Update, February 2025
The internet is reporting that Elisa Rae Shupe has died.
Sue Kerr wrote: I Knew Elisa Rae Shupe (1963–2025) and She Deserved Better — Pittsburgh Lesbian Correspondents.
Additional reflections, 2023–2024
In April 2024, right-wing social media influencer Morgonn McMichael posted a video rant about the bathrooms at Kansas City International Airport. The airport hallway had three bathrooms: men's, women's, and gender-neutral, which McMichael did not mention. She complained about the existence of the gender-neutral bathroom as if it were the only option. "I have never seen an all-gender bathroom. I am not going in here," she said.
The "chair of the commission who helped craft this policy in Kansas City" responded that it was a "single-stall bathroom." (Which she might have discovered, had she gone in.) She responded, making a more specific argument: "I won’t apologize. ‘All gender’ multi stall bathrooms shouldn’t exist."
Someone else responded to suggest that McMichael has indeed seen a gender-neutral bathroom before: "Morgonn, real quick, the bathrooms on the plane you flew on to get there, what gender were those?"
You can feel like cis or trans or binary or nonbinary or none of those.
See here:
"'I’ve never felt like a woman, to be honest with you. I’ve never felt desirable. I’ve never felt feminine. I have to convince myself that I’m, like, a pretty girl,' Eilish explained. 'I identify as ‘she/her’ and things like that, but I’ve never really felt like a girl.'”
Billie Eilish is ‘physically attracted’ to women, but also ‘so intimidated’ by them | Lisa Respers France, CNN Entertainment, November 14, 2023
Eilish doesn't say (at least, the article doesn't quote her as saying) that there is something it feels like to feel like a girl — only that she personally doesn't feel it.
A poem, reflecting the words of "our fierce Zenobian / activist auntie mother of nine / in the serious blue abaya and / sensible shoes with a baby / in her lap":
"And
what is a woman? Certainly
not me. I have never felt like
a woman nor will I
ever be."
— "asushunamir," Banah el Ghadbanah, La Syrena: Visions of a Syrian Mermaid from Space, Ann Arbor, Michigan: Dzanc, 2022. p. 152.
The site with Shupe's essay has been made private, so you can't read it.
Also, relevantly: There was a 2023 email leak.
2017
Jamie Shupe made history in June 2016 in becoming the first person in the United States to have a legally designated "non-binary" gender identity, represented on an identity card issued by the Oregon Department of Motor Vehicles.
Shupe was born male and today prefers not to be classified as either male or female and wants to be referred to with the pronoun "they" rather than "he" or "she." They don't see eye-to-eye with people who choose to transition from one gender to another, although Shupe personally attempted a male-to-female transition for several years before settling on a non-binary identity.
In a nearly 11,000-word essay "You Can't Feel Like a Girl," posted July 22, 2017 to a blog called "First, Do No Harm: Youth Gender Professionals" with the tagline "Professionals Thinking Critically about the Youth Transgender Narrative," Shupe tears into transgender people and their care providers. It's a rant with no typical essay structure and many typos.
The rant includes a lot of personal information, including Shupe's declaration that they have "Complex PTSD" and probably "Asperger's". They said they'd taken four years of female hormones but still hadn't achieved the body transformation results they'd hoped for. Claiming to be happy about never having had genital surgery, Shupe refers to people who have transitioned from male to female as "surgery queens," as here — "The surgery queens aren’t proper role models for these trans children. They’re what they get to see at the circus" — and as "monsters," as here — "Trans women are like the beast Cerberus, the monstrous multi-headed dog that guards the gates of the Underworld to prevent the dead from leaving."
Here's where their information comes from:
"due to my narrow interests and the fact that I have nothing better to do as a retired person, I’ve spent every day of the last four years studying transgenderism through the lens of media articles. I don’t have much use for academia or it’s [sic] articles. I like to see what institutions like the Daily Mail have to say about people like me. It’s not uncommon for me to get 100 Google email alerts per day for keywords like transgender or gender dysphoria. That’s how I spend my days."
Shupe says several times that transgender women are not "real" women because they don't have the same reproductive biology. The final paragraph says: "This is my coming out as a TERF and a SWERF," i.e., Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist and Sex-Worker-Exclusionary Radical Feminist. Shupe's position here is consistent with the title of their blog post: They believe a boy can't coherently say that they "feel like" a girl. A boy can feel feminine, but the boy remains a boy or perhaps third-gender and is not, and will never be, a girl. A key theme of this essay is that, since gender transition is invalid (in Shupe's estimation) for people of all ages, children shouldn't be allowed to transition either. Shupe says that "these charlatans deserve to be fired at best and jailed at worst" and twice names a particularly well-respected children's endocrinologist as a "monster."
Shupe claims to be a better role model for gender-variant children than a gender-transitioned person can be, given that all the emotional difficulty they've experienced in life has been caused by external sources (discrimination, shaming, etc.) and that they have never been suicidal, whereas people who go through gender transition have emotional difficulties that arise from the inside and they tend to be suicidal. I disagree with this on the following points:
- Everyone has an inside and an outside, and our feelings arise from complex interactions in our inner and outer worlds. It isn't possible that all of someone's negative emotions have been solely the result of others dumping those feelings nonconsensually into them. If you discover yourself to have become a reservoir for other people's toxins, you are still responsible for processing it and overcoming it, and whether and how you do it affects whether you are a good emotional role model for others. You can't say: There's toxic crap inside me but I didn't put it there so I'm not responsible for it. Nor can you point at others and say: They put their own toxic crap inside themselves and they must assume full responsibility for it.
- It isn't obvious that never having been suicidal in the first place makes one a better role model than having suffered with suicidal thoughts and still being alive — especially not for people who are suicidal and would like a role model who has dealt with that.
- And since Shupe says that transition promotes self-hate in transgender people, it isn't clear how Shupe managed to personally avoid this pitfall when they attempted transition.
Shupe goes on to say that the idea of "feeling like a girl" is incoherent, given that girl is simply a fact about one's biology; there can only be "feeling feminine." This is where the title of the essay comes from. Unfortunately, it overlooks that there are multiple ways of being feminine (some of them culturally specific) and that they can overlap with ways of being masculine. For example, nurturing can be interpreted as both feminine and masculine. Femininity and masculinity are not always polar opposites, so they are subject to interpretation. I believe that Shupe's thesis makes an incorrect claim here. It is possible to feel like a man or a woman. What that means is that you want to be seen as a man or a woman, no matter what gin joint you walk into, no matter if you're feeling a bit more or less feminine or masculine than usual. You may feel very feminine and want to express your femininity and be perceived as feminine, yet you still want to be seen as a man. You may feel very masculine and want to express your masculinity and be perceived as masculine, yet you still want to be seen as a woman. The gender is a convenient box that you don't mind fitting into on a regular or at least semi-regular basis. You accept it because it feels accurate or useful. That's what it means to feel like a man or woman. It's entirely reasonable to feel that way. Many people have that feeling about the sex with which they were born, and they are generally known as cisgender; a relatively smaller number of people have that feeling about the other sex, and they are known as transgender, and they are entitled to have that feeling, too.
And if we say that this thing I just defined as feeling like a man or woman, that that's what is meant by feeling masculine or feminine — well, then we're just arguing about proper labels, not about the existence of the feeling.
If Shupe's argument rests on people needing to acknowledge and accept the sex they were born as, of course Shupe is implicitly calling into question their own choice legally designate their gender as non-binary (assuming they aren't intersex).
Shupe briefly repeats the anti-trans talking point that children's gender transition is an attempt to straighten out gay kids. ("They can’t be gay, so they’re being surgically made straight instead.") This is not true. I've discussed it elsewhere.
Shupe uses language that implies that transition is something that a doctor does to a transgender person. Language of autonomy — transition is something one chooses and does for oneself — is lacking. In Shupe's essay, transition is also treated as entirely medical, whereas in real life, there is an important social aspect. Throughout history, some individuals have always managed to achieve a complete binary transition without hormones or surgery because they happened to pass very well. That remains possible today. Some people just put on the clothes of the opposite sex and immediately pass. Shupe does not acknowledge this in their essay, probably because they are primarily upset about irreversible medical intervention. Would Shupe accept other people's binary gender transition if they managed to accomplish it without medical intervention or with mild or reversible medical steps?
Transgender men (people who transition from female to male) are largely ignored in this essay, which is probably beneficial for them, although there is an incoherent paragraph that refers to them in the context of the public debate over bathroom use.
"I wish right now that the doctors who are pausing puberty would instead pause for a moment and take a look at the chaos resulting from the mess they’ve created. It’s harming women. The ones that are real women. Trans men have yet to harm men. Testosterone injections have been around for decades and there’s still no trans guy in the NFL. All it’s good for is soldiers in the bathroom war. 'See, I have facial hair, that makes me a man! Women you should be scared.' Women aren’t scared of trans men, I’ve asked them. They’re scared of penises or people that used to have penises. That’s why we don’t have a peace agreement for the bathroom war yet with the conservatives."
The meaning is hard to ascertain, but it was probably intended to be construed more like this: Some cisgender women assert fear or disgust or hypothetical transgender women and say they are reluctant to share the bathroom with them because they assume that transgender women are essentially "guys in dresses" — lecherous, creepy, possibly dangerous, and easy to spot, causing discomfort in others as soon as their faces are visible. Someone might challenge this by asking the cisgender woman: If she indeed believes that transgender women are really men, then logically doesn't she also believe that transgender men are really women? So does she feel comfortable if a transgender man — a person who presents as a man, wearing masculine clothes, who might have a beard, flat chest, deep voice — walks into a women's public bathroom? Well, Shupe has helpfully asked "them" (at least one cisgender woman) whether they believe they are afraid of "trans men," and they said no, so really it's transgender women (not transgender men) who are the primary cause of conflict here. Great. Shupe's interview question is irrelevant. In real life, in public bathrooms, trans men often aren't identifiable as such; we're identifiable as people who don't belong in a women's bathroom. It doesn't matter if some cis women believe they're unintimidated by their imaginary conception of a trans man. What matters is that lots of people (cis or trans) who use women's bathrooms would be alarmed by a real trans man, a stranger, entering it unannounced. The pragmatic conclusion at which many trans men arrive is that we should use men's bathrooms. Everyone involved is happier.
A lot of Shupe's essay is about adults who transition and don't adjust well, have botched surgeries, or other miscellaneous regrets and disappointments. Shupe says that no one (regardless of age) should transition from one side of the gender binary to the other (male-to-female or female-to-male) because that's not a valid identity, it increases internal distress, it doesn't dismantle patriarchy, and it injures women. To the contrary, it is a valid identity (given that many people successfully live it; how else would we validate it?); gender transition greatly reduces some people's distress, both internal and external; our personal gender identities as "woman," "man," or "other" do not need to dismantle patriarchy (everyone is responsible for being an ethical person and taking actions to address injustice, but our identities do not have to dismantle patriarchy while we sleep because that does not make sense); and the existence of trans people doesn't harm cis women (Shupe asserts this multiple times without providing a clue what kind of harm they are referring to).
I'm glad that Shupe helped clear the way for legal recognition of nonbinary people. People should be free to assert their identities — and to transition or not. I hope we can have inclusive politics.
