In July 2019, Elisa Rae Shupe took a whirlwind trip to a conference in Atlanta. With an all-expenses-paid visit that included lodging at the five-star Ritz Carlton hotel, Shupe says she and her spouse received “rock star treatment” from Family Policy Alliance (FPA), the conservative Christian lobbying group hosting the event, who invited her to speak about her detransition.
“Throughout my involvement with these folks, I always understood the wink-wink theatrical relationship of playing the victim,” says Shupe, adding that the idea was to make her detransition sound “as bad as [she could].”
Shupe, who made waves in 2016 when she became the first US Citizen to change their legal gender to non-binary, had recently turned against the trans community after she detransitioned and began publicly denouncing trans rights on social media.
She attributes her decision to detransition – where she went back to identifying with her assigned gender at birth after previously identifying as trans – to a lack of family acceptance and to her struggle with borderline personality disorder (BPD).
“Especially with the BPD, where I become destabilised with my sense of self; my goals changed,” she told Uncloseted Media.
Her new perspective was a key reason she was invited to speak in Atlanta at the Statesmen Academy, an annual training conference put on by FPA which, according to their website, “provides pro-family legislators early in their career with the training, mentorship, support and coordination necessary for effective, Christ-centred public service.” Shupe was invited to speak in front of hundreds of prospective lawmakers about her experience detransitioning on a panel called “The LGBTQ Agenda.”
Shupe, who has since retransitioned and left the world of the Christian right behind, was once part of an ecosystem of detransitioners who are crucial to the legal strategy behind some of the 125 anti-trans bills sweeping through state legislatures right now, 87 of which became laws last year.
While very little research has been done, detransitioners are thought to represent between one and eight percent of people who transition. Most, according to York University researcher Kinnon MacKinnon, are not opposed to transgender rights, and many still consider themselves part of the LGBTQIA+ community or as allies to it.
“Of all the people I’ve ever interviewed, it was a really, really rare minority who would support the complete destruction of gender-affirming healthcare,” says MacKinnon, whose research specializes in sexual and gender minority populations.
Despite this, the negative testimonials of a small number of vocal detransitioners have become a central narrative – and often a winning strategy – for far-right groups like FPA, Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) and Heritage Foundation, which are the backbone of the movement to roll back transgender healthcare in the US.
FPA has been the main lobbying arm for Focus on the Family, a notoriously anti-LGBTQIA+ evangelical organisation that has lobbied against marriage equality, gay adoption, and many other LGBTQIA+ issues, and has labelled LGBTQIA+ rights a “particularly evil lie of Satan.” They did not respond to requests for comment.
In Atlanta, Shupe was interviewed by Autumn Leva, Vice President of Strategy for FPA. Leva questioned Shupe about her personal experience with transition in an effort to educate the policymakers in the audience about how to fight pressure from the “LGBT lobby.”
After that, Shupe went on to testify in favour of South Dakota’s “Vulnerable Child Protection Act,” which would ban gender-affirming healthcare for minors in the state.
Many detransitioners are handpicked by these far-right groups and then hired as expert witnesses, who are transported across the country to state legislatures and courtrooms to testify in favour of anti-trans legislation and court cases, including restrictions on gender-affirming healthcare for kids.
Shupe got the attention of these groups after she announced her detransition on her personal blog, calling gender identity “a fraud perpetrated by psychiatry, the likes of something the United States and other nations hasn’t experienced since the lobotomy era.”
Within a week, Daniel Davis, an editor for The Daily Signal, a conservative media outlet founded by The Heritage Foundation, asked Shupe to write op-eds about her detransition which were later published with headlines like, “My New Life After Transgender Despair,” and “I Was America’s First ‘Nonbinary’ Person. It Was All a Sham.” The op-eds told the story of her fall from grace through “transgenderism,” and her subsequent renewal through Jesus. The Daily Signal did not respond to a request for comment.
“That’s when ADF really got serious with me,” she says. “The whole detrans pipeline started to take notice.”
Less than 24 hours after her first op-ed was published, Shupe was booked on Fox News’ The Ingraham Angle, where she spoke with regret about physical changes such as breast growth and about being made an “outcast” by the trans community. But Shupe says these were never real concerns, just a performance she gave to suit the anti-trans narrative.
“On my way to the Fox studio, I honestly viewed it as giving a performance, getting into the character of being the victim that they all wanted me to be,” Shupe says.
Rebecca Jane Morgan, a doctoral candidate in history at the University of Nottingham in England who studies the development of the modern anti-trans movement, says that for stories of detransition to catch on, “simple, familiar narratives” tend to be the most effective.
“The audiences here [want] a kind of simplistic fall and then retribution narrative,” Morgan says. “The innocence of youth, followed by corruption by this ideology, followed by transition, followed by meeting Jesus and being restored. Paradise lost, paradise regained.”
MacKinnon of York University says that because most people who stop or reverse their transition don’t fit this mould, the pool of detransitioners who regret their decision is small. Some detransitioners have even testified in support of gender-affirming healthcare. But even with limited options, these groups have found a few stars who have become the detrans faces of the anti-transgender movement, including Prisha Mosley, Luka Hein, and – perhaps most notably – Chloe Cole.
Cole, a twenty-year-old Californian, first started posting about her transition regrets on Twitter in April 2022. The next month, she was testifying in favour of an Ohio bill which would ban trans healthcare for minors. Come July, she made her own appearance on The Ingraham Angle.
Since then, she has testified in favour of trans healthcare bans in Florida, Utah, Kansas, Tennessee and Idaho. In Wyoming, Republican Sen. Anthony Bouchard introduced a bill – also aimed at banning trans healthcare for kids – that he dubbed “Chloe’s Law.”
In addition to gaining celebrity in right-wing spaces, detransitioners who become expert witnesses often make a healthy income advocating against gender affirming healthcare, which 94 percent of trans people say changes their lives for the better.
In an Ohio court hearing last July, Cole testified that she is paid $2,000 a month by Do No Harm, which has been described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as an anti-LGBTQIA+ medical organisation. In addition, she says she earns between $50,000 and $100,000 a year in speaking fees, and the same amount in annual donations to her DonorBox, where she tells prospective donors that she needs “help to keep [her] activism going. Flights, food, camera equipment, etc. Most importantly, [she] need[s] help affording out of pocket medical costs for detransition related (not surgery) medical cost.” Cole did not respond to a request for comment.
Other detransitioners have entered the right-wing ecosystem very quickly after speaking out publicly. Mosley, who did not respond to a request for comment, made her first appearance in right-wing media less than two months after she first announced her detransition, and Hein made her first appearance in The Daily Caller just over two weeks after announcing hers.
Elisa Shupe says it’s no coincidence that these detransitioners get scooped up so fast. When she was advocating for gender-affirming healthcare bans, Shupe was included on email chains with a working group of 20 politicians, scientists, lawyers, and radical feminists working to pass anti-trans legislation. After leaving the right-wing ecosystem, she provided these emails to Mother Jones.
Finding and promoting detransitioners was a key strategy. In one email, Kara Dansky, then a board member for Women’s Liberation Front, an anti-trans feminist organisation that has partnered with far-right groups such as The Heritage Foundation, said that “it will be detransitioners, parents, and athletes who will break this open,” referring to the fight against trans healthcare.
According to Shupe, Walt Heyer, another detransitioner who contributes to conservative publications like The Federalist, was “constantly” searching social media for people who regretted their transition in order to incorporate them into his writing.
In one email to Shupe, Heyer wrote that this activism was critical to his livelihood: “my conference speaking is the major source of income and prevents us from eating out of the neighbourhood trash cans.”
“He was trying to find people to latch onto or exploit,” says Shupe. In one 2019 article, Heyer published an email which he had received from a younger detransitioner describing their attempted suicide. The detransitioner later contacted Heyer, upset that the message had been published without their permission.
Heyer did not respond to a request for comment.
Shupe says these groups intentionally go after a specific demographic of detransitioner. “The younger the better” is what they want, she says.
She believes this is because America’s anti-trans campaign has largely been framed around “protecting children.” For example, many state bills restricting gender-affirming healthcare are titled “Vulnerable Child Protection” Acts.
In one of the emails Shupe released, a doctor from the American College of Pediatricians, another Southern Poverty Law Center designated anti-LGBTQIA+ hate group, said that they needed “two or three really good malpractice cases, particularly from minors with regret,” to take down Oregon Health and Science University’s gender clinic.
Many young detransitioners like Cole, Mosley and Hein, were discovered and active in their late teens and early twenties. All of them were assigned female at birth. Shupe says this is intentional, because “stereotypical gender roles made it easier to sell them as ‘victims.’”
“It is very much based in a western idealisation of female purity, and saving people from making themselves impure,” says Rebecca Jane Morgan of the University of Nottingham. She says that for young women, narratives of protection often evoke “the role that, long ago, a dad might have had in terms of stepping into a daughter’s life,” linking transition to cultural taboos like premarital sex.
Shupe frequently mentions her struggles with numerous mental health conditions, including BPD and PTSD. In retrospect, she believes that the groups she worked with took advantage of this, because promoting people with mental health issues is part of their strategy.
“They’re using people with severe mental health issues” to make people think “this is what the trans population looks like.”
Other detransitioners frequently talk about lifelong mental health concerns, which are cited as reasons for transitioning and/or detransitioning. Cole has told reporters about “severe mental problems” during her childhood, and Mosley has described “pre-existing diagnoses of OCD, anorexia, anxiety, depression, and BPD” in her testimonies as reasons for her initial transition.
Lee Leveille, a former detransitioner and cofounder of trans and detrans advocacy group Health Liberation Now!, says that right-wing groups prioritise detransitioners with mental health struggles to make a stronger emotional appeal when using their stories.
“They have to be able to find them during very opportunistic points of crisis, when they are immediately feeling aspects of regret and they want to do something about it, which is a point of anger and emotional appeal that is very successful in terms of drawing people in,” Leveille says.
Right-wing media and court arguments often emphasise the mental issues faced by prominent detransitioners as reasons why gender-affirming care should be restricted. Republican politicians like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Vivek Ramaswamy and conservative media figures like Ben Shapiro have stated that transness is caused by mental illness, and ADF-hired medical experts have repeatedly claimed, often based on methodologically unsound research, that gender dysphoria is over-diagnosed in mentally ill people.
Part of the courtroom strategy by ADF and similar groups is to leverage op-eds and other media appearances by detransitioners. In an Alabama court case in which the state successfully defended its ban on gender-affirming healthcare for minors, the state submitted an op-ed written in The Daily Signal by detransitioner Sydney Wright as evidence.
Multiple of Shupe’s op-eds were written in collaboration with ADF. In one email, Roger Brooks, a senior counsel with the group, asked her to write an op-ed in support of the group’s lawsuit to overturn New York City’s ban on conversion therapy for gay and trans people. In the email, he offered points to raise in the proposed story, including that she was “horribly lied to and cheated” by doctors facilitating her transition. He also offered her writing support from ADF employees “familiar with the length and style that appeals to op-ed page editors.” Alliance Defending Freedom did not respond to a request for comment.
Shupe says that Bob Sullivan, an attorney who frequently liaised with ADF and planned to represent her in a medical malpractice lawsuit, helped craft her persona as a victim. In one email advising her on a potential autobiography, he said her story “could be modified to make it a quick-hitting intro into [her] nightmare of gender dysphoria.” He also discussed how they should strategically time the possible autobiography’s release “according to any litigation we pursue.”
Uncloseted Media reached out to Sullivan about the email exchange, which was obtained from a public release by Shupe. In an email, Sullivan said this is “inaccurate and misleading,” and a “mischaracterization [sic] of the communication between” him and Shupe, and said that his words have been taken out of context. He declined to comment further citing attorney-client privilege.
Because right-wing narratives about the detrans experience have dominated public discourse, nuance is often lost, making it especially difficult for people whose relationship to their gender identity has changed over time.
“I think we do need to do more research to minimise these kinds of outcomes from happening, but it’s not a feasible goal to have an aim of having a zero percent regret rate, or even one or two percent” says Mackinnon. “All medical treatments have risks and uncertainties and regrets, so the occurrence of regret doesn’t mean that we take away the whole system.”
“One of the things that makes me really sad and really frustrated is just the idea that changing how you perceive yourself or changing your needs in terms of healthcare access suddenly means that you are going to be opposed” to all trans rights, says Leveille. “It really shouldn’t be like this.”
Shupe faced a difficult journey after leaving this right-wing ecosystem. She says she has been harassed by her former right-wing allies and has had difficulty receiving medical care because of doctors’ fear of a media storm.
“It’s been hugely fucking damaging,” she says.
MacKinnon says the weaponisation of detransitioner stories by the far-right not only hurts trans people, but also detransitioners, making it harder for both groups to find the care that they need.
“I’ve interviewed [detransitioners] who are sobbing; they’ve lost all their friends, and they don’t really have anyone to turn to,” says MacKinnon. “And because of the political activism that’s going on with the right wing, it also makes LGBTQIA+ organisations more reticent to even develop these supports. The more that this experience becomes politicised by conservative and right wing actors, the less likely we are to have formalised recognition and support within left wing and progressive spaces.”
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