Queer Diplomacy: A Transgender Journey in the Foreign Service

by Robyn McCutcheon

“This wildly compelling, beautifully written, first-of-its-kind memoir is an incredibly important, useful, and deeply humanizing story about one transgender woman’s unique experience navigating the complex world of foreign affairs and diplomacy. It’s a joy to read.” —Anthony Cotton, international inclusive development professionalJoin Robyn McCutcheon, an out and proud transgender woman, on her journey as a diplomat with the U.S. Department of State. Follow her on travels that took her through the Soviet Union as a historian, to the stars as an engineer in the Hubble Space Telescope project, and onward to Russia, Romania, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan as a Foreign Service Officer representing her country on everything from human rights to nuclear arms control. Find out what it was like to transition gender while serving full-time overseas and to become an icon to the LGBTQIA+ communities in Romania and in Central Asia. Follow her as president of glifaa, one of the best known LGBTQIA+ associations in the federal government. This is a story of perseverance and personal triumph. Simply put, this is queer diplomacy at its best.Robyn McCutcheon has spent her life immersed in Soviet/Russian affairs and in pointing control for NASA missions. In 2017 she received a Superior Honor Award for her “exceptional dedication and creativity in advancing LGBTQIA+ rights in Kazakhstan” and was listed as one of the top 50 successful transgender Americans you should know. Now retired, she has bike-packed multiple times across the United States and travels frequently to Central Asia.

338 pages, Paperback

Published March 7, 2024

Reviews

[Rupert Wolfe-Murray · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every new diplomat should read this book as well as anyone open to transgender people, and willing to learn their stories. If I had to sum it up in two words it would be passion and kindness, qualities that the author has an abundance of.

Robyn is a legend and, as Marvin says in the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, she has "a brain the size of a planet."