifaa.
Ms. McCutcheon feared she had committed professional suicide by confiding in a colleague. There was little precedent in the federal work force for what she had just done.
A relevant case was that of Diane Schroer, a retired Army Special Forces officer who was offered a job as a terrorism analyst at the Library of Congress in 2004, only to have it rescinded after she disclosed her intention to transition. Four years later, a federal judge ruled in favor of Ms. Schroer — but his narrow order did not create broad protections for transgender workers.
As Ms. McCutcheon perused glifaa’s website, though, she was startled to learn that months earlier Hillary Clinton, then the secretary of state, had added gender identity to the department’s nondiscrimination policy as part of a broader initiative to champion L.G.B.T.Q. rights abroad.
“Oh my God,” Ms. McCutcheon recalled thinking. “My career may survive.”
The Gender Transition Committee
Among her first moves was calling the embassy’s human resources officer, Natalie Koza. When Ms. McCutcheon said she was wearing women’s clothing on the weekends and planned to come out at work, Ms. Koza, who was at home, uncorked a bottle of wine to steady her nerves.
“Nobody in the department had ever done this,” Ms. Koza said in an interview. “Yet there was such happiness on her part and also determination.”
Days later, a senior embassy official spotted Ms. McCutcheon on the street wearing a dress, Ms. Koza said. The official demanded that Ms. McCutcheon meet with a State Department psychiatrist and suggested that it would be best if she left Bucharest.
After the psychiatrist reported that Ms. McCutcheon had appeared to be of sound mind, Ms. McCutcheon emailed Duane Butcher, a colleague from a previous assignment who would soon arrive in Bucharest as the embassy’s second in command. She asked for his support.
Mr. Butcher was surprised: He had never suspected what Ms. McCutcheon was going through.
He agreed to help. He considered her a standout diplomat with a rare set of skills: science expertise, mastery of Russian and a knack for forging deep friendships with locals. And the new nondiscrimination policy was clear.
After arriving in Bucharest, Mr. Butcher quietly established a team that came to be known as the Gender Transition Committee. Its members tackled practical matters — like how to change Ms. McCutcheon’s name in the computer system — and debated how to handle resistance within the embassy along with possible public fallout.
Their work became public in November of 2011 with a brief letter Ms. McCutcheon wrote in the embassy’s newsletter titled “Farewell Robert, Welcome Robyn!” It included before-and-after headshots and tongue-in-cheek answers to questions she expected colleagues to have. (“No, my sense of humor has not changed,” she wrote. “It’s still impenetrably based on engineering and science.”)
Two days later, heads snapped as Ms. McCutcheon walked into the embassy’s Marine Ball wearing a royal blue gown. To make a splash, she had colored her hair a dull red, put on sparkly earrings and purchased new shoes with heels. She walked in confidently past a coterie of Marines, one of whom handed her a rose.
In the past, she had been deemed a security threat and told to get mental help, and had lost out on a choice assignment. Now everyone wanted to hug her, Mr. Butcher recalled, even colleagues he knew were politically conservative.
“It was a transcendent moment,” he said.
‘A Precedent-Setting Event’
In 2012, Ms. McCutcheon flew to Thailand for gender confirmation and facial feminization surgeries, paying the $35,000 cost out of pocket. The years that followed were the most fulfilling of her career. The State Department gave Ms. McCutcheon awards for her activism in countries with budding L.G.B.T.Q. movements.
Her apartments in Romania, and later in Kazakhstan, became gathering points for activists. Ms. McCutcheon was elected president of glifaa, a role she used to advocate for broader protections for gay and transgender federal workers.
“I had never imagined that, even in a democratic society like the U.S., a transgender woman could serve in such a visible role,” said Viktoria Primak, a transgender activist from Kazakhstan.
While Ms. McCutcheon was best known for her L.G.B.T.Q. advocacy, she also wrote cables about health policy and human rights and rallied governments to sign on to the Paris Agreement, the pact among most nations to fight climate change. She spent 2013 in Washington working on nuclear arms control policy.
Around that time, the government was taking steps to broaden protections for L.G.B.T.Q. people, culminating in a 2014 decision by the Justice Department to reverse its longstanding position that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 did not extend to transgender people.
Ms. McCutcheon’s story loomed large as these changes were debated and drafted, said Sharon McGowan, who served in senior roles at the Department of Justice and at the Office of Personnel Management from 2010 to 2017.
“It’s hard to overstate how important Robyn is and will continue to be in the story of this country’s march toward progress,” Ms. McGowan said.
In the summer of 2014, as Ms. McCutcheon’s time as glifaa president was ending, John Kerry, then the secretary of state, attended a Pride event in the Ben Franklin dining room at the State Department. He acknowledged the “prejudice” and “completely inappropriate judgments” Ms. McCutcheon had at times endured at the State Department. “She didn’t just get through a difficult period,” Mr. Kerry said at the gathering. “She was determined to turn it into a precedent-setting event.”
The moment felt unreal, Ms. McCutcheon said, coming just years after her career nearly ended in disgrace. “I felt like I was living a miracle,” she said.
Retirement Plans Derailed
Ms. McCutcheon left the State Department in 2019, having reached the mandatory retirement age, and headed to Maine, where she had spent years building a cabin with a wood-burning stove and walls decorated with old Soviet propaganda posters. She wrote a memoir and spent months on cross-country bike rides.
The transgender movement faced setbacks during Mr. Trump’s first term as he rescinded many Obama-era policies. After President Joseph R. Biden Jr. was elected in 2020, Republicans turned up the pressure, leaning into fights over transgender athletes in school sports and transition care for teenagers.
In retrospect, she said, some transgender advocates may have erred in asserting that children who experienced gender distress should be allowed to transition without rigorously establishing that they were, in fact, transgender.
“Was there a period here of, Rah, rah, rah, yes, we will celebrate you, we will just promote you on your path?” she pondered. “Maybe that was too much, too fast.”
Despair, Departure
Ms. McCutcheon followed last year’s presidential contest with trepidation. Last fall, Mr. Trump falsely claimed that schools were helping children undergo gender surgeries without parental consent. His most aired television ad in the final weeks of the campaign proclaimed: “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.”
She held out hope that Kamala Harris would win and continue to address other issues she was passionate about, including climate change, vaccine development and human rights.
Last year, at the suggestion of a friend, Ms. McCutcheon applied for permanent residency in Kazakhstan, the country where she last served and where she had dear friends. She didn’t have a firm plan to leave the United States, but she wanted to have the option.
Mr. Trump’s re-election plunged her into despair. For the third time in her life — the first since her transition — she was taking antidepressants. After Mr. Trump took office, the question for Ms. McCutcheon became when, not whether, to leave the United States.
Ms. McCutcheon was aghast at the executive order the president signed on his first day in office, declaring that “it is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female.” The order went on to say, “These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality.”
Then came policies barring transgender workers from using public restrooms that matched their gender identities, which left several friends feeling their jobs were untenable. Mr. Trump’s new passport policy prohibited the State Department from issuing passports with a gender marker that differed from a person’s sex assigned at birth. Ms. McCutcheon saw that as dangerous for transgender people traveling overseas.
The rollback of rights was so sudden and far-reaching it left longtime advocates like Ms. McCutcheon feeling stunned and paralyzed. After retiring, she had assumed a new generation of activists would build on the progress hers had made. But suddenly, leaving — even at the cost of being away from her son, Matthew, and her boyfriend, John Quinn — felt like the only way to preserve her sanity.
“I tumbled into a very dark spot very quickly because it seemed so unexpected to me that this could happen so fast,” Ms. McCutcheon said.
She purchased a two-bedroom apartment on the outskirts of Astana and planned her move for mid-June. Ms. McCutcheon marched in the Washington Pride parade early that month, holding a glifaa banner alongside fellow State Department retirees.
She went on a few trips with Mr. Quinn to say farewell to friends. And she attended the wedding of her son, where Ms. McCutcheon delivered a toast about the enduring power of love — even in a complicated family story.
Late on a Wednesday morning, an orange moving truck lumbered down the dirt road leading to Ms. McCutcheon’s cabin. She remained stoic as movers carried out her beloved road bike and 14 tidily packed boxes containing clothes, books and kitchenware.
A couple of days later, a friend came by to drive her to the bus station, the first leg of a journey that would end more than 2,500 miles away. Ms. McCutcheon sat momentarily on her suitcase, partaking in a Russian tradition that calls for a moment of reflection.
The pine tree forest that surrounded the cabin was dulled by a slight mist. It was 8 a.m., a tranquil time before the black flies would start biting.
“I’ve left before, I’ve gone off on long trips before, but I always knew I’d be coming back,” she recalled thinking as the car pulled away. “This is the first time there’s a chance I won’t.”
Audio produced by Patricia Sulbarán.
Ernesto Londoño is a Times reporter based in Minnesota, covering news in the Midwest and drug use and counternarcotics policy.
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