Elisa Rae Shupe, a Complicated Profile in Bravery
She turned away from anti-trans activism and leaked a trove of emails that exposed the inner workings of the right-wing network dedicated to rolling back our rights. It was a great gift to the trans community and journalism.
Elisa Rae Shupe flying a trans flag in 2016, Sandra E. Shupe, Source, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International
by Evan Urquhart
Elisa Rae Shupe was a transfemme veteran, the first American legally recognized as nonbinary, and a whistleblower who exposed the inner machinations of the movement to roll back transgender rights. She took her own life on Jan. 27, her body wrapped in a trans pride flag, outside the Syracuse VA Medical Center.
Although rumors had circulated widely online that Shupe was the one who had died, her identity was not confirmed by any news outlet until today, when syracuse.com published a story connecting her life to the tragedy in the medical center parking lot.
I corresponded with Elisa occasionally by email, starting in 2022. I first reached out after a tipster told me that she had turned away from the anti-trans activism in which she had participated for several years as a prominent detransitioner. Her Wikipedia talk page included messages I later confirmed were from Elisa, asking that her page be updated to reflect that she had retransitioned and had denounced her anti-trans statements. I emailed to ask if she might be willing to tell her story.
Elisa’s first email to me mentioned mental illness. “I realized something … How, myself included, a lot of these [detransitioner] women have serious mental health issues and way too much time on their hands,” she wrote. “They're sitting at home on disability with nothing to do, just like I was and still am, and that plays a role in them getting sucked into the GC movement and subsequently radicalized.”
No story of mine came out of this, but when stories relating to Elisa’s disillusionment with anti-trans activism finally broke they represented some of the most significant journalism on the anti-trans right ever published.
Madison Pauly, writing for Mother Jones, published an in-depth examination of the inner workings of the “religious-right networks behind transgender health care bans” on March 8, 2023, that relied upon Elisa’s trove of email correspondence with the architects of the anti-trans movement.
A few days later a profile of Shupe by Jude Doyle appeared on the website Xtra. Doyle’s piece was an intimate portrayal of the way mental illness made Shupe vulnerable to exploitation by people who saw her as a weapon to be used against trans people. Assigned Media’s Trans Data Library project relied heavily on this reporting in many of its entries.
By leaking these emails, Elisa gave a great gift to both the trans community and journalism. The emails, and Elisa’s extensive cooperation with the reporters who wrote about it, epitomized courage, because it necessarily involved Elisa taking full responsibility for her own participation in anti-trans extremism. It also involved exposing her mental health struggles before an American public that heavily stigmatizes mental illness, particularly personality disorders and severe illness that requires hospitalization.
But Elisa believed that her borderline personality disorder lay at the heart of what made her exploitable by bad-faith actors, and she wanted the world to know it.
Borderline personality disorder may also have made her exploitable by journalists. Or, if you prefer to look at it another way, the restlessness, risk-taking, and self-destructiveness of her BPD is what allowed Elisa to strike one of the most significant blows against the anti-trans movement.
Perhaps bravery by another name is mental illness. Or, at least, maybe it was like that for Elisa.
Elisa’s death hit me hard. I’m not always good at remaining in touch with former sources (or almost-sources), but I made an effort with Elisa because she was so clearly struggling, and because her history of anti-trans activism made it difficult for trans people to fully support her. I tried to stay in touch, but not as well as I’d like. I mostly wanted her to know, when she experienced dark times, that she would always have my respect and support.
Mental illness is also deeply personal for me. I’ve written occasionally about my struggles with self-harm and disordered eating pre-transition, and very occasionally mentioned that this included inpatient stays. Elisa’s illness held an uncomfortable familiarity, too close for comfort, but so far from where I am now, healthy and whole after transitioning.
Now she is dead. Could I have done more? Yes. Would it have changed things? Probably, no. I know I’m not that powerful. Still, I wish I’d reached out, just to say hello, a bit more often, and tried harder to be a companion in dark places.
If I had, at least I might have known her better.
I will remember Elisa as a hero and a martyr, a complicated person who I could have known better if I’d only made time to do so. I will miss her occasional emails, and honor her for her contributions to history and to the trans rights movement.
Evan Urquhart is the founder of Assigned Media.