RUTHFULLY YOURS

Even though it’s still young, the transgender movement has occasioned many bizarre and horrific stories. But even in that company, the saga of Jamie Shupe stands out.

Born in 1963, Shupe has been married to his wife, Sandy, for three decades; they have a daughter. He spent eighteen years (1982-2000) in the U.S. Army. In 2013 he began identifying as a transgender woman, claiming that he had struggled for years with a deep sense of being different and had been harassed in the military because he was perceived as gay. After declaring that he was a woman, he “lived for a year in Pittsburgh, got hormone treatments and a name change,” but never had a sex-change operation. Finding Pittsburgh inhospitable for a trans woman, he relocated to Portland, Oregon, where he continued living as a woman for another two years. In 2015, the New York Times profiled Shupe as part of a splashy, upbeat series celebrating “transgender lives.”

“I have effectively traded my white male privilege to become one of America’s most hated minorities,” Shupe lamented in the full-page Times testimony. “I now live in a world where radical, conservative politicians and religious groups routinely attack my very existence with legislation to deny me basic human rights such as a bathroom that matches my gender-identity….I am a transgender woman. My civil rights are fragile. I live in daily fear in a country that claims world leadership. And my trans brothers and sisters are forced to serve their nation in silence.”

The next year, however, Shupe made another change. Now rejecting the idea that he was a woman, he petitioned the Oregon courts to be officially recognized as non-binary. In a June 2016 ruling, a Multnomah County judge, Amy Holmes Hehn, declared that Shupe’s sex was “hereby changed from female to non-binary.” The ruling made international news because Shupe was the first person in the U.S. to be legally recognized as non-binary.

In reporting this breakthrough, USA Today said that according to Shupe, his “three years of living like a woman were nearly as painful as those spent as a man.” Shupe told the newspaper that as a trans woman he had felt pressured “to maintain a hyper-feminine appearance 24-7”; otherwise, “you were back to getting called sir.” A year later Rod Kackley, writing at PJ Media, reported that Shupe planned “to be at the front of the line to apply for a new Oregon driver’s license” on which his non-binary status would be officially recorded. Kackley quoted Shupe as telling NBC News: “I’ve trembled with the fear of failure and cried tears until I had no more tears to cry, because of the magnitude of what’s been at stake — and now won.”

Shupe’s journey from male to female to non-binary made him a darling of the mainstream and gay media and of the trans and gay establishments. (Since same-sex marriage became the law of the land, many gay-activist groups have focused almost entirely on carrying water for the trans lobby.) Following the Oregon court ruling, the Guardian ran a piece by Shupe in which he declared that the U.S. “desperately needed a third sex classification of non-binary for all of the people such as myself that simply do not fit into the existing binary system of just male or female. As a transgender person who was forced to live as a male for nearly 50 years, and who then electively lived as a female for the following three years to alleviate my gender dysphoria, I have discovered that I am healthiest and best served by not being forcibly classified as either male or female against my will.”

But that wasn’t the end of Shupe’s story. In a July 2017 article, he expressed concern about the potential impact of his court ruling on “the future of transgender children.” He argued that such kids need “societal change,” not “surgical procedures” or “cross-sex hormones” or sterilization. In an radio interview at about the same time, Shupe supported a bathroom-privacy ballot initiative. Trans activists who had been his allies began to think twice. And Lambda Legal, the nation’s premier gay-rights law firm, which had agreed to help him obtain a gender-neutral passport, dropped him as a client. In a letter, which I have seen, dated August 1, two Lambda lawyers explained to Shupe that he had “taken a position contrary to, and irreconcilable with, Lambda Legal’s organizational interests, the transgender clients we currently represent in other legal matters, and members of the transgender community at large,” and that the firm had therefore concluded “that it is necessary for us to terminate our relationship.”

This didn’t silence Shupe. Writing in August 2017 for the Federalist, he stated that while he was a “staunch advocate for open transgender military service,” he opposed “all the nutty elements of transgenderism that insist on cutting off healthy body parts, claiming they’re ‘confirming their genders.’”