A trans veteran in New York state who died by suicide earlier this year has been identified as Elisa Rae Shupe, an advocate for equality who won an important court victory for trans rights.
“While I have liberated myself from the misery of gender dysphoria, I have traded that relief for the abuse and wrath of an often unforgiving public that is only beginning to understand my plight,” she wrote in a 2015 op-ed for the New York Times. “I have effectively traded my white male privilege to become one of America’s most hated minorities.”
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A year after that op-ed was published, Shupe became the first person to get legal recognition of a nonbinary gender identity in the U.S. when a court in Oregon ordered the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles to create a nonbinary gender option on driver’s licenses.
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“I was assigned male at birth due to biology,” she said at the time. “I’m stuck with that for life. My gender identity is definitely feminine. My gender identity has never been male, but I feel like I have to own up to my male biology. Being non-binary allows me to do that. I’m a mixture of both.” She added that she sees herself “as a third sex.”
But she faced some more challenges in life. She detransitioned in 2019, which she announced in an essay published by the far-right Daily Signal where she blamed healthcare professionals and LGBTQ+ organizations for helping her transition and “screw[ing] up her life.” Her story went viral among anti-transgender activists, and she even spoke at the Family Policy Alliance, the lobbying arm of the anti-LGBTQ+ organization Focus on the Family.
Shupe re-transitioned by 2022, calling her involvement with the Family Policy Alliance “sleazy.” She described her volatile childhood with a journalist from Keloland in 2023 and said that she hadn’t anticipated the “pretty scary environment” for trans women that she would be stepping into. She talked about her struggles with her mental health, which included two stints at a mental health facility in D.C. and a diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder. She talked bout her suicide attempts, which led to a third stay in a psychiatric ward. She talked about coming off of hormone replacement therapy and watching her body detransition, which she likened to vines covering up a tree and suffocating it to death.
“We were all gathered to do harm,” she said of her speech at the Family Policy Alliance’s event. “I was there to train lawmakers to help do that.”
She would be hospitalized for her mental health at least two more times, according to her wife, before her death in 2025.
Years later, Syracuse.com reported, she was at the Syracuse VA Medical Center getting gender-affirming surgery. A month later, in January 2025, she was found hanging near the campuses of the Syracuse VA Medical Center and Syracuse University in upstate New York, wrapped in a trans Pride flag.
Her apparent suicide shocked the local trans community and was noted in national media sources because of its timing, shortly after the start of the current administration and the signing of a slew of anti-trans executive orders.
“You cannot erase non-binary and transgender people because you give birth to more of us each day,” Shupe wrote in an email she sent minutes before her death to several people across the country.
“Her life was always full of rejection and pain,” a friend of Shupe told Syracuse.com. “She was harsh in her feelings and language.”
“Elisa, her very being, pissed off many. She was used, as so many marginalized humans are. She definitely didn’t have adequate support.”
Out journalist Sue Kerr, who has written for LGBTQ Nation in the past, met Shupe in 2018 at a community center in Pittsburgh. She said that they talked for hours at a trans Pride picnic.
“I do not believe Elisa was broken by her identity. She was broken by failed systems, including her family of origin and the military as well as the anti-transgender movement,” Kerr said. “She was beaten down by beauty standards, by her own conflicting desire to be accepted and to challenge non-acceptance.”
Shupe is survived by her wife and her daughter.
Editor’s note: This article mentions suicide. If you need to talk to someone now, call the Trans Lifeline at 1-877-565-8860. It’s staffed by trans people, for trans people. The Trevor Project provides a safe, judgement-free place to talk for LGBTQ youth at 1-866-488-7386. You can also call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255.
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