Ky Schevers

Ky Schevers was born in . She was assigned female at birth and grew up in a Chicago suburb. In an interview with Outline, she described liking reptiles and science fiction as a child; most of her friends were boys. When her family moved to a more rural area when she was nine, she was ostracized or even severely bullied for not acting like a typical girl. In the same interview, puberty was described as "miserable" for her. At the age of 15, she realized she preferred girls romantically and joined the gay youth group at her Unitarian church. She cut her hair short, and started referring to herself as a "boy dyke". Around this time, she adopted a masculine name. == Transition ==

By college, in 2004, Schevers was identifying as a trans man. Her college community was highly supportive of her transition, respecting her name and inquiring about accommodations she needed. Rather than the ostracism she had previously experienced, her transgender status got her positive attention as a "minor campus celebrity"; at the same time, she felt tokenized by her peers. She worked odd jobs to support herself and pay for the testosterone-based masculinizing hormone therapy, which was also subsidized by grants received by her Chicago clinic. Over the following years, Schevers felt ambivalence about her transition. It solved some of her problems with her identity, but caused others. She says people were nicer to her after she transitioned, when she presented as a man, rather than a butch lesbian. However, testosterone led her to feel emotionally numb, and her previous obsessive thoughts about her gender and identity had not been resolved. She stopped taking testosterone after two years, then returned to a lower dose, then stopped again, though still described herself as trans. She began describing herself as genderqueer. Around this time, she began talking to an older woman who had detransitioned; the two bonded over their shared experiences of transition, queerness, and conflicted feelings over gender. == Detransition ==

In the summer of 2011, Schevers began her detransition, from male back to female. She was more afraid of the detransition process than of the transition, but she was accepted by her friends and family. She wrote that her gender dysphoria that caused her initial transition was caused by her internalized misogyny and trauma, and she suggested that could also be true of other gender transitioners. and a chapter to the 2016 radical feminist anthology ''Female Erasure: What You Need To Know About Gender Politics' War on Women, the Female Sex and Human Rights'' (), among 48 authors, many of whom considered gender transition an attack on women. Conservatives retold Schevers's story. When, in November 2016, Schevers posted her first online video about her detransition, as CrashChaosCats, it was quickly picked up by American conservative blogger Robert Stacy McCain who used it as evidence of "her former captivity within the transgender cult." Breitbart took her story and likened transition to mutilation. Schevers said her words were misused and taken out of context. Conservative commentator Ryan T. Anderson discussed Schevers, under the name Crash, at length in his 2018 book, When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment. Anderson quotes her writing and videos to say that she was never a man trapped in a woman's body, instead that she wanted to identify as one because of personal trauma and a misogynistic culture, and that detransition brought her a more lasting peace. When Schevers found this out, she wrote that she was enraged to find out that her story was distorted and used this way, and that she would never have agreed had she been asked. == Retransition ==

In late 2020, Keira Bell, a detransitioned woman in the UK, sued the UK National Health Service in the case Bell v Tavistock, causing the High Court of Justice to rule that young people, even with the help of their parents or doctors, could not give informed consent to transgender medical treatment. That was what happened to her, she said; she tried to explain her gender dysphoria "in a radical feminist framework, and find the root causes, and do everything to make these feelings go away, and that didn't really work. The only thing that did work to make them go away was accepting them." Slate magazine called her the most prominent of the former members of the anti-transgender movement who were speaking out against it. Both had been involved with what they now called transphobic detransition communities and wanted to fight back against them. and have been interviewed about other transgender issues. In 2022, Schevers said she had "retransitioned", identifying herself as transmasculine and genderqueer, even though she still used she and her pronouns. She said that she supported the journey of trans and genderqueer youth, and felt guilty that she was a prominent figure who set the stage for other detransitioners who associated with far right groups to push an anti-trans platform to attack them. == Notes ==