Ky Schevers is an American writer and activist who left the transphobic “ex-trans” movement. Schevers states on the Reclaiming Trans website:
Ky Schevers played a significant role creating and promoting the radical feminist detrans womenās community. Under the name CrashChaosCats, she wrote, made videos, presented workshops and gave media interviews in order to talk about her experiences detransitioning and promote anti-trans feminist ideology. Eventually she became disillusioned with the radical feminist movement and recognized her detransition as a harmful anti-trans conversion practice. She writes now to raise awareness of the harms of ideologically motivated detransition and the role transphobic detrans communities play in organized transphobia.
Background
Gender critical troll Katie Herzog featured Schevers prominently in a widely criticized 2017 article about “detransition” that appeared in The Stranger. Schevers is given the pseudonym “Cass” in Herzog’s piece. Neither Herzog nor The Stranger has ever updated the original piece or covered the subsequent developments. Schevers was also mentioned in the 2018 profile of ex-trans activist Carey Callahan in the documentary that accompanied the transphobic Atlantic piece on “detransition” by Jesse Singal. Schevers is called “CrashChaosCats” or “Crash” in that publication.
Herzog claimed that many people in the ex-trans movement “detransition” because they have a harder life from less social acceptance:
That may be true for some detrans peopleāespecially trans women, who generally have a harder time passing and who lose the benefits inherent with appearing male in societyābut it wasn’t the case for Cass, a 31-year-old detrans lesbian in California. Cass was severely bullied as a gender nonconforming kid and says transitioning actually made life easier. She started taking testosterone at 20, and her community was largely supportive. She didn’t have a hard time finding work or people to date. “People were definitely nicer to me after I transitioned and they saw me as a man instead of a butch dyke,” Cass said.
Three months before Cass started taking testosterone, her mom committed suicide. “Transitioning was kind of a survival strategy,” Cass said. And that worked for a while, but over time, she started to sense that her dysphoria was rooted more in the trauma of her mother’s death and her own internalized misogyny than in gender identity. As an adolescent, she had been masculine, butch. “I got a lot of very harsh, negative messages about what it meant to be a woman,” Cass said. “It got to the point where I couldn’t see myself as a woman without feeling the horror other people felt toward me. Living as a man provided a kind of refuge until I was ready to dive into all that.”
When she was ready, Cass, like Jackie, looked online for advice, and she met a woman a few years older who had detransitioned. Her experiences were the sameāfrom childhood bullying and internalized misogyny to the sense that transitioning hadn’t really solved her dysphoria at all. They became friends, talking over the course of a few months, and then, after nine years living as a man, Cass came out as a woman.
It’s been four years since Cass detransitioned. She changed the gender marker on her driver’s license back to female and asked her friends and family to call her by her birth name, but she still passes as male, with a deep voice and a shade of hair on her cheeks.
“Psychologically, it was harder to detransition,” she said. She compares it to the process of working through her mom’s suicide. “It involved a lot more dealing with my trauma and facing the self-destructive parts of myself. It’s not fun, but it’s worth it.”
Cass still hasn’t told the health-care providers who helped her through her transition about the change. In some ways, she faults them for enabling her transition, even though it’s exactly what she wanted at the time. She writes about her experience online, and in one post, she says that a favored therapist “helped me hurt myself. That definitely wasn’t her intention but that’s still what happened. This contradiction is difficult to face and understand.”
In addition to her writing, Cass recently started posting videos to YouTube, where there are a growing number of detransitioning confessionals. In one video, which has been watched nearly 900,000 times, a young man reflects on his decision to detransition after living as a woman. He’s beautiful and androgynous, with long lashes framing bright-blue eyes. “I’m not like every other boy,” he said. “I can accept that now.”
There’s an offline community of detransitioners as well: In 2014 and 2015, Cass led a workshop on detransitioning at the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival. (Michfest, as it was known, had a contentious history with the trans community due to its long-held “women born women” policy. The festival closed after nearly 40 years in existence in 2015.) Last year, Cass and 15 other detransitioned women got together on the West Coast for a weekend of workshops, meditation, and shared experience. Cass thinks it was the first gathering of its kind.
In the comments, Schevers wrote in 2017:
As one of the detransitioned women (“Cass”) interviewed for this article, I want to say I’m happy with how it came out and am glad women like me are finally getting more representation. I think it’s a very balanced and well researched piece of writing and best of all gives a marginalized group of people a chance to be heard. I’m very excited that detransitioned people are getting more opportunities to speak about our own experiences rather than having other people talk about what they think we are and what we mean. This is one of few articles out there that actually represents my life as a detransitioned woman.
I’m dismayed but not surprised by how some people are reacting to the issues this piece has raised. My life is not transphobic and making lives like mine more visible is not transphobic either. Reading that experiences like mine should not be talked about in public is infuriating. I get to be open and honest about my life and I get to work to make my experience and community more visible. There are people out there who need to know that there’s resources and support for them if they end up detransitioning. They need to know they’re not the only ones.
I made a video in response to the article and people’s reactions to it that can be watched here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SuI5rBWDā¦I would encourage people to also watch videos other detrans women made in response: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VqN_9rM8ā¦
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kN6N6F6Aā¦
Since leaving the ex-trans cult
Schevers later teamed up with Lee Leveille to form Health Liberation Now! It is “a free, trans-run resource analyzing the social and political forcesĀ acting in opposition to health liberation for transgender, detransitioned, retransitioned, andĀ gender diverse people, as well as those questioning their gender. We pair theseĀ analyses with collections of proactive resistance strategies that community organizers can useĀ in pursuit of trans health liberation.”
References
Herzog, Katie (June 28, 2017). The Detransitioners: They Were Transgender, Until They Werenāt. The Stranger. https://www.thestranger.com/features/2017/06/28/25252342/the-detransitioners-they-were-transgender-until-they-werent
Herzog, Katie (July 3, 2017). A Response to the Uproar Over My Piece, āThe Detransitioners.ā The Stranger. https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2017/07/03/25262759/a-response-to-the-uproar-over-my-piece-the-detransitioners
Urquhart E (February 1, 2021). An āEx-Detransitionerā Disavows the Anti-Trans Movement She Helped Spark. Slate https://slate.com/human-interest/2021/02/detransition-movement-star-ex-gay-explained.html
Schevers K (December 20, 2020). Detransition as Conversion Therapy: A Survivor Speaks Out. An Injustice! Magazine https://aninjusticemag.com/detransition-as-conversion-therapy-a-survivor-speaks-out-7abd4a9782fa
Resources
Medium (medium.com)
Health Liberation Now! (healthliberationnow.com)
Reclaiming Trans (reclaimingtrans.com)
Twitter (twitter.com)
Muck Rack (muckrack.com)
WordPress (wordpress.com)
- Reclaiming Trans (reclaimingtrans.wordpress.com)
- CRASHCHAOSCATS (crashchaoscats.wordpress.com) [2013-2019, removed 2020]