The first individual in U.S. history to be legally designated as “non-binary” — identifying as neither male nor female — has publicly renounced his transgender/non-gender persona and gone back to identifying as male.
In June 2016, an Oregon court ruled that 52-year-old Jamie Shupe, an 18-year honorably discharged military veteran, could legally identify as neither male nor female, a ruling that allowed him to be issued an Oregon driver’s license with a non-binary gender designation.
However, on his blog, where he now identifies himself as an “Ex-Transgender and Former Non-Binary Person,” Shupe recently announced that the state of Florida, where he has resided since 2018, had issued him a driver’s license identifying him as male. Shupe further stated that he has abandoned his transgender-non-binary posturing and now considers himself fully male.
“My history-making and landmark sex change to non-binary was a fraud based on the pseudoscience of gender identity,” wrote Shupe in his announcement. “I am and have always been male.”
He added that “in my thirty plus year marriage, I am the husband. To my daughter, I am her Father. I no longer identify as a transgender or non-binary person and renounce all ties to transgenderism.”
Shupe’s tortured journey from male, to transgender “female,” to “non-binary,” and back to male started in 2013 when he began dressing and identifying as a woman. In a 2015 New York Times profile entitled “Transgender Today,” Shupe explained that “I had to decide if I was going to begin living authentically as the woman that I have always been for my remaining years, or remain silent and get buried as the male that I am not by family members.”
In 2016, however, Shupe jettisoned the idea that he was a woman and instead petitioned a judge in Oregon, where he lived, to allow him to identify as neither male nor female. In June of that year, Multnomah County Judge Amy Holmes Hehn ruled that Shupe’s gender was “hereby changed from female to non-binary,” making Shupe the first person in the United States to be officially identified as such.
While Shupe became a hero of sorts to the LGBT movement, he found the chaos and confusion disconcerting, particularly its impact on children and youth. In his statement renouncing his own gender journey, Shupe said that he believed allowing people to choose their gender identity “is a fraud perpetrated by psychiatry, the likes of something the United States and other nations hasn’t experienced since the lobotomy era.”
In explaining his decision, he said that he did not want to be “party to advancing harmful gender ideologies that are ruining lives, causing deaths, and contributing to the sterilization and mutilation of gender-confused children.”
Image: Talaj via iStock / Getty Images Plus
