She turned away from anti-trans activism and leaked a trove of emails that exposed the inner workings of the right-wing network dedicated to rolling back our rights. It was a great gift to the trans community and journalism.

  

by Evan Urquhart

Elisa Rae Shupe was a transfemme veteran, the first American legally recognized as nonbinary, and a whistleblower who exposed the inner machinations of the movement to roll back transgender rights. She took her own life on Jan. 27, her body wrapped in a trans pride flag, outside the Syracuse VA Medical Center.

Although rumors had circulated widely online that Shupe was the one who had died, her identity was not confirmed by any news outlet until today, when syracuse.com published a story connecting her life to the tragedy in the medical center parking lot.

I corresponded with Elisa occasionally by email, starting in 2022. I first reached out after a tipster told me that she had turned away from the anti-trans activism in which she had participated for several years as a prominent detransitioner. Her Wikipedia talk page included messages I later confirmed were from Elisa, asking that her page be updated to reflect that she had retransitioned and had denounced her anti-trans statements. I emailed to ask if she might be willing to tell her story.

Elisa’s first email to me mentioned mental illness. “I realized something … How, myself included, a lot of these [detransitioner] women have serious mental health issues and way too much time on their hands,” she wrote. “They're sitting at home on disability with nothing to do, just like I was and still am, and that plays a role in them getting sucked into the GC movement and subsequently radicalized.”

No story of mine came out of this, but when stories relating to Elisa’s disillusionment with anti-trans activism finally broke they represented some of the most significant journalism on the anti-trans right ever published. 

Madison Pauly, writing for Mother Jones, published an in-depth examination of the inner workings of the “religious-right networks behind transgender health care bans” on March 8, 2023, that relied upon Elisa’s trove of email correspondence with the architects of the anti-trans movement. 

A few days later a profile of Shupe by Jude Doyle appeared on the website Xtra. Doyle’s piece was an intimate portrayal of the way mental illness made Shupe vulnerable to exploitation by people who saw her as a weapon to be used against trans people. Assigned Media’s Trans Data Library project relied heavily on this reporting in many of its entries.

By leaking these emails, Elisa gave a great gift to both the trans community and journalism. The emails, and Elisa’s extensive cooperation with the reporters who wrote about it, epitomized courage, because it necessarily involved Elisa taking full responsibility for her own participation in anti-trans extremism. It also involved exposing her mental health struggles before an American public that heavily stigmatizes mental illness, particularly personality disorders and severe illness that requires hospitalization. 

But Elisa believed that her borderline personality disorder lay at the heart of what made her exploitable by bad-faith actors, and she wanted the world to know it.

Borderline personality disorder may also have made her exploitable by journalists. Or, if you prefer to look at it another way, the restlessness, risk-taking, and self-destructiveness of her BPD is what allowed Elisa to strike one of the most significant blows against the anti-trans movement. 

Perhaps bravery by another name is mental illness. Or, at least, maybe it was like that for Elisa.

Elisa’s death hit me hard. I’m not always good at remaining in touch with former sources (or almost-sources), but I made an effort with Elisa because she was so clearly struggling, and because her history of anti-trans activism made it difficult for trans people to fully support her. I tried to stay in touch, but not as well as I’d like. I mostly wanted her to know, when she experienced dark times, that she would always have my respect and support.

Mental illness is also deeply personal for me. I’ve written occasionally about my struggles with self-harm and disordered eating pre-transition, and very occasionally mentioned that this included inpatient stays. Elisa’s illness held an uncomfortable familiarity, too close for comfort, but so far from where I am now, healthy and whole after transitioning.

Now she is dead. Could I have done more? Yes. Would it have changed things? Probably, no. I know I’m not that powerful. Still, I wish I’d reached out, just to say hello, a bit more often, and tried harder to be a companion in dark places. 

If I had, at least I might have known her better.

I will remember Elisa as a hero and a martyr, a complicated person who I could have known better if I’d only made time to do so. I will miss her occasional emails, and honor her for her contributions to history and to the trans rights movement.

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Evan Urquhart is the founder of Assigned Media.

 

Google’s featured snippet is pulling in an Amazon AI summary of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi manifesto Mein Kampf that calls it “a true work of art” in the latest AI-related fuckup affecting top search results.

As of writing, searching for “mein kampf positive reviews” returned a result that was pulled from an AI-generated summary of an Amazon listing’s customer reviews. So, it’s a search algorithm attempting to summarize an AI summary. The full AI summary on Amazon says: “Customers find the book easy to read and interesting. They appreciate the insightful and intelligent rants. The print looks nice and is plain. Readers describe the book as a true work of art. However, some find the content boring and grim. Opinions vary on the suspenseful content, historical accuracy, and value for money.”

As I’m writing this, Google says “An AI Overview is not available for this search,” but the Amazon AI summary was in large text directly below it, in the space where an overview would typically be, above other web results. This is what Google calls a featured snippet: "Google's automated systems select featured snippets based on how well they answer the specific search request and how helpful they are to the user," the company says. A highlight appeared, added by Google, over the phrase “easy to read and interesting.” Notably the featured snippet result for this doesn’t quote everything from Amazon’s AI, so it is itself a summary. 

Alexios Mantzarlis, the director of the security, trust, and safety initiative at Cornell Tech and formerly principal of Trust & Safety Intelligence at Google, first spotted the result.

Uh... Amazon's AI summary of Mein Kampf is even worse, and pollutes Google results for [Mein Kampf positive reviews]

— Alexios Mantzarlis (@mantzarlis.com) 2025-03-06T13:45:31.788Z

After I contacted Google for comment (the company hasn’t responded as of writing) an AI Overview did appear, and notes that the book is “widely condemned for its hateful and racist ideology,” but that historical analyses “might point to aspects of the book that could be considered ‘positive’ from a purely literary or rhetorical perspective.”

This is, at least, a better summation of the conversation around Hitler’s book that Amazon’s AI summary gives. The AI-generated review summary on the Amazon listing also shows links to see reviews that mention specific words, like “readability,” “read pace,” and “suspenseful content.” Enough people mentioned Mein Kampf being boring that there’s a “boredom” link, too.

Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The 2,067 reviews for this specific copy of Hitler’s fascist manifesto are mostly positive, and taken extremely literally, the blueprint for Nazism is easy to read and, in some sense, “interesting.” But the reviews are much more nuanced than that. Reviewing the roadmap for the Holocaust from the world’s most infamous genocidal dictator with “five stars” seems twisted, but the reviews are nuanced in a way that AI clearly doesn’t understand—but a human can. 

“Mein Kampf, by Adolf Hitler, should be read by everyone in the world who are interested in a world of peace, social responsibility, and worldwide cooperation,” one reviewer wrote, in an honestly pretty concerning start to a very long review. But they go on to write more that clarifies their point of view: “This evil book presents a dark vision of how to go about creating tyranny in a democratic society so that one, similar to Russia, is created. [...] Also, Hitler is an excellent writer; he is not a rambling madman writing disconnected ideas and expressing a confusing methodology. His text is easy reading, and it is a world classic that is a must read.”

Another five-star review says: “Chilling to begin reading this book and realize that these are the words written by Adolf Hitler. Read it and absorb what he says in his own words and you soon grasp what he means. [...] We are bound to repeat History if we don't understand mistakes that were made in the past.”

These aren’t “positive” reviews; most of the five-star reviews are noting the quality of the print or shipping, and not endorsing the contents of the book.

Mein Kampf has never been banned in the U.S. (unlike plenty of other books about race, gender, and sex), but Amazon did briefly ban listings of the book from its platform in 2020 before reinstating it.

Google’s AI Overview shoots itself in the algorithmic foot frequently, so it’s noteworthy that it’s sitting this result out. When it launched in May 2024 as a default feature on searches, it was an immediate and often hysterical mess, telling people it’s chill to eat glue and that they should consume one small rock a day. In January, the feature was telling users to use the most famous sex toy in the world with children for behavioral issues. These weird results are beside the bigger point: Google’s perversion of its own search function—its most popular and important product—is a deep problem that it still hasn’t fixed, and that has real repercussions for the health of the internet. At first, AI Overview was so bad Google added an option to turn it off entirely, but the company is still hanging on to the feature despite all of this. 

The Mein Kampf AI summaries are also an example of how AI is starting to eat itself online, and the cracks are showing. Studies in the last few years show that AI models are consuming AI-generated content as training data in a way that’s polluting and destroying the models themselves.

Thanks for subscribing to my newsletter! It’s free, but I’d be super grateful if you pre-ordered my novel Lessons in Magic and Disaster. Nicola Griffith says, “Lessons in Magic and Disaster is a hymn to queer love, joy, and persistence… A book for our times—and for all the times before this.” You can get a sneak peek at my work in progress — a sequel to All the Birds in the Sky — if you pre-order. (Details here.) And you can get a signed/personalized/doodled version from Green Apple Books.

With that out of the way…

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What to Do if a Character Stops Surprising You

What do you do when a character loses all of their mystery? 

In my book Never Say You Can't Survive, I talk about being curious about your characters, and how wanting to know more about them can help you to enjoy writing them more — the same way that in real life, we are drawn to people we want to know more about. 

But sometimes, the curiosity runs out. Sometimes you start to feel like you know everything you need to know about a character, and that's when the character often will become less interesting to write. They’re a known quantity, they've peeled back all their layers. What do you do when a character becomes (Billy Joel voice) too familiar, and there are no more surprises? 

This happens. Here's a few ways that I've found to deal with it.

1) Look back through what you already wrote

If you think you know everything about a character and what makes them tick, you definitely don't.

If you look back at what you wrote earlier, you’ll probably find that you left yourself lots of clues and hints about unexplored nooks and crevices in this character's personality and backstory. If you spent a decent amount of time building a character’s internal monologue and developing their story, you’re pretty much bound to find loose threads that you can pull on. I’m often amazed at the stuff I forgot I threw in when introducing a character, which can prove fruitful later on in the character’s life.

And of course, if you decide to introduce a new facet to a character later in the book, you can always go back and add hints about this earlier on.

2) Go back and write the parts you skipped over

Sometimes there’s a scene that just doesn’t feel necessary — you can skip over it, and just tell the reader what happened. And we can just see whatever happens next.

If two characters have a conversation and already I know how it turns out, I might just summarize that conversation in a sentence. Normally, this is a really good idea, because you can move the story forward quickly without getting bogged down.

But I've been amazed how many times I felt at a loss with a character, and the only way to fix it has been to go back and write the scene I skipped, so I can see not just what decision the character made, but why they made it, and what issues they struggled with as they made it. Even if I still don’t end up including that scene in the book, writing it anchors me more in the character’s perspective and lets me know how they feel about the decision they made.

3) Figure out what your character is in denial about.

Sure, your character may be telling you that they're an open book and you know everything about them — but they're probably lying.

It’s worth doing some digging to figure out what they're not admitting, or are actively ignoring about themself and their situation. There's probably a lot of stuff that they (and you) have been sweeping under the rug. Maybe you can confront them with irrefutable evidence that they're wrong about something that happened in their past.

Along similar lines…

4) Figure out the person this character would least like to have a conversation with

And lock those two people in a room together.

5) Give them what they've always wanted

And see how miserable it makes them! And what they choose to do about that misery. 

6) Confront them with someone terrible who agrees with them

A fun way to shake up a character’s ideals or personality is to have them meet someone who believes all the same things they do, but is taking those beliefs in a terrible, harmful direction. Make ‘em squirm and try to justify how they’re different from the awful person who shares all their beliefs.

7) Introduce someone who knew them way back when

Meeting someone from a character's past gives us a window into the person they used to be. You might think you remember your childhood pretty well — until you run into someone who was there, and saw a bunch of events from their own vantage point. Or even your young adulthood, for that matter.

It's always a bit of a wake-up call to encounter someone else's memories of your own past. Not to mention, someone who knew you in your youth will know all the most embarrassing stories and possibly where all the bodies are buried.

Whoever a character used to be, that version of them is still inside somewhere, and it tells us a lot about who they are now — whether they want to admit it or not.

8) Take them at their word.

Maybe instead of exposing what a hypocrite a character is, try believing what they say about themselves. If they act exactly like the person that claim to be — or that you have decided they are — it's going to reveal so many contradictions and cracks, because nobody ever fully lives up to their own legend or fully tries to embody their own beliefs.

Make them go out and tilt with some fucking windmills. Send them into a situation where their clearly-defined and well-established character traits are going to make them do something really extreme, that they won't be able to take back. Make them prove they are who they say they are, or who you've been saying they are — and make it cost them a lot.

9) Get them out of a rut.

I saved the most obvious suggestion for last. If a character seems like they're stagnating, or has no more mysteries to unfold, change up their status quo.

Put them in a starkly different situation, where nothing is familiar and they have to evolve or (maybe) die. Deal them a huge setback, or — see item #5 above — give them an unexpected windfall. This is the quickest and easiest way to make a character change, which is another way of saying “to make them reveal new aspects of their personality.” Throw them into the deep end without a life preserver, possibly with a bunch of sharks. 

And as always, don't forget to have fun!

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Music I Love Right Now

I was already on a kick of listening to Angie Stone lately, and then she tragically passed away in a car accident over the weekend. I’m so sad I never got to see her perform live, and I only recently started to appreciate how great she was. Her debut album, 1999’s Black Diamond, is pure gold — it reminds me of some other great late ‘90s/early 2000s soul by folks like Eric Benét, D’Angelo and N’Dea Davenport. There’s lots of rich reverb-heavy synth and slow drum machine tracks, with sweet layered vocals. My fav song of hers is probably “Pissed Off”. Here she is doing it live and throwing some Earth Wind & Fire into the beginning:

Also, I did not know until I just looked at Wikipedia that Angie Stone had been a founding member of Sequence, the hip hop trio that recorded the incredible dancefloor-filler “Funk You Up”. Here she is in 1982: