“Applicant believed she was pre-adolescent or during adolescence when she was downloading images of children on her computer in 2013 to 2014 even though she was chronologically about 30 years old.”
From a very long security clearance opinion released Jan. 30 by the Defense Office of Hearings and Appeals (DOHA), but just posted on Westlaw (note that the guidelines having to do with denying security clearances based on sexual behavior list as a mitigating factor that “the behavior occurred prior to or during adolescence and there is no evidence of subsequent conduct of a similar nature”):
Applicant is a 42-year-old senior principle cyber software engineer systems administrator who has worked for the same defense contractor for about nine years…. She has three children between the ages of 10 and 15 and maintains a friendly relationship with her ex-spouse since their amicable divorce in 2022….
An important element is Applicant’s life is her history of gender dysphoria. She said:
My gender dysphoria is something that I feel like I always struggled with, it’s something that I can trace back even into adolescence, and pre-adolescence, an overall incongruity with my sense of self. But it’s not something that I ever really had words for prior to about 2015, [which] is when I really started looking into it. And in 2016 I was working with a therapist, and that’s when I kind of had a breakthrough, and recognized that I was transgender, and that a lot of what I was dealing with was gender dysphoria, the notion that my sense of [whom] I was disconnected from the body, and the way that I was perceived by society around me. I’m not sure how much deeper we necessarily want to get into that. But I did pursue further treatment, including both psychological therapy, medicine, and eventually surgeries.
[The government] alleges under the sexual behavior guideline that Applicant downloaded and viewed thousands of pornographic images of children from about 2013 to at least about 2014 while working for DOD at a base outside the United States. [The government] alleges under the sexual behavior guideline that she was investigated for these actions and warrants were issued for her electronic devices. She left the job before the investigation could conclude…. [There appears to be no discussion of any criminal prosecution. -EV]Applicant said her interest in the pictures she downloaded was “an aesthetic interest, [she] pursued as [she was] attempting to resolve [her] gender status as opposed to a prurient interest.” She explained why she utilized the dark web as follows:
[I]t was mostly just for the ability to find a large collection of images that could be downloaded without attendance that I could go through later to find things that I found soothing. I wasn’t specifically looking for illicit images, whether prurient or otherwise. There was some intent to bypass purchasing things that were for sale, that is just the facts of it. I was not trying to per se hide my identity through going there, it wasn’t the need for anonymity in that sense. But just not having to engage in a person to person kind of way.A criminal investigation began when local base security …