The making of a detransitioner
Elisa Rae Shupe was a weapon in the hands of TERFs and Christian conservatives. Now, over 2,600 pages of leaked emails help tell her story

By Jude Ellison S. Doyle • March 15, 2023 2:13 pm EDT

On Wednesday, March 8, Mother Jones broke the news of a secret working group that had collaborated to craft anti-trans legislation targeting youth healthcare and spread it to multiple states. The existence of that group—which included numerous elected officials, members of Christian conservative policy groups such as the Family Policy Alliance and the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), and representatives from anti-trans “feminist” group Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF), among others—proved that the current onslaught of anti-trans legislation was the result of a coordinated campaign. Within hours of the Mother Jones story publishing, a 2,600-page PDF archive of the leaks was posted online.

That archive is substantial, and it is damning. But the public leaks are not the whole story. When the archive was posted, I had already been reading through the leaked emails for several days. The leaker, a trans woman and former “detransition” activist named Elisa Rae Shupe, had reached out to me to offer access, and I had come away with a whole other story.

The full archive—sent to me, and other journalists—contains every email Shupe sent or received, from both of her two email accounts, between 2017 and 2023, the years when she was most active as a member of the organized anti-trans movement. There are years of media, legislative and tactical strategy outlined in those emails; there are conversations in which some of the most well-known TERFs in the movement coordinate strategy and brainstorm talking points. It is a playbook for how anti-trans organizations operate and a compressed history of how the TERF movement joined forces with the Christian right to create the current moment.

Most important, it is a record of how Elisa Rae Shupe was crafted into a weapon; how her narrative was established, edited and eventually taken out of her control, even as her name appeared on testimonies, Supreme Court briefings and highly circulated op-eds. This is the making of a “detransitioner.” More like her are being made every day.