Elisa Rae Shupe appears to have died by suicide.

Substack user and queer veteran zerodoesntsleep has reported that an unnamed suicide victim, whose body was discovered at the Syracuse VA Medical Center on January 27, has been privately identified as Elisa Rae Shupe by an anonymous recipient of Shupe’s suicide note. The deceased had reportedly wrapped herself in a trans flag.

Assuming this information is correct, it appears that Shupe wished for her death to be publicised, and so I wish to contribute to doing so by reproducing both existing statements on her death and previous context about her life. Shupe was a public whistleblower who cared deeply about how her public image was to be used after her death. Her voice and story should be preserved.

Who was Elisa Rae Shupe?

Shupe was a retired military veteran who gained public prominence in 2016 by becoming the first person in the US to receive legal recognition as nonbinary. (Shupe has identified herself as both nonbinary and a trans woman; she used she/her pronouns, as of her most recent online publications.)

From around 2017–2021, Shupe legally detransitioned, espoused anti-trans positions and worked with anti-trans groups. She then disaffiliated herself from those groups and leaked a large amount of their emails and documents, resulting in an influential Mother Jones exposé.

Jude Doyle profiled Shupe in Xtra Magazine in 2023, after Shupe sent him a cache of her 2017–2023 emails. The account Doyle unspools is a clarifying and disturbing portrayal of “the making of a detransitioner”. Inadequate medical care and monitoring left Shupe with complications from taking estrogen; she began to espouse beliefs that commonly reflect internalised transphobia, claiming that her identification as female had been illegitimate and that gender dysphoria was a psychiatrists’ invention “fuelled by societal norms and sex stereotypes.” Anti-trans and right-wing groups quickly offered Shupe roles and media contacts, and a lawsuit Shupe instigated against the VA shuttled her into the grip of the Christian right. Meanwhile, her mental health was deteriorating under the strain.

Her breaking point came after a highly trafficked op-ed at the Daily Signal, in which she called herself a mentally ill autogynephile and repeated that “I should have been stopped [from transitioning], but out-of-control transgender activism had made the nurse practitioner too scared to say no.” Being put into conversion therapy, she wrote, “would have protected me from my inclination to crossdress and my risky sexual transgressions, of which there were many.”

In the days after the op-ed was published, “the reality of how I had portrayed myself set in,” Shupe writes to me in an email. She believes, not without reason, that the whole world sees her as a pervert and a lunatic: “I’d destroyed my life. The bridge back to being trans was burned.”

Elisa Rae Shupe is a complicated figure who did significant harm to other trans people in this period, but she was also an obviously vulnerable trans woman being exploited by anti-trans and political detransitioner movements, coerced and encouraged to ‘destroy her life’ for their benefit. She describes herself, after leaving the movement, as “all alone.”

In 2024, Shupe wrote an article for TechPolicy concerning the autofiction novel she self-published in 2023 (under the name Ellen Rae), AI Machinations, which she created by using generative AI to generate small blocks of text. In said article, Shupe says that she was recognised as a gifted writer in the military and that it has been her lifelong dream to become a published writer, but that her disabilities — “C-PTSD, bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder, a Chiara 1 brain stem malformation, and gender dysphoria” — had “severely impact[ed]” her “cognitive and creative abilities”.

Shupe continually battled to assert her autonomy and voice and, despite everything, did so. Her life was also imbricated, even before her death, with complicated questions about transness and suicidality. Doyle references her email exchanges with anti-trans figurehead Lisa Marchiano, in which Marchiano asks Shupe to help her gather evidence that the “trans narrative” — the availability of transition — is “making kids feel suicidal”, in a period where Shupe herself was experiencing suicidality connected to losing her access to transition care. In this context, Shupe’s own final statements on her experience of mental illness and of suicidality are an important recalibration of agency.

I have reproduced her last statement here, again from zerodontsleep’s Substack. She sent this to local media organisations, which have not published it. As such, I believe to amplify it is in accordance with her wishes.

Email sent 11:00 AM Monday Jan 27, 2025

This is the message from Elisa Rae Shupe, the first person to obtain a non-binary gender transition, to the Trump Administration:

Fuck You America!

I don’t want your hatred.

I don’t want the military decorations and medals you awarded me.

I don’t want your pension money for my distinguished military service and service-connected disabilities.

I don’t want your health care to treat the mental illnesses you caused.

I don’t want more psychiatric ward commitments to keep me alive in a nation that I despise.

I don’t want to be buried in any of your state or national cemetery’s for veterans and military retirees.

I don’t want to be buried anywhere on American soil.

I don’t want any military honors or ceremonies to mark my death.

I don’t want my ashes to be stored on American soil.

I want my ashes or remains to be spread or buried in international waters.

I don’t want your flag anywhere near my body, remains, or ashes.

I don’t want any members of my family other than my spouse to be on the vessel that disposes of my ashes or remains.

My death is not a surrender.

My death as a member of the third gender and transgender population does not mean you won.

It solely marks the end of our association.

You are not the land of the free.

You are not a country getting made great again.

Too much demonstrated hatred throughout your existence extinguishes any claim to previous greatness.

You are a cesspool of zealots that worship a god that does not and has not ever existed.

Enjoy your new royal family and third world dictator.

I refuse to participate any further.

Have that Nazi piece of shit Elon Musk and his DOGE henchmen deduct the savings from my $93,000 of federal pensions from your bankrupt coffers.

The white man decimated and massacred the indigenous populations of the third gender on the lands now called America. It was only fitting that a white person restored it.

You cannot erase non-binary and transgender people because you give birth to more of us each day.