The Daily Signal - #418: Former Transgender Jamie Shupe Details How Process Affected Him

Episode Date: March 14, 2019

Following up on his viral essay in The Daily Signal, former transgender and nonbinary person Jamie Shupe joins us on the podcast to share more details about his journey, how the mainstream media lost interest once he went back to being a man, and why he thinks it hurts men and women to promote transgenderism. We also cover these stories:•Almost all House members voted for a resolution asking the Justice Department to release the report by Special Counsel Robert Mueller.•The Supreme Court of Connecticut issued a ruling that could pave the way for lawsuits against the company that manufactured the gun used in the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre. •There’s now more millionaires in the United States than there are people in Sweden or Portugal. The Daily Signal podcast is available on Ricochet, iTunes, SoundCloud, Google Play, or Stitcher. All of our podcasts can be found at DailySignal.com/podcasts. If you like what you hear, please leave a review. You can also leave us a message at 202-608-6205 or write us at [e-mail]. Enjoy the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Friday, March 15th. I'm Kate Trinco. And I'm Daniel Davis. Jamie Shoup received glowing coverage in the New York Times back in 2015 for being transgender. He then became the first American to ever get non-binary legal status. Now he's not getting so much love from the mainstream media. He's rejected transgender ideology and reclaimed his male sex. Today we'll have him on the program.

And by the way, if you're enjoying this podcast, please consider leaving a review or a five-star rating on iTunes, and please subscribe yourself and encourage others to subscribe. Now, on to our top news. In a rare show of bipartisanship, almost all House members voted for a resolution asking the Justice Department to release the report by Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Quote, a vote for this resolution will send a clear signal to both the American people and to the Department of Justice that Congress believes transparency is a fundamental principle, necessary to ensure that the government remains accountable to the public, said Representative Jerry Nadler,

a Democrat who chairs the House Judiciary Committee. Well, House Democrats have unveiled a bill called the Equality Act, which they say would ban discrimination against LGBTQ people. The bill would add sexual orientation and gender identity as protected classes under federal civil rights law. But critics say it would force Americans to go along with certain falsehoods, like a person's self-perceived. gender. Implications of the bill would be a national transgender medical mandate, a transgender bathroom policy, and forced recognition of preferred pronouns. Some states have already adopted similar policies, and as an example of what's happened, a number of faith-based adoption providers

are now being threatened with bankruptcy over lawsuits because they won't place children with same-sex couples. That kind of thing under the Equality Act would count as discrimination and would be punished severely. The bill looks unlikely to advance since Republicans hold both the Senate and the White House, and it's also noteworthy that most Americans oppose the potential consequences of the bill. According to research by the Heritage Foundation, 63% don't believe that a biological man, who believes he's a woman, should have access to a woman's bathroom. In addition, 65% of those surveyed said that nonprofits and charities should have the freedom to provide services that don't affirm same-sex marriage and gender transition.

It's not every day that Senator Bernie Sanders and Mike Lee join up to co-sponsor legislation. The odd couple were behind a bill calling for no more U.S. military assistance in Yemen that just passed the Senate Wednesday, 54 to 46, with most Republicans voting against it. In the conflict, the U.S. has sided with the coalition led by Saudi Arabia, which is fighting those associated with Iran. Quote, with passage of this resolution,

we have reasserted Congress's constitutional role over declaring war and overputting American blood and treasure on the line. It is long past time that we end U.S. involvement in this unauthorized, unjustified, and immoral war that has caused immense human suffering, said Lee, in a statement. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, however, had a different take, saying our focus should be on ending the war in Yemen responsibly, pulling the plug on support to our partners, only undermines the very leverage and influence that we need to help facilitate the U.N.'s diplomatic efforts. The Supreme Court of Connecticut dealt a blow to firearm manufacturers in a ruling Thursday that could pave the way for lawsuits against the company that manufactured the gun used in the 2012 Sandy Hook Massacre. That horrific school shooting claimed the lives of 26 people, including 21st graders. The court's decision allows families to get around a federal immunity provision that protects gun manufacturing,

from liability claims when their firearms are used in a crime. Lawyers representing the families of the victims argued that the gun manufacturer made a deliberate effort to market their guns to troubled young men. So now there's more millionaires in the United States than there are people in Sweden or Portugal. Over 10.2 million households are worth a whopping 1 to 5 million, and that doesn't even count however much their house is worth. That's per a survey from the Spectrum Group, as reported Bloomberg. When it comes to the really rich, there's about 1.4 million American households worth 5 to 25 million and 173,000 worth 25 million or more. Well, if you like this podcast, we think you'll also like the Freedom Caucus podcast. It's hosted by Congressman Jody Heise of the Freedom Caucus, and you can find it on iTunes and SoundCloud.

Here's a clip of Congressman Heiss talking to Jim Jordan, founder of the Freedom Caucus, about the double standard that elite public officials often have for themselves. You mentioned the investigation with the IRS. That was a huge deal. And so you've had some major investigations, some major issues like that one with the IRS, like the Benghazi attack. What are some of the things about those investigations that probably most of our listeners, may not know anything about.

Well, the first thing is they go to the fundamentals. I mean, you think about an agency with the power that the IRS has over our lives and the fact that they systematically, and for a sustained period of time, targeted people for their political beliefs. I mean, you think about the privileges we have as being Americans under the Constitution, under the Bill of Rights, under the First Amendment. First Amendment, your right to practice your faith the way you want, your right to assemble, you're right to petition your government,

your right of freedom of the press. But the most fundamental liberty you have under the First Amendment, your right to speak, and particularly to speak in a political fashion, and yet that's exactly, exactly and precisely what the IRS went after. These groups who were seeking tax-exempt status, which used to be just kind of a rubber-stamped thing, they were harassing groups for doing that because they were political, conservative groups, excuse me, who were against Obama-care and against the crazy spending. So that's why you get so focused on it. And then with Benghazi, your government, your government is supposed to tell you the truth. And we have very very.

four amazing Americans, Ambassador Stevens, Sean Smith, Glenn Doherty, and Tyrone Woods, who gave their life for our country on September 11, 2012. And while that fight was still going on, Tyrone Woods and Glendority are still on the roof of the annex fighting for their lives and defending their fellow citizens while that fight was still going on, the Secretary of State, Secretary Clinton issued a statement that became the official statement of our government. At 1008 that evening, she said this, some have sought to justify that vicious behavior as a response to inflammatory material posted on the internet. She was blaming a video before the fight was even over.

Instead of being focused on helping our people who were, as I said, fighting for their lives, they were misleading the American people because we know the video wasn't the cause of it. Because the very next day she told the Egyptian prime minister, excuse me, Egyptian ambassador, she told him, direct quote, she told him, we know the video had nothing to do with it. It was a planned attack, not a protest. So privately telling the truth, public. publicly telling the American people something different. And they did it because they were 56 days before an election.

So you can't have the IRS harassing people. You can't have your government misleading the people. And when those kind of things happen, I feel like it's our job as members of the Oversight Committee to expose it and make sure the American people get the full story. In remarks Thursday at the Heritage Foundation, Senator Lindsay Graham, Republican of South Carolina, and chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, made it clear he's ready to get these confirmation. through. He said, quote, I'm committed to processing as many highly qualified conservative judges at the district court level as possible. We're off to a very good start. End quote. There were 144 current judicial vacancies as of March 11th. Up next, we talked to Jamie Schoop, who after years

of experimenting with gender reembraced his birth sex. Do you own an Alexa? You can now get the Daily Signal podcast every day as part of your daily flash briefing. It's easy to do. Just open up your Alexa app, go to settings, and select flash briefing. From there, you can search for the Daily Signal podcast and add it to your flash briefing so you can stay up to date with the top news of the day that the liberal media isn't covering. Well, we're joined now over Skype by a man named Jamie Schupe. He's the author of a recent Daily Signal op-ed that tells the story of his journey into transgenderism, to non-binary, and eventually back to male. Jamie, thanks so much for being on the podcast.

Thank you for having me. So, Jamie, you came into Public View back in 2015 when you wrote in the New York Times about your decision to be a transgender woman. Since then, you switched to non-binary. You became the first American ever to receive non-binary legal status. And then finally, this year, you reclaimed your birth sex of male. Before we get into the questions, I just want to thank you for being so open and vulnerable to write the piece. Yeah, I really did put my... myself out there. I mean, the worst possible thing in the world is to admit your mental illnesses

and to admit the, like, the sexual issues that I have. Well, we do appreciate it. So our first question here is pretty basic. What inclined you toward transgenderism? What made you think that despite your body deep down inside that you were a woman? I'm guilty of conflating sex stereotypes with thinking that I was a female. You know, I've always had this internal view of myself as being super feminine, which is highly distorted because the rest of the world has never seen that. Yeah, that should have been a red flag. It's one of the gender dysphoria traits that's listed in the DSM.

But again, because there was so many failures in my therapy, nobody ever confronted me with that, nobody ever explained it. Yeah, I mean, I, I, I, I, I, I thought, you know, things like wearing women's clothing and having these psychological traits of being a female made me a female, and it doesn't. So you mentioned in your op-a that you think you actually have a certain condition that I'm not going to try to pronounce. But could you explain that condition to us and why you think you actually had that? I'm assuming we're talking about Dr. Ray Blanchard's diagnosis of autogynophilia. Yes, what you said.

Yeah. Yeah, we're talking about autogonophilia. You know, that was part of me going back to my birth sex. Because, you know, this is this thing that's been in the back of my head for years now as a transgender woman. And even while I was non-binary, and it was locked away in this trunk, and I was refusing to face it. Well, I mean, here, back in January of 2019, I went ahead and I broke out the articles from Blanchard. and I was just like, oh my God, you know, this, this is true. This is who I am.

What it means is like I'm sexually attracted to the idea of myself as a woman. Even, you know, when I have sex with men, all I picture is me being a woman in my head, and that's the motivation for the sex ex. I'm not attracted to the man's body whatsoever like a gay male is. it's just strictly a sexual parapheria. And it's the worst thing in the world to have to admit about yourself, but it's completely true. So, Jamie, in your piece, you talked about some of the painful roots of this in your childhood. You talked about abuse and how that factored into your mindset.

That's also something we've seen among a lot of other people who become transgender. Tell us about that. Yeah, the childhood sexual abuse really missed me. up. Okay, so I, you know, I grew up in the Maryland suburbs, one of those white picket fence things. And, you know, football was called smear the queer. And it was really painful to be getting sexually molested by my male uncle and then going out with the neighborhood kids and playing smear the queer. And, I mean, I just had this tremendous guilt about, oh, my God, do they, did they know I'm the queer? And I felt damaged. And at one point,

point, I even use it as a metal crutch to tell myself that I believed I was a female because of the sexual abuse. I would say, okay, well, he targeted me because I was really a female, which, you know, that isn't true. He was a pedophile. He was attracted to little boys. Yeah. So, I mean, that's, there aren't really words for how sad that that is that that happened to you. And thank you for sharing that. I would just wonder, what would you say? I mean, horribly, this does happen to children. And how do you think we as a society? I mean, you're not happy with where your path ended or went. How do we help kids who experience this and adults who experience this in a real way?

Well, we have to start talking about it. And better yet, we even have to start protecting young boys and males. Absolutely. You know, one of the things I've done is I have a WordPress site. It's called bathroom incidents. And, I mean, it's absolutely mind-blowing. the number of little boys that get molested in bathrooms in public bathrooms. I mean, people always think automatically that it's females.

Like I said, if you read this WordPress site of mine, it's like, oh, my God, you would not believe the scale of the horror. Yeah, it's that bad. You know, something, too, that happened to me that was very influential. So this is a pretty bad dig on the Veterans Administration. on the West Coast they actually prescribed to me synthetic marijuana and I was in the medical marijuana program so then when the estrogen injections put me in the psych ward on the East Coast and one of the conditions of letting me out of the psych ward was I had to go to a drug rehab and so I went it was down in Florida and basically the days in the drug rehab were spent you know just unpacking our issues

And I was in a group with a whole bunch of men. And, you know, one day I started talking about my sexual abuse. And when I did, almost every single hand in the room went up that they had been molested as children. That's how bad this is. Wow. Yeah. Yeah, you mentioned the VA. I should mention also you're a veteran.

I spent 18 years in the Army. So when you sought out help from the VA for this mental illness, you were going to you know, you wanted to transition to a woman, but did, I mean, did they know about your past abuse and did you encounter any caution or resistance at all? No, sadly, the resistance was zero. It's just like I wrote in the op-ed. You know, they've been conditioned where somebody shows up and says, you know, okay, I'm a female or I think I'm a female, they automatically bless off on that. Even the psychological exams they gave me, which There was three very thorough ones that lasted for hours.

Basically, I mean, they spent a lot of time picking apart my childhood. They ignored most of my military traumas. And they didn't even really talk about gender dysphoria, even though they would write things like patient meets criteria for gender dysphoria and the final reports. I mean, it was a really sad situation. So when you started transitioning, what was it like for you? Did you start feeling mentally healthier?

Did you feel better? What was that experience like? That was, I was promised that this would help me. Even the informed consent document in my VA medical records states that, you know, you will get better mental health from taking hormones. It was just the opposite. I steadily deteriorated. They had to keep me on-sike drugs.

Like I said, I was in the medical marijuana program in Oregon. I stayed doped up all the time. Yeah, I mean, this did not help me at all. It destabilized my mental health because I was living in a false reality. I was fighting my body. I was fighting society. Yeah, I mean, I perfectly understand why this kills people and why there's such a high suicide rate. Society gets the blame.

It's not society. It's the program itself that's killing us. Yeah. Could you actually expound on that a little bit? Because often the thing that we hear is that if you don't allow people to transition, they will commit suicide. But it sounds like you're arguing that the transition itself can make you suicidal. Yes, it does because, you know, that's an interesting question.

Should, like, let's do the chicken and the egg thing. Does the gender dysphoria really come before or does it come after you've convinced somebody that are the opposite sex? My argument is that it comes afterward. That's exactly what happened in my case. You know, I'll give you an example. once I diagnosed myself as being a female and people are affirmed to me as a female. Okay, so I'm looking at myself and I'm going, oh, my God, I'm in a male body. And you set out on this crash course to turn yourself into a female and it's impossible.

You know, in the military, we call that setting yourself up for failure. Like I said, it's literally impossible to change your sex and you'll die trying. So on that, Jamie, you, you. eventually decided to switch to non-binary. How did that idea come about? And yeah, what's the backstory there? By late 2015, I was realizing that my sex change was a failure. I didn't know how to get myself out of that mess. You know, here I was. I'd been in the New York Times telling everybody I was a trans woman. I was cheerleading the cause. It had to, you know, wrecked the relationship, with my family.

None of my family ever did except this, and I don't blame them in hindsight. Yes, I needed like, okay, so how am I going to get myself out of being a female? And then I started encountering people who identified as gender, queer, and seeing non-binary on the Internet. And, you know, I had a noble intention with this at first, because, you know, you do have the suicide factor. And it certainly crossed my mind about, you know, okay, what you're like I said to you, should I just go ahead and just commit suicide and get it over with?

And I figured, okay, so maybe if I make this non-binary thing legal, that it would give people a landing zone. Because I desperately need it one. And, you know, another component of it was, okay, it's totally not believable that anybody who's in a male body can actually be a female. I mean, that's just hogwash. I don't know why the doctors tell people that, I mean, the absolute best case scenario of this would be that you have a disorder of sexual development. If gender identity was real and I don't believe it is, then I would be have that as a female side. And then, of course, I would have my male biology. And those two things could theoretically make somebody intersex and give them a disorder of sexual development.

And those are the kinds of mind games. I was playing with myself. And that's how this whole thing came about. But yeah, it was, go ahead. Oh, sorry. I was just wondering, you'd also mention in the op-ed that you felt you weren't able to, for lack of a better term, pass as a woman during that stage. Do you think if you had been able to?

I mean, you know, it does seem sometimes with, you know, medical intervention at certain stages that is possible, like that if you had socially been accepted as a woman, do you think you still would have switched to non-binary? You know, there's actually something else we should talk about on that. This goes back to the VA again. Prior to making the decision to go to court, I asked the doctor, and it's the same one who wrote a sex change letter to non-binary. I asked to be genetically tested.

And I told myself, okay, if this genetic testing comes back and it says you're male, then I'm going to go ahead and go back to being male. Well, the doctor refused to do the testing. and she actually told me that the knowledge would harm me. So, I mean, that was a tremendous failure in my care. So I went ahead with the court case. But to answer your question, you know, one of the things I've seen, or some of the things I've seen, I've met some incredibly pretty transsexuals,

and they're still miserable because they know they're not females. Females know they're not females. and it's a very hollow experience. What kind of reception did you get when you became non-binary? I mean, it was covered that you were the first person in America to get that legal status. Tell us about that. You know, that was going from being an absolute nobody. I mean, sure, I was in the New York Times, but, I mean, outside of the trans community,

people didn't really know about that. and but to go from being a nobody to being on the world stage like that, I mean, it was unbelievable. And it actually, you know, made it very difficult for me to return to my birth sex because, you know, I spent my time thinking like, okay, you know, what is there seven or eight billion humans on the planet? And, you know, how many of them ever get to do something? That's the first time ever had to happen in the United States. Yeah, I mean, so I had to destroy that. So eventually you decide to return to being a man again. And you write in the op-ed, my sex change to non-binary.

It was a medical and scientific fraud. Explain why you decided to switch back. You know, I have struggled the entire time with that, oh my God, I'm leading people's children into this. That bothered me more than anything because part of the of creating the non-binary thing to was to hopefully give people a space where they didn't feel like they had the need to change their bodies. But yet the transgender activist folks were basically still wanting to medicalize non-binary as well. So that turned out to be a failure on my expectations. I'm curious, Jamie, if you've heard back from the New York Times or any of those other outlets that celebrated your initial coming out. No, it's kind of shocking.

Yeah, I've really gotten a lesson in how the media works. I mean, virtually the entire left has been silent. Nobody wants to tell the truth about really what happened with my court victory. So I'm wondering, you know, obviously, well, I'm assuming that you must have interacted a lot with members of the LGBT community during these years. And what is sort of the message you would like them to hear from you? They need to stop what they're doing. I mean, there isn't going to be a gay or a lesbian community with what the transgenderism is doing because they're essentially making everybody straight. Even worse than that, I mean, they're medicalizing sex stereotypes.

This has become a world where if you believe you're feminine, that they turn you into a female. If you believe you're masculine, they turn you into a male. And they fix your sexual orientation in the process. That's a pretty horrible thing when you break it down like that. So you wrote in the piece that this is one of the more powerful lines I thought. You said, I should have been stopped, but out of control, transgender activism had made the nurse practitioner too scared to say no. Now, in that quote, you were talking about the one. nurse who did have caution about your transition.

And you said you talked about how you fired her after that. But that really pointed to something in the medical community, the culture in the medical community, as you said, buying into these new to transgender ideology, what changes would you like to see within the medical profession? Well, I mean, it's deeper than the medical profession because what the LGBT advocates are doing is they're passing all these very rigid. conversion therapy laws. And they're making it literally impossible to, for anybody to question the motivations about why people are doing these gender changes. So that has to start there as well.

Yeah, I mean, basically, you know, the doctors and the clinicians, their hands are tied because they literally get fired for asking the right questions. So you've been incredibly open about your challenges with mental health and how they played a role. in this. How do you think, I guess, the medical community should handle gender dysphoria when a patient comes forward with it? What do you wish someone had said to you at the time? And I don't want to ask you to reveal something too private, but is there treatment now that you're doing that's working for you? I think the medical community needs to stop lying to people. These are essentially like quack theories that have come out of some basement of academia. I mean, it's unfathomable.

that a doctor can go to medical school and learn about the body and learn all the, you know, spend years and years and years getting this education and then have the nerve to sit down in front of somebody and believe that they could be born in the wrong body. I mean, there's something really horrible around with that. I don't have words for it. Yeah. What advice would you have for someone who thinks they might be transgender or to someone who has a friend or a loved one who thinks they're transgender. You know, transgender is an adjective. It's not a noun. It doesn't really exist. You know, this whole gender identity thing is a fraud. It's legal fiction. And people have to start realizing that. You know, it might be a big fad right now, but people are making changes to their

bodies that you can't walk back. You know, I mean, I am so incredibly lucky that, you know, I did this at a late age. I didn't lose my job because of it. I don't know how, but I didn't lose my marriage because of it. I have a child, which I'm very thankful for. You know, people are just destroying their lives, believing that these gender transitions are real. And then they end up having some pretty ugly senior years when it all falls apart. So, as you probably know, your article for the Daily Signal went viral and there's been a lot of comments online and in social media and some of the more mean ones have said you know you switched to female you switched to non-binary now you're switching to male clearly you're going to switch again in a few years what's your response to that part of

my education of learning about myself you know it affected me pretty profoundly when that doctor the psychiatrist had the VA said you know I think you have borderline personality disorder So, you know, I went home and opened up Google and punched that in. And sure enough, one of the traits of borderline personality disorder is you have a constantly shifting sense of identity. So that's taught me a lot. And I think that's going to help me never make this mistake again. Well, Jamie, it obviously takes a lot more than we can fathom for you to write the piece and come on the podcast. Thank you so much for speaking out and for taking time.

Yeah, we really appreciate your courage. Yes, I cannot say enough about how much I'm grateful to Heritage Foundation and the Daily Signal for this. So thank all of you as well. Want to get up to speed about the Supreme Court? Then subscribe to SCOTUS 101, a podcast about everything that's happening at the Supreme Court and what the justices are up to. We'll leave it there for today's episode. Thanks for listening to the Daily Signal podcast brought to you from the Robert H. Bruce Radio Studio at the Heritage Foundation. Please be sure to subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, or SoundCloud,

and please leave us a review or a five-star rating on iTunes. Rob and Rachel will join you on Monday. You've been listening to The Daily Signal podcast, executive produced by Kate Trinko and Daniel Davis, sound design by Michael Gooden, Lauren Evans, and Thalia Rampersad. For more information, visitdailySignal.com.