Department Of Veterans Affairs Obscures Its Participation In A Self-Harm Cult
Policy change comes with limited liability
Responsive to Donald Trump’s executive order, the Department of Veterans Affairs announced last Monday “that it will phase out medical treatments for gender dysphoria.”
Funds saved on drugs and surgeries for new patients “will be redirected to help severely injured VA beneficiaries — such as paralyzed Veterans and amputees — regain their independence.”
Cross-sex hormone ‘therapy’ will still be available to veterans who were already made dependent on it, whether on active duty or as VA patients.
This was good news, but it came with a curious denial. “Although VA has never offered sex-change surgeries, the department has been providing treatment for gender dysphoria for more than a decade,” reads the official statement.
We note the contrary example of James ‘Elisa Rae’ Shupe, who checked into a VA hospital last December for what he claimed was an orchiectomy, or removal of his testicles, prior to vaginoplasty, the creation of a pseudo-vagina from his penis.
A longtime sufferer from mental illness, Shupe then checked in to the same VA hospital to commit himself for psychiatric evaluation and care. He checked back out on 21 January 2025.
Six days later, Shupe reportedly hanged himself from the parking deck of the Syracuse, New York VA hospital. His purported suicide note blames the Department of Veterans Affairs for his mental illness.
“Additionally, VA had been providing letters of support encouraging non-VA providers to perform sex-change surgeries on Veterans,” the policy change announcement explains. Did a non-VA surgeon remove Shupe’s testicles in a VA hospital?
Whatever went down, it was all “authorized under Veterans Health Administration Directive 1341(4), which has now been rescinded.” So the self-harm cult was outsourced, you see, meaning that it is not their fault. Legal liabilities are limited.
I am not being churlish here. As an American military veteran, I am simply used to seeing veterans get screwed over and put through bureaucratic hell without anyone ever being held accountable.
From Gulf War Syndrome, the cluster of symptoms related to service in Operation Desert Shield and Desert Storm, to the high rates of Parkinsons in veterans, to the overprescription of opiods and then the overreaction of under-prescription for pain relief, veterans have always borne the brunt of institutional failures.
Sex-change magic did not work on James Shupe. It failed to prevent his suicide. Likewise, a recent study of more than 107,000 insurance records found no evidence that mental health outcomes improved with transgender psychsurgeries — and some evidence that the opposite is true.
A high-intensity life in a hypermasculine culture produces a number of male veterans like Shupe who display classic autogynephilia. They are men for whom no real woman could ever be as feminine as the woman they imagine themselves to be. Chasing this ideational dragon through medicalization is a form of self-injury normally associated with mental illness and cults.
Like the broader medical profession, and at the command of politicians serving an ‘inclusion’ agenda, the Department of Veterans Affairs has enabled that cult of self-harm. Now the institution is backing away and disowning responsibility for the mess.
So while this is welcome change at the Department of Veterans Affairs, it is also a reminder that justice is hard to get. They are hardly the only entity now trying to limit liability as the trans craze implodes, nor will they be the last.
In Montana, the legislature is currently debating SB 218, which would extend the statute of limitations for litigation against gender doctors to 25 years. As Wesley Yang notes, similar legislation caused all the gender clinics in Missouri to “shut down immediately.”
Though the clinicians claim they are helping people to become their authentic selves by dosing them with cross-sex hormones, they don't really believe it. If it were true, they would have no reason to fear future liability. But it's not true, they know it's no true, and they therefore shut down immediately rather than face that liability.
The same is true of surgeons and clinicians who delivered outsourced sex lobotomies to American veterans. From now on, “VA will not provide any other medical or surgical therapy for gender dysphoria to any patients in any circumstance.” Good.
But it is too late for too many. It is too late for James Shupe. Getting any justice for them would be an uphill battle. The best we can hope for is detransition coverage. VA will eventually need it.
Detransitioners Take Washington
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"A high-intensity life in a hypermasculine culture produces a number of male veterans like Shupe who display classic autogynephilia. They are men for whom no real woman could ever be as feminine as the woman they imagine themselves to be."
Could it be that Shupe had AGP ideation all along, perhaps since puberty, but that something about the "hypermasculine culture" caused Shupe to identify as a woman for the first time? Maybe Shupe was fixated on the fantasy that he was a woman who was being had sexually by one of those hypermasculine men.
I'm dead-set against Trump and MAGA, but if Trump were looking to realize his dream of court-martialing someone, there could be no more deserving a subject than that ugliest and most preposterous man in a dress, Richard "Rachel" Levine.