Mainstream US Media Cites BDSM Fetishist in Defense of Childhood Medical 'Transition'

A U.S. Army veteran who was widely celebrated in mainstream media as the first legally recognized ‘non-binary’ person has been featured positively in a recent New York Times hit piece aimed at vocal detransitioners who criticize medical interventions for minors on the basis of “gender identity.”

Elisa Rae Shupe, 59, formerly James Clifford Shupe, was the first individual in the United States to be legally recognized as ‘non-binary’. Over the past decade, he has changed his identity four times – from male, to female, to non-binary, to male, and currently identifies as female again. He has repeatedly claimed that he suffers from a variety of mental illnesses and has written in extensive detail about the sexual fetishes that motivated his “gender identity.”

By 2022, Shupe had come full circle and was again claiming to be a woman. He legally changed his name to “Elisa Rae,” and frequently posted criticism on social media of women he labeled “TERFs.”

In March, in what appears to be a collaboration with a Swiss hacker who was previously investigated by the U. S. government, Shupe leaked over 2000 pages of e-mail exchanges he had with politicians in an effort to discredit bills designed to protect children from irreversible medical transition. The recent New York Times article which mentions Shupe’s leaked emails, titled, “How a Few Stories of Regret Fuel the Push to Restrict Gender Transition Care,” was published on May 16 and confirms that he also sent the files to the publication.

Mother Jones was the first outlet to reference Shupe’s e-mails on March 8. “Inside the Secret Working Group That Helped Push Anti-Trans Laws Across the Country,” calls attention to the approximately 2,600 e-mail exchanges dating from 2019 to 2021 given by Shupe to the press. The communications involve discussions of the Vulnerable Child Protection Act, a bill proposed by South Dakota Republican state Representative Fred Deutsch which would have prohibited medical ‘transition’ interventions for children under the age of 16.

“It was like Deutsch assembled a team of Navy SEALs — we were all trained killers in a specialty,” Shupe is quoted as saying in the Mother Jones article, comparing the debate over halting children’s puberty to military warfare. “It’s like they want to do as much damage to the trans community as they can,” he added.

Within hours of publication, the 2600-page document was released by Maia Arson Crimew, a Swiss hacker and developer who refers to himself as a “mentally ill enby polyam trans lesbian anarchist kitten robot”. Formerly known as Tillie Kottman, Crimew was previously indicted by a U.S. grand jury on criminal charges, including fraud and identity theft, related to his alleged hacking activity between 2019 and 2021.

Personal contact information was not redacted from the document containing the emails, resulting in hundreds of individuals being flooded with messages containing transgender pornography and death threats.

Kara Dansky, president of the U.S. chapter of Women’s Declaration International (WDI) was among the hundreds of people who were targeted for digital abuse in response to the e-mail leaks. Dansky said she suspects Shupe of coordinating with Crimew, but “can’t prove it.”

On March 10, Dansky published an open letter to the author of the Mother Jones hit piece, Madison Pauly, slamming her “hard-hitting piece of investigative journalism about a bunch of people emailing each other about draft legislation.” Dansky also revealed that the day the article went live, she received an anonymous and threatening e-mail that was sent to the 215 people whose contact details were clearly visible in the document shared by Crimew.

“You have all been exposed for participating in genocide… Your god will never forgive you,” reads the message.

On the same day as the release of the Mother Jones article, Shupe published a blog post admitting to sending out the exchanges to the press and linking to the piece. He also appeared to have advanced knowledge that the article would be released.

“While waiting for Mother Jones to publish this story, I’ve been listening to Hells Bells by AC/DC. Hell’s bells, motherfuckers! Satan in the form of investigative reporting is coming for you,” Shupe wrote.

Dansky said that she had been flooded with e-mails that either threatened violence against her or contained pornography, much of which was transgender-themed content.

“This is the most vicious movement I have seen in my lifetime. Honest actors want their political opponents’ views to be out in the open so they can refute them. ‘Trans’ is an industry-fueled men’s rights movement that resorts to sending pornography and threats of violence instead,” Dansky said.

She confirmed that 215 other individuals whose contact information Crimew publicly exposed had received similar communications including pornography and death threats, and criticized legacy media for their role in lionizing trans activists.

“Today, many media outlets that were once considered progressive, including Mother Jones, sing the praises of misogynist men like Shupe who claim to be women. The media has become a mouthpiece for a multi-billion dollar industry whose aim is to abolish the material reality of sex at the altar of ‘gender identity.’”

In a blog post authored in March, Shupe called for mainstream media to once again publish articles about his life following the e-mail leaks, and he appears to have been paying close attention to any reporting regarding his self-declared identity. A previous post by Shupe suggests that he monitors his site’s traffic.

“Today marks the first time since I retransitioned to a female gender identity that a mainstream media outlet has reported that news… The announcement that I reclaimed my transgender identity should get celebrated,” he said. “It’s my goal to be a better role model in the future… The one that trans kids deserved all along.”

Shupe also asserted that he suffers from borderline personality disorder, a condition that he claimed made him “vulnerable” to “gender-critical extremism.”

Two days later, in a separate blog post, Shupe made a veiled threat to his critics: “Every day I’m dumping the bodies (of evidence) TERFies. And there’s nothing that you can do to fucking stop me,” Shupe wrote, and linked to Crimew’s tweet containing the compilation of Shupe’s e-mails.

Over the past decade, Shupe has gone from an army sergeant to identifying as a woman, then as ‘non-binary’, followed by a period of de-transition activism, and currently has begun claiming to be a woman again.

In a 2015 editorial published by The New York Times, Shupe said he began to identify as transgender in 2013, at the age of 49, and that his awareness of his “mortality played a role in making that life-altering decision.”

“I had to decide if I was going to begin living authentically as the woman that I have always been for my remaining years, or remain silent and get buried as the male that I am not by family members,” Shupe wrote, bemoaning the “abuse and wrath of an often unforgiving public.”

“I have effectively traded my white male privilege to become one of America’s most hated minorities,” he stated, in regards to his decision to publicly declare himself to be a woman.

The following year, Shupe made headlines and was featured positively in a variety of publications after a judge in Oregon granted him a “a non-binary gender classification.” Shupe, 52 at the time, was legally listed as female in his documentation. His legal petition therefore requested to have his sex marker changed from ‘female’ to ‘non-binary.’

In 2019, Shupe came forward to tell conservative outlet The Daily Signal that “it was all a sham” and blamed his identity confusion on post-traumatic stress disorder. Shupe began campaigning against transgenderism on both a blog and on Twitter under his account notabledesister, where he gained some credibility among the detransitioner and gender critical community.

In the article, Shupe says that he was going through a severe psychological disturbance when he began to claim a female identity.

“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,” he wrote. “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… I should have been stopped, but out-of-control, transgender activism had made the nurse practitioner too scared to say no.”

In addition to Shupe’s alleged mental health issues and identity crises, he has a disturbing history of sexual coercion. Two years ago, he confessed in a blog post to various sadomasochistic fetishes and to “coercing” his wife to participate in sexual practices, which he says she “obliged” because she “feared” him.

In 2021, Shupe authored a blog titled Autogynephilia Diaries, where he penned a lengthy account of his sexual proclivities, including photos of his sex toys and a breast pump he used to induce lactation “for fetish use.”

“My problem is a paraphilic disorder. That is, it’s not about gender identity; it’s about abnormal paraphilic sexual desire,” Shupe wrote.

“If you struggle to understand this concept of self-love, maybe I can explain it to you this way. Like many males, as a teenager, I longed to touch the breasts of a female. And once I found a girlfriend, I couldn’t keep my hands off of hers. But now that I’ve grown my breasts, I can’t keep my hands off them,” Shupe confessed.

He continued on to explain his sexual practices and admitted to coercing his wife into participating in his sexual fetish.

“I would don a wig, clothing that I imagined a woman wearing during housekeeping, and heels,” Shupe states, before engaging in “half-hearted housework.” Afterward, he says, he would expect his wife to give him “a sexual reward.”

“However, some of my worst behavior occurred when I began to demand that my wife play the role of a straight man during marital sex, coercing her to satisfy my need to pretend that I was a female.”

“My wife reluctantly obliged my paraphilic fantasies on these occasions because she feared the alternative scenario. Me divorcing her. Or me going out to places such as adult theaters and having men indulge them, something that I’ve frequently done despite the high risk of getting HIV or other sexually transmitted diseases.”

“Transvestic disorder, pedophilia, voyeurism, and exhibitionism are the four most common paraphilias. Don’t forget. If you have one paraphilia, the chances are that you have accompanying ones, too,” Shupe wrote, and added, “My paraphilias cannot be changed. I can only medically manage them with chemical or surgical castration and intensive therapy.”

It was around this period, between approximately 2020 – 2021, when Shupe created a website called Female Crime which was dedicated to “documenting crime by female pedophiles, lesbians, feminists, teachers, and others” and had its own category for “gender critical feminists.”

Disturbingly, Shupe published a message directed specifically at me and included a video of his wife claiming that he had never abused her. In what was merely coincidental timing, I had just published a Substack article highlighting how Shupe was referenced by a prominent academic associated with the United Nations (UN) who campaigned for controversial reforms to Scotland's legal recognition of a “gender identity.” He also attempted unsuccessfully to have my article removed.

Shupe has persistently attacked anyone who criticizes him or exposes his history of fetishism and deception. Donovan Cleckley became a target for his bullying after he called attention to his tactics and had some of his content removed in response to a DMCA complaint filed by Shupe.

In my experience with writing about men who lay claim to womanhood, I’ve observed a common theme. Many have a history of pathological sexual disorders, and often the most determined and vocal of these men, like Shupe, have a military background.

The designer of the trans flag, Robert Hogge, is a Navy veteran, for instance, and the founder of the Transgender American Veterans Association (TAVA). Hogge, who goes by Monica Helms, is also an admitted fetishist who has said that he has stolen women’s underwear for his own gratification and began identifying as a lesbian woman while working at a porn shop.

David Chester Warfield, or Dana Rivers, a trans activist and Air Force veteran, harassed women who attended the female-only music festival called Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival (MichFest) in the early 2000’s.

The slur “TERF” (Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist) was coined in direct response to MichFest’s policy of maintaining a female-only space.

Both Hogge and Warfield pressured the event’s organizers to admit men who claimed to be women. Last year, Warfield / Rivers was found guilty of the triple homicide of a lesbian couple and their son.