My name is Robyn McCutcheon, and I work as a Foreign Service Officer (FSO) with the U.S. Department of State. I had a first career with a NASA contractor and was part of the team responsible for pointing control systems on Hubble Space Telescope. I’m also what you might call an “old Russia hand,” having traveled widely in the Soviet Union and having published on issues related to the history of Soviet science. Since joining the State Department in 2004, I’ve served in Washington, Bucharest, Tashkent, Moscow, and elsewhere.

I’m just an average, mid-level FSO except for one thing: I’m the first FSO ever to transition gender openly while serving overseas. I had a life history of trans-ness that would be familiar to anyone born in the 1950s. It included failed transition attempts, a week in a psychiatric ward and, more than anything else, years and decades of deep hiding and attempts to make it go away. I carefully hid this history when I joined the State Department, but my past caught up with me in 2010. When it did, I thought my life was over.

But to turn around the Bobby McGhee song, “Sometimes nothing left to lose is freedom.” No doubt about it, it was one of the scariest moments in my life when I first spoke openly about being transgender at the U.S. Embassy in Bucharest, Romania, in 2010. At first slowly and then with ever greater speed, however, the Embassy community, both American and Romanian, rallied around me. My official transition happened on November 10, 2011, and was followed by my social “coming out” at the Marine Ball two days later. My new life, the happiest years of my life had begun.

It took a few days before I realized I had done something that others considered special. First individual and then dozens of congratulatory e-mails started pouring in from around the world. Before long I was engaged officially in outreach to the Romanian LGBT community. When I returned to Washington in 2013, I served for a year as president of GLIFAA, the LGBT+ pride organization for the State Dept. and USAID, working hard on such issues as removal of the transgender exclusion that had denied medically necessary health care to transgender employees of the federal government.

I’ve since move out of the transition spotlight. I’m lucky in that, given my age, I “transitioned well.” Today I’m am just another woman in the Foreign Service, doing her job like everyone else. Given this, why would I agree to be part of this series in the New York Times?

I’m writing here because I have a debt to pay. The fact that I was a first had much to do with those who came before me. Diane Schroer set the stage for all of us in the federal government when she fought the discrimination that denied her a job at the Library of Congress in 2005. In my own foreign affairs community, Dr. Chloe Schwenke was fired from her job with a USAID contractor when she announced her transition in 2008. Like Diane, she fought. Thanks to her efforts and those of her allies in GLIFAA and elsewhere, gender identity was added to the non-discrimination statements at the State Department and USAID in 2010.

Just as Diane, Chloe, and others opened a door for me, so I have opened a door for others. I am no longer the only transgender FSO. The doors are not yet wide open and not all is perfect, but the doors will open wider as more of us pass through them. To keep those doors open, I declare that I am a proud woman of transgender experience who is proud to serve her country.

And to all transgender friends in countries where I have served who experience intolerance, I point to my own experience. U.S. society changed and became more accepting of trans* persons in my lifetime. So can yours. It takes patience and hard work but you, too, can change the world for the better and open the door for others.

======================================== Although I am employed by the U.S. Department of State, the views and experiences I express here are strictly my own, those of a private U.S. citizen, a transgender woman who happens to work for the U.S. Government.