Theology in the Raw - #733 - The first legally recognized non-binary person: “It was all a sham” (James Shupe)

Episode Date: April 8, 2019

On episode #733 of Theology in the Raw Preston has a conversation with James Shupe. On June 10, 2016 in Portland, Oregon, Jamie Shupe became the first person in the United States to have their sex legally designated as non-binary. On November 1, 2016, Jamie Shupe became the first person in the history of Washington, D.C. to be issued an official document with a sex other than male or female when their birth certificate was issued as “unknown” as a result of their non-binary sex change court order. Shupe has since reclaimed his birth sex of male and now resides in Ocala, Florida. Jamie Shupe retired from the U.S. Army as a decorated Sergeant First Class (E-7) after 18 years of honorable military service. For more about Shupe visit: https://jamieshupe.wordpress.com Support Preston Support Preston by going to patreon.com Connect with Preston Twitter | @PrestonSprinkle Instagram | @preston.sprinkle Check out his website prestonsprinkle.com If you enjoy the podcast, be sure to leave a review.

Hello, podcast listeners. Welcome to Theology Neuron. I got a couple quick announcements before we get into our show today, which I'm so excited about. The show, not the announcements. Well, I'm kind of excited about the announcements too, but more excited about the show that you're going to listen to. This is a very intriguing conversation. I can't wait for you to listen to this. But first, I want to let you know that we are adding lots of speaking events to my schedule. I will be in Grand Rapids in May, going back to Grand Rapids that we are adding lots of speaking events to my schedule. I will be in Grand Rapids in May, going back to Grand Rapids in May. Just love that city. I'll be in Indianapolis, Fort Wayne, Richmond, Virginia, and New York City in September.

That's going to be a busy month. Colorado Springs, Temecula, and Minneapolis in October and November. All those dates and times and details and yada, yada, yada will be found at centerforfaith.com and go to the speaking events and you can find out more details about those events. It may take another week or so for those to all be up on the website, but just if you live in those cities, then just keep a lookout at centerforfaith.com and go to the events page for more details. Also, the Digital Leaders Forum on Faith, Sexuality, and Gender is out. It is available. If you go to digitalleadersforum.org, that's digitalleadersforum.org, it'll take you to the landing page where you can preview the

course for free. And you can purchase the course. You can watch the trailer to the course. The course is the most comprehensive course, online course on faith, sexuality, and gender that's available. As far as I can tell, I've scoured the internet to see, is there anything else out there like this? And currently there is not. 22 video lessons, over eight hours of video content, pastoral panels discussing ministry questions, lots of biblical theological teaching, Q&A, interviews with LGBTQ Christians, and much, much more. That's digitalleadersforum.org to go preview the course for free. All right. Okay, so my guest on the show today, I should give some backstory on how I even reached out to my guest. But,

well, my guest is James Shoup, formerly known as Jamie Shoup. Jamie, well, James Shoup was the first legally recognized non-binary person back in 2016. And you'll hear the story to this in the interview. Uh, James went in to get, uh, you know, he went into the courts and filed to be recognized as non-binary, not trans or other or whatever, male, female, but as non-binary. And, uh, he lived as a, well, as a trans person for a while, and then as a non-binary person. And then just recently, as of January 2019, came out saying the whole thing was a sham. I'm a man, I'm a male, and I have been deeply harmed by an ideology that nudged me to identify as non-binary and or transgender. It's a fascinating story. Jamie has served in the military for a number of years.

He is a retired sergeant from the military. And he just has a fascinating, fascinating story. Fascinating story. Now, here's the thing with fascinating stories is they are stories. And Jamie's story is one story. And so we can't, here's the thing. And we talked about this later on in the conversation. I just want to say it up front as well, that we can't read an entire people group through the lens of one story. One story is one story. And these stories are super important to hear. And one of the reasons why I wanted to

have James, I keep calling him Jamie, but Jamie is his former name, but James is his birth name that he now uses. James's story, as you'll hear, is one that is not prioritized, if you will, in many media outlets. For instance, when, as you'll hear, when James was the first legally recognized non-binary person, he was flooded with news interviews and publicity, and he was in all kinds of mainstream news outlets. But now when he reversed his identity, went back to his male identity, his birth sex, you know, he said it was like crickets. He said the only people that wanted to hear a story now were those on the right, you know. But the people that championed his story at the beginning, when he transitioned to non-binary, are now not interested in him. And now, you know, only right wing media outlets are wanting to hear

his story. And I just find that a little bit disingenuous. I think that his story is his story. We need to publicize it, whether it agrees with our narrative or not. So without further ado, let's just get into the conversation. I want you to welcome to Theology in the Raw, James, formerly known as Jamie Shoup. Okay, and we are live with Jamie Shoup. Jamie, thank you so much for being on the show. I can't tell you how excited I am to talk with you. Thanks so much for having me.

So why don't we just go, I want you to share your story. And I know that could take probably several days to really have back everything. But let's just go back to, give us a brief snapshot of your early life. And also maybe what brought you into your military service. And then we'll go from there. Yes. I was born in Washington, D.C. I grew up in the suburbs of Rockville initially until I was about 13 years old. I mean, that was a true white picket fence kind of thing.

years old. I mean, that was a true white picket fence kind of thing. While it looked good on the outside, there was a lot of turmoil because I was being sexually abused by a male uncle. There was a lot of alcoholism on my father's side of the family, a lot of violence associated with that. One of my uncles committed suicide during that time in my younger years. So just total, complete turmoil during most of my childhood. And then my parents uprooted us from there, took us to Southern Maryland, which was like going from the city to the country. And I went from that nice, well, almost practically an upper middle class upbringing to actually becoming suddenly poor and needing to work on a tobacco farm to get money for school clothes. Yeah. So that was kind of the backdrop of me entering the military.

Okay. So you entered the military. Were you 18 years old when you went in? I was going on 19. People tend to think with the trans thing that I went in there to quote man up. That wasn't the case at all. I mean, it was like in 11th grade, the recruiters showed up and they did the aptitude testing. And I think it was like 110 to be an officer.

I scored a 125. Wow. So I was like way up on the test. And once I did, I mean, they started showing up at the gas station I was working at. They started calling the house all the time. And me coming from a four family, I was like, okay, this sounds like a good idea to go ahead and get in the military because I'm expected to be out on my own soon. Did you have, did you experience gender dysphoria growing up?

Was this something you went through as a, as a child? No. And yeah, that's an interesting thing because I equate it to kind of like growing up on a desert Island. I wasn't around any trans people. I wasn't around any gay people. I had no concept of transgender that had even existed. So yeah, so I think that was like formative and me helping to make this thing fall apart because I look back on that now and say, yeah, this wasn't really a thing. Wow. So let's fast forward then to just a few years ago, you became the first, as far as I understand,

the first legally recognized non-binary person, somebody who is recognized by the law, not as male or female, but as non-binary. Is that correct? And I imagine you probably fought pretty hard to get that. No, I didn't fight hard at all. It was, yeah, it's, it's a really sad situation. I mean, it was the first time in the United States history that someone had been issued a court order declaring them neither male or female. And I accomplished it really easily. I mean, I hired a lawyer.

He said, it was, you know,, Jamie, it's $350 an hour. How many hours do you want? It took three hours to win. Oh, my gosh. Wow. Yeah. The judge just rubber-stamped the decision. So that was very public.

And how was the, let's just say, the greater LGBT community, or let's more specifically, maybe the, for lack of better terms the transgender activist community not just you know people with gender dysphoria but people who are you know really active in in that community were you like did they come around you were you hailed as a hero did they were they aware of what was going on with you they weren't necessarily hailing me as a hero originally but they didn't have any choice in the matter because I was suddenly so famous. And I had trans activists reaching out to me and basically telling me how they wanted me to talk. Really? Yeah.

Yeah, they were literally trying to say, you know, okay, you're an activist like us now, and this is the party language, and this is what's acceptable for you to say and this is what's not acceptable for you to say and I'm like no wait a minute here really yes that was yeah and what was what did you was it that caught you off guard or I mean how did you respond to that I told them that I wasn't going to be led like that that I was going to say what I had to say yeah wow did they kind of not like that no they they be led like that, that I was going to say what I had to say. Wow. Did they kind of not like that? No, they didn't like that at all because, for example, they didn't want me to talk about surgeries because they knew that I had a history of saying I don't agree with surgeries. I think it's a bad thing.

When you heard non-binary, you had already prior spoken out against surgeries. You were never pro-surgery. You know, when I first, quote, transitioned to female, although I hate that word. We'll just use it because, you know, in absence of language because you can't really transition to anything. But when I first switched to being a female, I was all, you know, gung-ho and going to get surgeries. to being a female, I was all gung-ho and going to get surgeries. And then I started seeing the horror show of the people who had been maimed and all the surgeries that went wrong. And that turned me against it. And I started speaking out against it. Surgeries that went wrong because

they just weren't, they were kind of botched or just surgery maybe in general is just harmful or both? They're botched across the board. I mean, I've got a transgender archive site and you can find everything from botched breast augmentations to botched genital surgeries to botched facial surgeries. I mean, the whole thing is a horror show. So your concern about the surgery, it wasn't, if I could put it like this, and correct me if I'm wrong, it wasn't necessarily moral as it was just pragmatic. Like you didn't see anything morally wrong with somebody transitioning. It was just, there's a pragmatic fallout.

Like this is not going to, this could not go well. You didn't want to roll the dice with that. Would that be an accurate way to capture how you were thinking a couple years ago um it's kind of a mixed bag i mean in the later years i i resented that people were using that to say this you know this okay see i had the surgery that makes me a female i fixed my birth defect yeah because that's like part of the language I was taught. You know, you frame your genitals as being a birth defect and it's being fixed. Oh, really? Yeah.

Wow. Okay. It's not true. Yeah, yeah. It's an interesting definition of birth defect, but the presence of a functioning genitalia. So let's fast forward a little bit now and i i saw somewhere maybe oh i think it was in your twitter bio that you say uh blanchard was correct uh i was suffering from autogenophilia now for our audience ray blanchard is a very well-known very accomplished uh psychologist who specializes in the area of gender dysphoria,

especially among children. But he does have, he's been controversial in the sense, I think he's doing very credible science, but he has a category, a subset of a transgender experience, which he calls autogenophilia. Now, would you, I want, you know, I can unpack that, but I'd rather have you unpack that. Can you tell us about the journey, you're kind of getting introduced to Ray Blanchard's material, and then discovering autogynephilia, and then realizing, hey, I think I'm the one, I have this kind of condition. Well, you could do, I have to preface this with it, you could make a college course about Blanchard's

autogynephilia thing it's it's really deep it's some of it's really academic yeah but okay so like me coming into the trans community i had no idea who blanchard was i had no idea what autogynephilia was but i soon found out that that blanchardard was this bad guy to be avoided at all costs and that everything he said was to be discredited. So initially I dug into it a little bit. And what Blanchard says is there's two kinds of transsexuals. There's like a homosexual kind and they are attracted to male bodies and they want to be female and they basically want to attract a straight male and they have a genuine physical attraction to the male body. Now, the other type is where I fall into. I am attracted to the idea of myself as a woman. So it's like instead of me looking at a woman and say, I want to have sex with her,

somebody who's really beautiful. It's more of like I transfer that a woman and say, I want to have sex with her, somebody who's really beautiful. It's more of like, I transfer that to myself and say, wow, I want to, I want to look like her. I want to be her. I want to experience sex as her. And that's Blanchard's other type of transsexual. So yeah. So the trans community wants to shut down any conversation about Blanchard and discredit him as much as possible. Yeah. And that's so unfortunate. Cause unfortunate because i mean he it's not like he's um he's from my vantage point i've read you know many articles by him and others like you know ken zucker and um j michael bailey and you know there's a whole kind of scientific community that would you know um that is kind of opposed to ideology driving science which is happening all over the place it seems like from my vantage point.

And when I read Blanchard, I see not somebody who is like, you know, he gets labeled as trying to harm, you know, transgender people, whatever. I don't see that at all. Really. I just see him looking at the science and looking at case after case after case and saying, Hey, this is just, it is what it is. Like we can't just ignore that autogynephilia exists just because it has a persona around it that could be offensive um see but that's what makes this thing a cult because because cults try to control information and and they don't want you

they don't want people like me the members to to read this stuff to study this stuff because you know what the moment i did the moment i opened my eyes to it, I was like, wow, Blanchard nailed me to a T. Really? Yeah. That was part of me going back to my birth sex. Now, are you familiar with J. Michael Bailey? He's in that community too. Oh yeah. He's really been beat up on too. So when I read his book, The man who would be queen which is largely about autogynephilia and he you know and he's a pretty bold bold guy he doesn't mix any words

he said that it's to the t um you can you can you can diagnose somebody that has autogynephilia he says somebody who has you know a history ofilia. He says, somebody who has, you know, a history of cross-dressing in private, usually they have a desire to transition later in life. Usually they're, they've been married to a woman. They're almost always, I mean, maybe exclusively biologically male. And they would have a more, for lack of better terms, a more masculine kind of presence, you know, like they don't have stereotypical feminine kind of qualities or interests. And he says, look, if you, you know, he almost has a checklist, I think, in his book saying, if you see this, this, this, this, this, this, this, boom, autogenophilia.

And would you say that that is more or less true that you do have a, that it is kind of easy to identify somebody who identifies as trans and it's also of the autogenophilia type or if that makes sense yeah i mean if you when you just break it down at the most simplest level it's really easy to spot um the gay males who are super feminine from birth versus the people like me yeah but you but you know an important part of this conversation would be okay and this is like a conversation no therapist ever had with me which is really tragic but if you but if you open up dsm-5 and you break out the what do you call it the definitions for gender dysphoria yeah so what one of the definitions is that you believe

that you possess stereotypical traits of the opposite sex that again nails me to a t that would have been really helpful for a therapist to sit down and open up that book, you know, five, six years ago and go over this with me, but none of them ever did at any point. And so where I'm going with this is like, I've always believed myself to be super feminine. And so the people like me, even though the rest of the world doesn't see that, it's in my head yeah so yeah because you know i mean we just met and i'm looking at your picture now and hearing you you don't like you don't present yourself on the outside as stereotypically feminine from the little you know we've been talking here you know because you're

saying internally you very much have a resonate with more feminine interests internally, but not externally. Yeah. Okay. And basically we use stereotypes to do that, which is another tragic flaw with this. Yeah. So that's my, here's something that seems like a gaping hole in some of the logic. And correct me if I'm wrong. It seems like so much of a transgender ideology.

And when I say I really want to distinguish, cause I have several friends who wrestle with debilitating gender dysphoria who are generally trying to seek help. And, and a lot of them are, you know, it'd be really religious, you know, Christians who are saying like, I don't think it's actually morally right to transition, but I still have this condition that I'm wrestling with. So I want to just always make it let's talk about that too but go ahead yeah okay yeah yeah and i want to make a distinction between people who are let's

just say genuinely struggling and seeking help rather than an ideology that is shutting down scientific conversations for the sake of promoting an ideology but um uh oh shoot what was i was going somewhere with this stereotypes yeah yeah this but so let's just the the the aggressive transgender ideology seems to assume um gender stereotypes that were largely formed by 20th century patriarchal anti-women you know like it seems that you know feminists have fought so hard to get rid of these stereotypes and it seems like some branches of a transgender the transgender movement are resurrecting these old stereotypes it just seems so contradictory like you know i ask people you know are you trans affirming or are you a feminist and some people say oh i'm both

i'm like i don't know these seem these ideologies seem to really clash which is why as you know so many radical feminists are you know up in arms i mean and aggressively so with with some of the ideologies so am i missing something so again to go back is it true that a transgender ideology is relying upon cultural stereotypes for its ideology to even work the whole house of cards is built on stereotypes yeah yeah i mean there's no nice way to say that but it's true everything is built on stereotypes like you know how how would how would somebody like me become a woman so the answer is I would put a long wig on. I would put a dress on as feminine as possible. I would wear makeup.

I would wear heels. Small breasts wouldn't be okay. I would have to have the biggest breasts possible. I wouldn't want to be overweight. I would want to be as thin as possible. I mean, just every imaginable, you know, stereotype that you can throw out there about a woman is how I would become a woman. How are you not resurrecting the mid 20th century male dominated

patriarchal view of women? You know, it's like, it's like you're living out the dream of every, you know, misogynist man from the 1940s and fifties. I mean, again, yeah, I mean, yeah, you're,, yeah, you're playing right into that role to also attract one of them. Yeah, wow. But, you know, think about the female-to-male side of the house. Do you see any transgender men that look like rock stars?

Nope, they all look like crew-cut military guys and have beards yeah wow it's nothing but stereotypes well how would they respond to that because that just seems like such a blatant you know do they just dismiss it or it just seems like such a hole in the like you said the house of cards they just ignore it or i don't care what they do with it i just tell them like it is that's that's what you're doing that's what i was doing and and we need to tell the truth about what we've been doing here yeah which is which go ahead go ahead well as i say it's also harmful towards boys who may not be

who may not match up to stereotypical masculinity you know maybe they're into art and dancing and you know playing the violin instead of sports, which is perfectly fine that you're still a male. And one of the biggest problems in society is forcing these stereotypes on people and messing them up. But it's like man, it seems like some transgender activists are at least just keeping those stereotypes alive, which is just hurtful for so many reasons. Yeah. I mean, when you break this thing down, okay, so what they are doing,

they're basically saying that if you're a masculine female, that you need to become a male. And if you're a feminine male, you need to become a female based on these stereotypes. So they're, they're just creating this endless cycle of creating more clones of them rather than, as the feminists say, you know, fix the problems within society. Because, you know, how can I be a feminine male when all these trans guys are becoming males, and their definition of a male is a crew cut and a beard?

Wow. Yeah. I'm going to keep chewing on that. i want to move forward just just slightly now because a couple months ago you came out and again according to your twitter i don't have your twitter bio in front of me but i remember you saying something like you know the whole thing was a sham i'm male and blanchard is right you know and you went public with just this you know going to get you know going against your non-binary identity so how have or let me let me just be really specific like what uh was going on inside

of you maybe in a couple months before leading up to your public kind of renouncement of your previous non-binary identity yeah we should really start let's let's it might take a few minutes if you if you don't mind the time but but let's let's start in like september of 2016 okay so i walked into the va for an appointment with uh at the women's clinic and i i told the doctor, I've been using a breast pump on my breast and I want bigger breast. And she didn't really even and I even said to her that I wanted a lactation drug. You know, this is all like red flags for Blanchard stuff. And this is textbook Blanchard. And she and the VA had passed down transgender medicine to primary care.

So it's like all these doctors just wear a trans medicine hat and, you know, practice medicine alongside that. So she was clueless. She wrote me a prescription for six milligrams of estrogen. She's like, okay, you know, this will make your breasts grow. Sent me on my way. So by January, 2017, I was in the emergency room because they should have never gave somebody over 40 years old oral estrogen, especially not a dose of six milligrams. So my legs were swollen up and they thought I had blood clots.

They gave me some ultrasound testing, said, OK, you need to cut back on the hormones. And I have them. So I went down to just the progesterone and like two or three milligrams of estrogen. I halved them. So I went down to just the progesterone and like two or three milligrams of estrogen. So September, 2017, I'm back in the emergency room, legs messed up again. They diagnosed me with vasculitis and said, you know, the veins in my legs were starting to get messed up. The estrogen was damaging my kidneys. My kidneys weren't reading fully functioning anymore. And the emergency room doctor at the VA in Reno, Nevada, he's like, hey, you've got to quit the hormones. So I did. I stopped them that day. And we were traveling in the camper. I ended up in Palm Springs, California, like two weeks later.

I made an appointment at an LGBT clinic. I go in and the doctor says like, oh, wow, the VA should have never stopped you from taking hormones. Um, so what we need to do is we need to treat you like a trans kid being that you don't like the big scary needles and we'll just do like subcutaneous injections, but we're going to get you back on estrogen. So I took estrogen injections for five weeks in a row and my mood just like spiraled out of control. It's just like shut my testosterone off really quick, which my testosterone had been creeping up over the summer on the reduced estrogen amounts. So it was actually back to almost normal male levels. And I didn't even

know that. And so they gave me these five weeks of estrogen injections. And my mood just went totally out of control by shutting off my testosterone really quick. And what ended up happening was, so November and December of 2017, I ended up in the psych ward at VA. I could not control my emotions. My emotions and thoughts were just all over the place. I was like going off in all these different courses of direction. Every few hours, every few days, I was going, okay, I'm going back to male. Now I'm going to go female. Now I'm going to be non-binary. I was just like a total psych case mess.

And so they, you know, I was off hormones again. And even in February, I was still messed up and had to go through a two week mental health rehab, which cost the taxpayers another $30,000. And so May of 2018, I went back on – started back on finasteride because my testosterone coming back, my skin was a mess. I was getting all these growths all over me. I had acne, and the testosterone was feeding the autogynephilia thing. I was starting to, to want to cross-dress again. I was wanting to have sex with, you know, risky sex with men. My behavior was just getting really out of hand. So, you know, we started me back on finasteride and then we started me back on

estrogen. And when we did, I went through the same thing I've been through every time. I went through what they call a testosterone surge. As they were trying to shut my testosterone down, my body was fighting it and producing more, which just made up my behavior all that much worse. And then finally around October of 2018, my testosterone was shut down enough that it wasn't affecting me anymore and all the feeling of wanting to be a girl went away the gender dysphoria went away you know the urge to cross-dress went away I was kind of like in this dead zone of with with my testosterone shut off enough where it wasn't driving my behavior

anymore and it yeah so it taught me a lot. I mean, I think a lot of people say this is what it means to feel like a girl when they transition. No, it's just being a chemically castrated male is what it is. And that was the point where I was able to open my eyes and break out the blanchard and start reading about my behavior. my eyes and break out Blanchard and start reading about my behavior. And I did. And I was like, it's like I said earlier, I mean, what Blanchard said fit me to a T, you know, right down to me wanting to lactate and, you know, my desire to have, have sex with men and seeing myself as a woman. I didn't care what the man looked like. I just wanted to see myself as a woman having sex with them. Everything Blanchard said about me was true. So, so I had that in the back of my head. You know, I wrestled

with the, the fakeness of my court decision because I don't know, we didn't talk about this earlier, but like when I went to court, my lawyer had told me beforehand that the judge had a transgender child. So basically my court decision was a sham. I mean, the judge didn't ask me any questions. The whole thing only took minutes, and I walked away with a landmark decision. Wow. So I had the planter thing. I had the fraud thing.

And, yeah, what I was doing to my wife. And I also had a lot of guilt that I had led people's children down this path. And all these things coming together, you know, eventually equaled in January 25 of 2019 of me going into DMV and saying, I'm a male. Really? Yeah. And what's it been like publicly in the last,

let's just say two and a half months or so, have you gotten a lot of flack for your more recent decision to go back to your mail, Dex? It was actually hard initially to get anybody to report it. Really? Yeah, I mean, you know, I went from being in People, Time, the New York Times, the Sydney Morning Herald, Der Spiegel, headlines all over the world to nobody would talk about it. Wow. And that's why I got on Twitter and made the announcement.

And that finally just became this little stone that started rolling down the hill and it's gotten bigger and bigger. So are more people reaching out to you now for you to tell your story or? It's still only on the right. There's not a single publication on the left that has told the world that I returned to my male birth sex. Is that, I mean, I know we all, we talk about media bias and I think it's, I would say without dispute really that there is media bias, especially in this, in this conversation. I mean, would you just dispute, really, that there is media bias, especially in this conversation. I mean, would you just, that is fascinating that people are just rushing to tell your story when you fit their narrative and now you've disrupted their narrative and now it's crickets. Like that, I mean, this seems clear evidence of media bias, right? I mean.

It's the ultimate example of media bias. And, you know, people now accuse the right of using me and the people of faith of using me, just like the left used me. But you know what? After everything I've been through and after everything I've saw and all the carnage I've witnessed,

I say, you know what? I welcome the right and the people of faith to wield me like a sledgehammer to destroy this mess. Yeah. And just to be, I guess, fair, you know, anecdotal stories are limited, you know, and I know several anecdotal stories of people who detransitioned and just said exactly everything you're saying to the T. And yet that doesn't deny that there are some other stories too,

anecdotal stories that, you know, other people can use and say, no, this person was about to kill themselves. They transitioned and that was 30 years ago and they had never been happier, you know, and we can go, you know, go back and forth whether that's true or not, you know, but that's another story. So, yeah, I think we should be clear that, yeah, just for my audience, my intention to have you on the show was absolutely not not at all to use one anecdotal story to sort of deconstruct the whole ideology my motivation though is exactly what you said that it is sad that everything is so unbalanced that people do race to tell one type of story and then the other type of story of detransitioning or whatever is just, is totally neglected.

And I think that's just completely wrong. So that's, that's my motivation. Yeah. I mean, they're, they're controlling the narrative, but I mean, look at, look at the way media is built nowadays. I mean, it's controlled by a bunch of billionaires, you know, these folks, these owners have to be exerting some editorial control over what goes on at their publications. Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. Before we, I mentioned in passing, people who are genuinely struggling with gender dysphoria, they're not

pushing an ideology, they're not waving their identity in people's faces. They're just like i have this this condition that i'm trying to make sense of and you said you had some thoughts on that do you want to if there's people listening i have several people in my audience that would have gender dysphoria um and yet you know would say that i'm trying to live out my biological sex i identify with my biological sex but man i just have this unchosen condition that is can be debilitating. What would you say to them?

I say that they're talking the narrative. Okay. You know, when I came, so, you know, an interesting thing in my trajectory is like I was heavily involved in the mental health side of the house because of all my PTSD. They think I have bipolar disorder. You know, one psychiatrist at the VA even thinks I have borderline personality disorder. So I came into trans through the mental health system and came into it thinking that it was going to fix my mental health. So these folks are basically talking the narrative that they want everybody to hear. You know, I learned in the mental health

system how to weaponize suicide. You know, if you want to go into the psych ward, you can report to any single emergency room in the country and say, I want to kill myself. And you'll go in the psych ward. I mean, trans folks have weaponized that as well. The suicide statistic you're saying, the 41% or 40% of trans people who have suicide ideation, you're saying that that that's been weaponized? Yeah. At a nuclear level. Yeah. Let me point out something really interesting to you. I hope you'll find this interesting. Okay.

So just about every media article written normally mentions the 41% suicide rate, except another category. When they write articles about transgender military service all of a sudden they don't talk about the suicide rate anymore why because it would make it look bad so they yeah they that's another way the media media manipulates the suicide thing yeah i look at that all the time i've seen some pushback on the suicide rate as well. Oh, there's a professor, adjunct professor at San Francisco state, San Francisco state. Is it Hoxa? It was a former male to female trans person who has a very similar story to

yours. He would live that way seven years and then said this is rubbish and went back to living out his his male identity and it is a psychology like a psychology professor um and they have a long article i think on trans trender or fourth wave now one of the sites so fourth wave now i know who you're talking about now yeah yeah yeah and they um he yeah pushes back on this he you know says yes the suicide rate is is higher but it's that the 41 percent has been inflated but then i think he also said well we have to look at you know suicidality is incredibly complex like you can't just draw a straight line between you know the moral majority on the right you know causing suicide rates because they don't accept trans

people or something like okay maybe that's that's one possible cause but you can't just assume they can draw a straight line from one thing to another without analyzing all other you know maybe you know mental health issues that might be going on alongside gender yeah see and you just nailed it to a tee because almost all of these suicides are mentally health related but what they do is they weaponize them and they blame it on society. It's, you know, people use the wrong pronouns. You didn't accept this person's gender identity. That's why they committed suicide. You know, they ignored that the person had bipolar disorder or PTSD

or a major depressive disorder. None of that seemed to matter anymore. Yeah. Or even I just read recently that people who experience gender dysphoria are also seven times more likely to be on the autism spectrum, which isn't making you suicidal, but it does say that like there's things going on here. And according to suicide.org, I mean, 90% of actual suicides happen because of an undiagnosed mental health issue.

So when we ignore mental health questions, when we're talking about this conversation and then also talk about suicide, it's like, well, man, well, let's, let's, you can't, you can't elevate the suicidality and then say, but we don't want to talk about mental health issues because that's politically incorrect. Like that's just not, again, that's, it seems to me like is actually itself harmful towards actual people. I mean, I did it too. When I, the night that I told my spouse that I wanted to, quote,

transition to being a female, I had her read an article. I downloaded it from a psychologist. And after she read it, I basically told her like, either you let me become a woman or I'm shooting myself in the head. I mean, so I, you know, I learned how to weaponize it and I did weaponize it. Yeah. When you said you were kind of coached early on by the, by the activists on what to say, how to say it,

was weaponizing suicidality part of that? Were they, have you, have you seen where people are being coached to use that as a weapon? You would find that more in a place like Reddit. You're not going to find one of the nonprofit activists actually espousing that in a cafe like the talks I had with them. Let's, I know we're kind of jumping around, but let's talk about children. You mentioned, I'm going to quote your website here. You said, I will not be a party to advancing harmful gender ideologies that are ruining lives, causing deaths, and contributing to the sterilization and mutilation of gender confused children. mutilation of gender confused children. That's been a growing topic in this conversation. You know, okay, it's one thing for a mature adult to make a decision to transition, free country, do what you want. But when an ideology is now influencing what some would call the experimenting on children, that's just can, from my vantage point, in some cases feels very, almost barbaric, you know?

Oh, yeah, that's all like background. My question to you is, what are your concerns with this conversation in terms of how it affects children? Well, the biggest problem is parents can't say no. I mean, this has progressed to the point where some of these gender prominent gender clinicians are basically advocating for child protective services to show up and take children away. Yeah, I mean, Fourth Wave now writes about cases of this. But yeah, I mean, if you, you know, you can't find a therapist to actually do an unbiased diagnosis. It's all goes into like the conversion therapy stuff. You know, they're everything's being passed now where gender identity is piggybacking on the gay conversion therapy. So if a parent tries to steer a child away from their chosen identity and tries to help them to identify with their biological sex, people will map that onto conversion therapy, right? And say that that's abusive and destructive.

So you can't even find a therapist like Zucker anymore to work with a kid because it's been made illegal. You're stuck with all these therapists where you walk in and the therapist automatically goes, sure, you're a boy. Sure, you're a girl. I don't want to lose my license. Is that what it is? Is it fear? Because, I mean, my question is how do we get here?

Is it just an overarching fear of losing your job, losing your license? Yeah, I mean, that is a real fear when that's your livelihood. Yeah. And not only that, you get professionally stigmatized as well. So my biggest, here's my biggest question that I don't know what to do with. When I read the experts, the scientific experts in this field, I'm talking about, I mean, we've already mentioned, you know, Ken Zucker and Blanchard or even, you know, Susan Bradley, who's, you know, a world-renowned expert for a number of years. There's a person in the UK whose name escapes me. But, I mean, and these are not like, you know, as a Christian, you know, I remind people, these are not like fundamentalist Christians. These are people who would be politically liberal.

I remind people, these are not fundamentalist Christians. These are people who would be politically liberal. They're not pushing some religious agenda. They are the scientific experts in the field who are even pro-transitioning for a mature adult. Ken Zucker got fired, if I remember correctly, for telling people not to transition, but just saying, you know what, let's put the brakes a little bit. Let's live out your cross-gender identity for maybe a year socially

before we medically intervene like that. He wasn't saying I'm against transitioning. And they, as far as I understand, they got him fired for it. My question is, how did the narrative become so embraced ahead of the scientific experts in the field who would be on the liberal left side um i just i'm scratching my head how that how that even happened well sorry i've got asthma yeah okay so let's let's start with the word expert there is no expert okay there's no scientific test for gender identity so whether we talk about you know zucker or blanchard or whether we go over to the other extreme and we talk about johanna olson um nobody can prove gender identity is a real thing you know just like you or i can't summon

god into a courtroom and prove god is real they can't summon gender identity into a courtroom either. Nobody really wants to talk about that, but that's how we got here. Because it's basically just whose opinion do you want to believe? So you're saying in the field, there's just people that do research in this area, but no real national, like recognized experts, like each ideology or each camp has its own kind of research in the field and that's just kind of the way it is yeah I mean even the research is

questionable nowadays because it's a study in search of an outcome over and over again and yeah I mean I used to track the studies a lot on my website yeah everybody's basically doing studies to come up with what they want to say for the direction they want it to go. Yeah.

I mean, that's how we got into this mess. I mean, this is the lobotomy thing all over again, but nobody wants to admit it. So where's this going to end up? I mean, what's the... You know, I made the statement a couple months ago that it's probably going to look look like a lot like the end of a war there's going to be a bunch of horribly psychologically damaged people a lot of folks are going to be missing body parts and there's going to be a public who didn't really understand what happened and isn't necessarily forgiving because

they don't like the situation to begin with. Wow. I mean, it's going to end up in courtrooms. Yeah. Well, I'm just so deeply concerned with children too. And especially now that we have, I'm sure you're aware of, you know, rapid onset gender dysphoria with, with, you know, Lisa Littman study where there seems to be some clear evidence of social contagion that is

influencing transgender identities among female teenagers and a lot of social pressure and even media influence and stuff to where now we're not even dealing with just kind of raw, like, psychological conditions that we're trying to figure out. But now we're dealing with how an ideology is influencing people. And to me, that just isn't going to end well. Like you said, yeah, you just can't keep going like that. I mean, the whole thing was never ending well to begin with. I mean, anything with such a high suicide rate can't be espoused as a good outcome. But yeah, I mean, it's just growing worse and worse and worse. Yeah, I don't have anything good to say. And

that goes back to me just stepping out of this and saying, look, folks, this isn't real. I'm warning you. I'm separating myself from it. I'm having nothing further to do with advancing it. I'm separating myself from it. I'm not having nothing further to do with advancing it and, you know, do it at your own peril. I want to real quick, you mentioned a name, you know, so we've, we've mentioned Zucker Blanchard and others on, on one side of this who again aren't anti-transitioning or they're not anti-trans are just saying it's like,

this is more complex and we need to be extra careful when we're dealing with children who would be some people on the other side who would be scientific? Let's just say they have the credentials. They're not just political pundits or bloggers, but they actually have scientific credentials who would be on the other side, who would be very opposed to Ken Zucker or Ray Blanchard. Again, I'm really leery of that world's scientific credentials because we're talking about people who are oftentimes like psychologists.

Those two words don't go together very well, scientific and psychologist. That's that. But like Dr. Johanna Olson Kennedy. Yeah, that's that's an interesting one. She's married to a transgender man. So how unbiased is she as a researcher? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, she goes home from the gender clinic to her transgender husband. So I don't know how somebody like that can get money to do studies, but apparently they did. There's another olsen the two aren't related um christina olsen right um there's uh diane ursonsaft i believe it's pronounced oh yeah yeah i mean okay so on my transgender archives site i i have a page about trans kids and i've

got a whole list of like who all the players are you're you're welcome to to look at that um yeah if you want to explore these names and it's kind of interesting because what I did in on this page is like I took most of the articles that have been written about trans kids and at the end of the article when I added it to the page I added uh who the players were in the article and it's like the media pitches them all against one another. So like to have a bad guy in the article, they'll use Zucker. To have a good person in your article, they'll use Olsen. Just depending on how the slant of the article they want it to be.

That's the way they use the characters in the cast. Julia Serrano is another one, right? Who has a PhD in in in um i forget what it's like she's a credible science i mean okay you might push back in the word credible but she's you know she she has scientific credentials who i think she's um i think she's a male to female trans person yeah i mean serrano is a male that identifies as a female and i don't i i guess that falls into the old, you can't have the fox guarding the hen house thing.

Yeah. Anytime that situation is going on, I don't give the person any credibility. Yeah. Yeah. But then you also have on the Zucker side, oh, who's, it's somebody who identifies as an autogynephiliac

male to female researcher who would agree with Zucker and Blanchard and says no I have autogynephilia I think you're probably talking about Ann Lawrence yes yes yes Ann Lawrence yeah Blanchard and Zucker and Bailey they're the unpopular folks, even though they're probably the most correct in what's going on here. Yeah.

It's just fascinating because I work with all these friends of mine who deal with public school system and the stuff being taught. And it just is so incredibly one-sided it's not even like it doesn't even represent kind of both sides well which again and again and again we're not dealing with like religiously conservative people on one side and then scientists on the other we're dealing with people who are all like you know in the general scientific community yet it's just so one-sided you know i mean california is going to pass the thing where kindergartners are taught you know that there's 15 genders which to me that almost sounds i'm like why only 15 i mean facebook recognizes like 74

you're not as progressive as i think you are it's it's funny you mentioned that because i i did a tweet a couple days ago and what i said was you, when I was a kid, I can still remember, I believe it was in seventh grade. I had this class and part of it was about creation. And the other part was evolution. Yeah. And they pitched both sides at me and they let me decide. Well, when it comes to gender identity, there's no opposing side in the schoolhouse. They're just strictly ramming gender identity down the children's throat as like it's a law. Yeah.

You know, there's a really interesting situation with my judge. Okay, so I became the first, quote, you know, legally non-binary person in the country by my judge. you know legally non-binary person in the country by my judge and there's a ton of legal cases it's it's like almost standard practice when like the aclu or lambda files a trans legal case that they will they will write something to the effect of almost like word for word that everyone quote has a gender identity and gender identity is the deciding factor of what your sex is so that's written into all these legal cases so keep that thought in mind that quote everyone has a gender identity okay so one of the cases my judge decided not long after my case was she met someone become a gender this

person's name is patch and the interesting thing about agender is it means the person doesn't have a gender identity. Yeah. So how do you determine, so do they therefore not have a sex? How did we go from all these legal cases being written where every one quote has a gender identity to a guy walking into the courthouse and getting a court order saying that he doesn't have a gender identity right i mean it kind of like blew the whole thing up and just showed me all the more what a big fraud the whole thing is

oh man you know what you can't square those you can't square my case and his. Yeah, that's crazy. You know, I just, I just saw that your name is, you go by James now. I called you Jamie, which is your former name. When I introduced you, I think, so I apologize for that. You go by James now, right? Yes. And don't feel bad. I mean, I only made the announcement yesterday. Oh, okay. Yeah. There's a lot to unpack with that because, okay, so my birth name was James Clifford Shoup. Okay. The uncle who used to molest me was named Clifford. Oh, gosh. Yeah, and my

family always called me Clifford. So it was like, you know, the Pavlos dog thing of getting my bell wrong every time the word Clifford was mentioned. Yeah. So yeah. So when, you know, an LGBT advocacy group offered to change my name, I jumped on it as part, as part of my gender transition because yeah, I mean, that was like an escape hatch for, for a name that I always felt had been harming me. Yeah. Wow. What do you plan to do over the next several months with this?

I mean, just taking each day at a time, I'm sure you're getting hit up for more interviews and write-ups. Yeah, I mean, hopefully the interviews are going to start dying down. I've got one every day this week. Yeah, I mean, it's important to tell my story, but it's also really draining. Sure, yeah. And, you know, with me having PTSD,d i mean you wouldn't want to watch me sleep at night things that i do in bed okay yeah i have to sleep in separate beds from my wife now wow but yeah i mean it's a balance of me telling my story and and me taking care of my mental health

yeah and and just moving forward um i mean i've only been off hormones i think this is like my third week oh wow so this that's another like major challenge of this testosterone flowing back into my body and getting therapy to deal with that. I'm basically going through puberty again. Wow. Goodness. Can I ask? I mean, if you don't want me to go here, I'd still be fine. But how's your relationship with your wife and family and everything through all this? You know, I've probably got the best wife on the planet because, I mean, she's been with me from being a male to going to female to going to non-binary and then going back to male. And she hasn't divorced me. I mean, that says a lot about a woman.

Yeah, I mean, but she's just the type who takes her marriage vows very seriously. She has stuck by me and I can't say enough about her. I mean, I feel terrible for all the things I've put her through. Yeah. Wow. Well, James, thanks so much for being on the show. I know our listeners are probably going to be wrestling with this for quite a while. And I do have a lot of listeners that are interested in the sexuality, gender conversation, primarily from a faith perspective, but you can't separate, I think, the faith perspective from what's going on in society. So I know, yeah, I think your testimony is gonna be really powerful and challenging to a lot of our listeners. So thanks so much for being on the show. And I know it takes a lot to tell your story and just keep it up, man. Yeah. Yeah. You're not the only people seeking my testimony. Some legislators have reached out too. Oh, good. Good. Yeah. But thank you for having me. Yeah. And people want to find you. Yeah. And if people want to find you, I'm looking at your website now. It's jamesshoop.wordpress.com. Is that correct? It should still be under Jamie. I can't change the address on it.

Jamie Shoup, S-H-U-P-E. And there's a wiki article with links and that will take you to, you know, both the kind of before and after picture of the last several years of your life. So yeah, encourage people to check you out. Thanks again for having me. You have a wonderful day. Thank you.