Four years ago, I wrote about my decision to live as a woman in The New York Times, writing that I had wanted to live “authentically as
the woman that I have always been,” and had “effectively traded my white male
privilege to become one of America’s most hated minorities.”
Three years ago, I decided that I was neither male nor female, but
nonbinary—and made headlines after an Oregon judge agreed to let me identify as a
third sex, not male or female.
Now, I want to live again as the man that I am.
I’m one of the lucky ones. Despite participating in medical transgenderism
for six years, my body is still intact. Most people who desist from transgender
identities after gender changes can’t say the same.
But that’s not to say I got off scot-free. My psyche is eternally scarred,
and I’ve got a host of health issues from the grand medical experiment.
Here’s how things began.
After convincing myself that I was a woman during a severe mental health
crisis, I visited a licensed nurse practitioner in early 2013 and asked for a
hormone prescription. “If you don’t give me the drugs, I’ll buy them off the
internet,” I threatened.
Although she’d never met me before, the nurse phoned in a prescription for
2 mg of oral estrogen and 200 mg of Spironolactone that very same day.
The nurse practitioner ignored that I have chronic post-traumatic stress
disorder, having previously served in the military for almost 18 years. All of
my doctors agree on that. Others believe that I have bipolar disorder and
possibly borderline personality disorder.
I should have been stopped, but out-of-control, transgender activism had
made the nurse practitioner too scared to say no.
I’d learned how to become a female from online medical documents at a
Department of Veterans Affairs hospital website.
After I began consuming the cross-sex hormones, I started therapy at a
gender clinic in Pittsburgh so that I could get people to sign off on the
transgender surgeries I planned to have.
All I needed to do was switch over my hormone operating fuel and get my
penis turned into a vagina. Then I’d be the same as any other woman. That’s the
fantasy the transgender community sold me. It’s the lie I bought into and
believed.
Only one therapist tried to stop me from crawling into this smoking rabbit
hole. When she did, I not only fired her, I filed a formal complaint against
her. “She’s a gatekeeper,” the trans community said.
Professional stigmatisms against “conversion therapy” had made it
impossible for the therapist to question my motives for wanting to change my
sex.
The “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders” (Fifth Edition)
says one of the traits of gender dysphoria is believing that you possess the
stereotypical feelings of the opposite sex. I felt that about myself, but yet
no therapist discussed it with me.
Two weeks hadn’t passed before I found a replacement therapist. The new one
quickly affirmed my identity as a woman. I was back on the road to getting
vaginoplasty.
There’s abundant online literature informing transgender people that their
sex change isn’t real. But when a licensed medical doctor writes you a letter
essentially stating that you were born in the wrong body and a government
agency or court of law validates that delusion, you become damaged and
confused. I certainly did.
Painful Roots
My trauma history resembles a ride down the Highway of Death during the
first Gulf War.
As a child, I was sexually abused by a male relative. My parents severely
beat me. At this point, I’ve been exposed to so much violence and had so many
close calls that I don’t know how to explain why I’m still alive. Nor do I know
how to mentally process some of the things I’ve seen and experienced.
Dr. Ray Blanchard has an unpopular theory that explains why someone like me
may have been drawn to transgenderism. He claims there are two types of
transgender women: homosexuals that are attracted to men, and men who are
attracted to the thought or image of themselves as females.
It’s a tough thing to admit, but I belong to the latter group. We are
classified as having autogynephilia.
After having watched pornography for years while in the Army and being
married to a woman who resisted my demands to become the ideal female, I became
that female instead. At least in my head.
Jamie Shupe as a soldier at Fort Hood. (Photo: Jamie Shupe)
While autogynephilia was my motivation to become a woman, gender
stereotypes were my means of implementation. I believed wearing a long wig,
dresses, heels, and makeup would make me a woman.
Feminists begged to differ on that. They rejected me for conforming to
female stereotypes. But as a new member of the transgender community, I beat up
on them too. The women who become men don’t fight the transgender community’s
wars. The men in dresses do.
Medical Malpractice
The best thing that could have happened would have been for someone to
order intensive therapy. That would have protected me from my inclination to
cross-dress and my risky sexual transgressions, of which there were many.
Instead, quacks in the medical community hid me in the women’s bathroom
with people’s wives and daughters. “Your gender identity is female,” these
alleged professionals said.
The medical community is so afraid of the trans community that they’re now
afraid to give someone Blanchard’s diagnosis. Trans men are winning in
medicine, and they’ve won the battle for language.
Think of the word “transvestite.” They’ve succeeded in making it a vulgar
word, even though it just means men dressing like women. People are no longer
allowed to tell the truth about men like me. Everyone now has to call us
transgender instead.
The diagnostic code in my records at the VA should read Transvestic
Disorder (302.3). Instead, the novel theories of Judith Butler and Anne
Fausto-Sterling have been used to cover up the truths written about by
Blanchard, J. Michael Bailey, and Alice Dreger.
I confess to having been motivated by autogynephilia during all of this.
Blanchard was right.
Trauma, hypersexuality owing to childhood sexual abuse, and autogynephilia
are all supposed to be red flags for those involved in the medical arts of
psychology, psychiatry, and physical medicine—yet nobody except for the one
therapist in Pittsburgh ever tried to stop me from changing my sex. They just
kept helping me to harm myself.
Escaping to ‘Nonbinary’
Three years into my gender change from male to female, I looked hard into
the mirror one day. When I did, the facade of femininity and womanhood
crumbled.
Despite having taken or been injected with every hormone and antiandrogen
concoction in the VA’s medical arsenal, I didn’t look anything like a female.
People on the street agreed. Their harsh stares reflected the reality behind my
fraudulent existence as a woman. Biological sex is immutable.
It took three years for that reality to set in with me.
When the fantasy of being a woman came to an end, I asked two of my doctors
to allow me to become nonbinary instead of female to bail me out. Both readily
agreed.
After pumping me full of hormones—the equivalent of 20 birth control pills
per day—they each wrote a sex change letter. The two weren’t just bailing me
out. They were getting themselves off the hook for my failed sex change. One
worked at the VA. The other worked at Oregon Health & Science University.
To escape the delusion of having become a woman, I did something completely
unprecedented in American history. In 2016, I convinced an Oregon judge to
declare my sex to be nonbinary—neither male nor female.
In my psychotic mind, I had restored the mythical third sex to North
America. And I became the first legally
recognized nonbinary person in the
country.
Celebrity Status
The landmark court decision catapulted me to instant fame within the LGBT
community. For 10 nonstop days afterward, the media didn’t let me sleep.
Reporters hung out in my Facebook feed, journalists clung to my every word, and
a Portland television station beamed my wife and I into living rooms in the United Kingdom.
Becoming a woman had gotten me into The New York Times. Convincing a judge that my sex was nonbinary got my
photos and story into publications around the world.
Then, before the judge’s ink had even dried on my Oregon sex change court
order, a Washington, D.C.-based LGBT legal aid organization contacted me. “We
want to help you change your birth certificate,” they offered.
Within months, I scored another historic win after the Department of Vital
Records issued me a brand new birth certificate from Washington, D.C., where I
was born. A local group called Whitman-Walker Health had gotten my sex
designation on my birth certificate switched to “unknown.” It was the first time in D.C. history a birth certificate had been printed
with a sex marker other than male or female.
Another transgender legal aid organization jumped on the Jamie Shupe
bandwagon, too. Lambda Legal used my nonbinary court order to help convince a
Colorado federal judge to order the State Department to issue a passport with
an X marker (meaning nonbinary) to a separate plaintiff named Dana Zzyym.
LGBT organizations helping me to screw up my life had become a common
theme. During my prior sex change to female, the New York-based Transgender
Legal Defense & Education Fund had gotten my name legally changed. I didn’t
like being named after the uncle who’d molested me. Instead of getting me
therapy for that, they got me a new name.
A Pennsylvania judge didn’t question the name change, either. Wanting to help
a transgender person, she had not only changed my name, but at my request she
also sealed the court order, allowing me to skip out on a ton of debt I owed
because of a failed home purchase and begin my new life as a woman. Instead of
merging my file, two of the three credit bureaus issued me a brand new line of
credit.
Walking Away From Fiction
It wasn’t until I came out against the sterilization and mutilation of
gender-confused children and transgender military
service members in 2017 that LGBT
organizations stopped helping me. Most of the media retreated with them.
Overnight, I went from being a liberal media darling to a conservative
pariah.
Both groups quickly began to realize that the transgender community had a
runaway on their hands. Their solution was to completely ignore me and what my
story had become. They also stopped acknowledging that I was behind the
nonbinary option that now exists in 11 states.
The truth is that my sex change to nonbinary was a medical and scientific
fraud. Consider the fact that before the historic court hearing occurred, my
lawyer informed me that the judge had a transgender child.
Sure enough, the morning of my brief court hearing, the judge didn’t ask me
a single question. Nor did this officer of the court demand to see any medical
evidence alleging that I was born something magical. Within minutes, the judge
just signed off on the court order.
I do not have any disorders of sexual development. All of my sexual
confusion was in my head. I should have been treated. Instead, at every step,
doctors, judges, and advocacy groups indulged my fiction.
The carnage that came from my court victory is just as precedent-setting as
the decision itself. The judge’s order led to millions of taxpayer dollars
being spent to put an X marker on driver’s licenses in 11 states so far. You
can now become male, female, or nonbinary in all of them.
In my opinion, the judge in my case should have recused herself. In doing
so, she would have spared me the ordeal still yet to come. She also would have
saved me from having to bear the weight of the big secret behind my win.
I now believe that she wasn’t just validating my transgender identity. She
was advancing her child’s transgender identity, too.
A sensible magistrate would have politely told me no and refused to sign
such an outlandish legal request. “Gender is just a concept. Biological sex
defines all of us,” that person would have said.
In January 2019, unable to advance the fraud for another single day, I
reclaimed my male birth sex. The weight of the lie on my conscience was heavier
than the value of the fame I’d gained from participating in this elaborate
swindle.
