Affirmed to Death: The Tragic Case of Jamie Shupe, America's First 'Nonbinary' Pioneer
How raging, unchecked autogynephilia destroyed a life
During his sojourn as a detransitioned man, James Clifford “Elisa Rae” Shupe sought an attorney to help him “put gender identity on trial.” Sadly, no one would help a self-described mentally ill person sue the federal government just because he had changed his mind for the moment.
Their caution was justified. Shupe, who first made headlines by becoming the world’s first ‘nonbinary’ person, assumed another, new identity in 2023, and turned on another set of allies with the help of an indicted hacker and a liberal online outlet, Mother Jones.
Returning to transition did not help Mr. Shupe. Weeks after his ‘gender-affirming’ orchiectomy, the removal of his testicles, Shupe took his own life by hanging at the parking garage next to the Veterans Affairs medical center in Syracuse, New York in January 2025. He was 61.
This essay was originally published in two parts in 2023 that were subject to false reports under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) by Mr. Shupe. The Distance chose to forego the drain on resources that would have been required to fight this legal battle. More than a year has passed since Shupe ended his life, so we are publishing this piece at last.
“Please help me take these mother effers to court”
Shupe made headlines when he became the first legally “nonbinary” person in the United States at the age of 52.
Detransitioning three years later to new, far more subdued headlines, Shupe wanted to sue the Department of Veterans Affairs for aiding in the medicalization of his self-delusions.
In emails shared with The Distance by recipients, Shupe explains that “I have a 100% mental health rating from two federal government agencies, saying I’m batshit crazy since 2005.”
The story is consistent with Shupe’s writing elsewhere in 2021 and Twitter direct messages Shupe sent to our editor during the period in question.
In his emails, Shupe explains what that rating means in some detail:
100% Rating: The veteran has total occupational and social impairment due to symptoms such as gross impairment in thought process or communication, persistent delusions or hallucinations, grossly inappropriate behavior, persistent danger of hurting yourself or others, intermittent inability to perform day to day activities, disorientation of time and place, and memory loss of names of close relatives, own occupation, or name.
“My diagnosis at the VA has since been changed to a transvestic disorder with autogynephilia [AGP] and a paraphilia,” Shupe wrote. However, he later resumed denying that AGP even exists.
In these correspondences, Shupe drew parallels between his experience and episodes of “false memory syndrome” during the 1980s which led to false accusations of sexual abuse. His own story about himself kept changing.
“I did the same thing with my childhood with my sex change to female,” Shupe says, promising he can prove it. “I went back and constructed femininity that didn't exist that led me into the sex change.”
Shupe wanted to sue the American Psychological Association, the American Psychiatric Association, a university hospital, “and the doctor who wrote the sex change letter claiming I'm non-binary.”
“I'll also be suing for emotional distress and pain and suffering because I had to get on National TV just like David Reimer and tell everyone what they did with me was a fraud.”
Shupe was referring to the most famous victim of pedophile sexologist John Money, who invented the concept of a ‘gender identity’ separate from the body. “And I can show just like Reimer that they're still using me even though I've reclaimed my male birth sex.”
Shupe said that he was never hospitalized for mental health before his “sex change” and complained of three “psych ward stays” during his “nonbinary” phase.
Claiming to be a victim of rapid-onset gender dysphoria (ROGD), a term coined by Dr. Lisa Littman to describe and study female teenagers, Shupe was eagerly attaching his story to every buzzword in gender critical spaces, once again retroactively constructing a new memory of the past.
In 2023, Shupe was doing it all over again. His delusions had returned full force.
“My VA medical records are full of nothing but bad sexual behavior.”
Army barracks have always been rife with pornography. There are sex shops on the highway and a sex trade in the trailer parks. Hypermasculine military culture is not new, but Fort Hood has always been a soul-sucking environment.
Shupe got there in the late 1980s, at a time when “Jody calls,” marching cadences with misogynist lyrics, had only just disappeared from Army posts. Fort Hood could be a moral cesspit, and it all rubbed off on him like sex lube.
Soon after emerging as an openly AGP man, Shupe turned critical of “gender critical” women. Radical feminists who were disgusted by his paraphilias disgusted Shupe. Nor did he appreciate the broader “gender critical” discussion of AGP.
After a notorious appearance on Benjamin Boyce’s podcast, which the host took down for nearly a year at Shupe’s demand — he was mad at all the mean comments calling him a wife abuser — Shupe dropped off the radar in 2021, and no longer responded to our editor’s DMs on X. He had abandoned the account.
“My sexual behaviors were problematic because they frequently escalated,” Shupe wrote in a now-deleted confessional Substack post. “It was as if the paraphilias were breeding.” Emphasis is added:
I went from transvestitism to autogynephilia to masochism to eventually wanting to incorporate all of it into cuckolding. In 2019, I began to invite men over to our family home under the pretense that they would be having sex with me, something my wife reluctantly agreed to. But that wasn’t the truth behind what was going on. The reality was, I secretly wanted a man to seduce her and then use both of us as he desired during sexual activities in any ensuing relationship. Fortunately, as the men began to visit, my wife caught onto the sick game and put the brakes on it without allowing herself to become involved. After she did, I realized I needed help instead of psychologists further affirming my fictitious female gender identity.
During the period when Shupe was a man named Jamie, in between his “nonbinary” phase and his present full-blown AGP phase, his marriage was deeply damaged by his misbehavior. To be clear, that marriage seems intact when Shupe returned to being a “woman” and his wife was once again a “lesbian”.
In a now-deleted Medium post discussing his experiences at Fort Hood, Shupe explicitly linked his AGP to his wife’s gender nonconformity. Because she was not feminine, wore pants, cut her hair short, and did not enjoy playing dress-up, Shupe became the woman of his own imagination, leashed and ball-gagged for the BDSM pleasure of a man.
Per his Substack post, Shupe says that his wife was too afraid of divorce to say no at first. “I began to demand that my wife play the role of a straight man during marital sex, coercing her to satisfy my need to pretend that I was female,” he wrote.
“Should I relapse,” Shupe told The Daily Signal in 2020, “the correct response for others would be to promptly get me help.”
“Civilly commit me if necessary, if the relapse has progressed to self-harm. But do not, under any circumstances, indulge my past delusions or new ones.”
Sage advice that Mother Jones reporter Madison Pauly ought to have heeded. Instead, they published a story based on emails Shupe had provided from an email list organizing to support legislation against pediatric transition in Oregon. Participation in the democratic process was framed as a sinister conspiracy. Withholding sterilizing drugs and surgeries from children and denying certain mediocre male athletes the right to cheat at sports became actual violence, even genocide.
Then the nasty emails began to arrive from outraged trans rights activists, or maybe just one outraged trans rights activist named Jamie Shupe.
There is no gender critical conspiracy funded by the right
His new return to AGP and “trans identity” did not bring Shupe the level of attention he craved. Shupe never explicitly looked for a big money payoff, but he certainly seems to have imagined that someone would take up his crusade and make him famous, at the very least.
It is not hard to see how this aggrievement worked out. The recipients of his sick fetish porn emails include conservative activists with influence at the Idaho state house, as well as liberals and feminists, who have law degrees.
According to the story that apologists for the pediatric transition cult tell themselves, and the world, all of these people are motivated by fear and hate of transgender people, and funded by the well-heeled religious right.
But as Shupe found out, this is a nonsensical rationalization. No “gender critical” foundation or organization exists on the scale of, say, the Southern Poverty Law Center. Everything people do in this scene is a bake sale of monthly subscriptions, donations, and merch to gather funds for action. The conservative Alliance Defending Freedom does not take contingent cases like Shupe. Individual attorneys are smart enough to stay away from the wife-abusing madman.
There was never any “there” there. Shupe found that out. Then he got mad, and began his spiral.
The ball gag in the mouth of madness
Shupe’s now-deleted, but archived, essay on autogynephilia discusses his fetishism in great detail—with pictures. Passages from Shupe’s essay, as he wrote them, include the following, with emphasis added.
Physiologic autogynephilia comes from the work of Magnus Hirschfeld. He noted that some transvestites masturbated while fantasizing about themselves pregnant, lactating, or menstruating. Because my primary care doctors and psychologist’s mentors failed to teach them about Blanchard’s research on autogynephilia, it went unnoticed when I unknowingly confided that I was using a breast pump in an attempt to make my nipples larger. Me asking for the drug domperidone to induce lactation should have been a huge red flag to those who have treated me at Department of Veterans Affairs clinics and hospitals.
Behavioral autogynephilia encompasses activities such as when I have coerced my wife to forcefully feminize me, something I shamefully began to regret after coming to understand why I was doing it. Early on, I would don a wig, clothing that I imagined a woman wearing during housekeeping, and heels. Then I would engage in some half-hearted housework. Afterward, I would expect my wife to give me a sexual reward. Later down the road, after also developing another paraphilia, sexual masochism disorder, I demanded gratification get withheld as punishment. However, some of my worst behavior occurred when I began to demand that my wife play the role of a straight man during marital sex, coercing her to satisfy my need to pretend that I was a female.
In a now-deleted Wordpress essay titled “The Journey Back from Darkness,” written as “Elisa,” Shupe later apologized for “shamelessly exaggerating my sexual behaviors and using the work of Dr. Ray Blanchard, the hole-riddled theory of autogynephilia, to harm transgender women.”
Shupe getting prescribed domperidone to stimulate lactation and having a breast pump beside his desk had everything to do with autogynephilia. Each “prostate milking session” for reaching every “sissygasm” was autogynephilia.
Shupe enjoyed cross-dressing and teasing other men while fantasizing about being a cuckold in what seems like an especially sad threesome. He was the usual “trans woman” coping with “gender dysphoria”, which just so happened to look a lot like a man engaging in quite extreme fetishism.
Contemporary research on patients diagnosed with gender dysphoria indicates a high prevalence of borderline personality disorder. Despite the persistence of this finding across peer-reviewed literature, transgender activists deny any comorbidity exists at all.
In the 2003 Mother Jones article, Pauly and Shupe promoted Lupron, used to castrate sex offenders, for children suffering dysphoria. Shupe published his “Journey Back from Darkness” essay on March 8, 2023 — the same day as the Mother Jones hit piece.
In the Wordpress post, Shupe admitted having leaked others’ emails and their addresses (doxxing) while presenting himself as the endangered party. “I was offered anonymonity [sic], but turned it down because I deserve to get held accountable to [sic]”, he wrote. He wanted, nay demanded the attention.
Among Shupe’s factoids, we find him alleging that radical feminists were the ones who told John Money that “children were a blank slate who get molded into males or females with no consequences” — adding that radical feminists killed police officers and bombed federal buildings.
Shupe was featured in three pieces for The Daily Signal. Cross-posted from MercatorNet in 2017, Shupe complained that “taking too much estrogen” resulted in “swollen legs and feet” that led to necessary testing for blood clots, despite Shupe doing regular exercise.
“I should have been stopped, but out-of-control, transgender activism had made the nurse practitioner too scared to say no”, Shupe told Daily Signal in 2019. He blamed the government. “I’d learned how to become a female [sic] from online medical documents at a Department of Veterans Affairs hospital website.”
Talking to Daily Signal again in 2020, Shupe seemed wistful as he described the sudden overwhelming attention he received for his nonbinary identification just a few years before.
When I officially ‘broke’ the gender binary, the media circus was spectacular. Media outlets from as far away as Germany cheered me on, celebrating my victory and embracing me as their latest LGBT hero. Before long, states were debating whether to recognize up to 73 gender identities, and gender activists testified about how those false-identities rooted in mere feelings were valid and real. For me, the celebration went on for months as I entertained reporters with tales of how I was the third gender: a special combination of male biology and a female gender identity. Of course, it was all a complete delusion, but journalists ate it up. Not once did they question me. And above all, I believed it. Having an official ‘X’ marker on my driver’s license served as validation from the government that I was, indeed, nonbinary.
The experience ruined Shupe by setting his expectations too high. Becoming ‘gender critical’ simply never received the same level of positive attention that he got for adopting his first political identity.
The sad conclusion
Shupe posted a note to Substack on or about Christmas Eve 2024 announcing his orchiectomy, the removal of his testicles. Shupe also intended to undergo penectomy and vaginoplasty in the new year, deeming them “life-saving” interventions. It is worth noting that half of men who regret this procedure do so instantly.
Shupe seems to have deleted his entire “Elisa Rae Shupe” Substack in early to mid-January. This deletion occurred at about the same time Shupe was transferred to the inpatient psychiatry unit.
Then Shupe was discharged 21 January, the day after Inauguration Day. He reportedly hanged himself six days later, about one month after his “life-saving” orchiectomy. However, Shupe was not identified in the scant local and national press coverage.
Instead, news website Syracuse.com referred to a “transgender veteran” who had “hanged themselves” while “wrapped in a body-length transgender pride flag.” Shupe’s body was reported to police “at about 11:15 a.m.”
While authorities refused to identify the deceased, a “queer veteran” posted Shupe’s alleged suicide note on Substack. (Credit to Exulansic for spotting it and sharing it with us.) It is a spasmodic, radicalized disavowal of America, the military, God, and Elon Musk, opening with: “Fuck You America!”
“The white man decimated and massacred the indigenous populations of the third gender on the lands now called America,” Shupe declared of a newly-reelected Donald Trump. “It was only fitting that a white person restored it.”
Borrowed from radical queer revisionism, this racist pseudo-history of Native Americans supposedly being clueless about who the women were, or how to make babies, was supposed to be Shupe’s answer to Trump’s executive order barring VA from doing any more “gender affirming” orchiectomies.
For as Shupe’s tragic spiral demonstrates, transgender psychosurgeries do not in fact save lives. Indeed, medicalization clearly played an important role in Shupe’s drastic mental decline, and he once again blamed the Department of Veterans Affairs for his problems.
“I don’t want your health care to treat the mental illnesses you caused,” Shupe wrote. “I don’t want more psychiatric ward commitments to keep me alive in a nation that I despise.” Demanding that his ashes be spread in international waters without an American flag in sight, Shupe’s suicide note refused “any military honors or ceremonies to mark my death.”
My death is not a surrender.
My death as a member of the third gender and transgender population does not mean you won.
It solely marks the end of our association.
“You cannot erase non-binary and transgender people because you give birth to more of us each day,” Shupe concluded before erasing himself. He wanted his death to count as a noble sacrifice of self rather than a deranged act of passive-aggressive violence.
The alternative, after all, was to admit that the magic was not real, that the spell of gender identity does not work, and the medicalized Skoptsy cult of self-castration does not belong in taxpayer-provided services to American veterans. It would mean that Trump was right, which would have been a moral catastrophe for James Shupe.
We agree with the late Mr. Shupe that VA should not perform elective sterilizing surgeries on patients with 100% mental health ratings and documented paraphilias. We consider his life, his family’s trauma, and his death as Exhibit A for why this prohibition should be made law, not just administrative policy.
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