In a personal essay published in the Daily Signal, Shupe, an Army veteran, recounted his story beginning with his longtime struggle with gender dysphoria to his overnight ascension as a "liberal media darling" after his major court win in 2016. Shupe said he now attributes his former gender confusion to post-traumatic stress disorder, "severe mental health crisis" in 2013, and childhood trauma. In the essay, he laments how "out-of-control, transgender activism" enabled the medical community to indulge his gender fantasies amid a temporary life crisis, a problem he believes is becoming more widespread.

"The best thing that could have happened would have been for someone to order intensive therapy," Shupe wrote. "[Instead, the doctors] just kept helping me to harm myself." Shupe said his landmark court win landed him "instant fame within the LGBT community." But after he publicly stated his support for President Donald Trump's transgender military troop ban and his opposition to the "sterilization and mutilation of gender-confused children," Shupe explained his fame dissipated almost overnight.

"Overnight, I went from being a liberal media darling to a conservative pariah," Shupe said. "The truth is that my sex change to nonbinary was a medical and scientific fraud." In fact, Shupe said his historic legal victory was also fraudulent because the presiding judge had a transgender child. "I now believe that she wasn't just validating my transgender identity. She was advancing her child's transgender identity, too," Shupe said.