Ky Schevers

Ky Schevers is an American transgender rights activist. She was assigned female at birth, but gradually transitioned to male, including medical transition at the age of 20. Five years after, she detransitioned to female. She became prominent among the detransitioned community and for writing and making online videos about the gender transition and detransition process under the pen names Crash or CrashChaosCats. Another nine years after detransitioning, Schevers broke with the detransitioned community over its attacks on gender transition in general, and began to retransition. She now identifies as transmasculine and genderqueer, but using feminine pronouns, and she co-leads "Health Liberation Now!", an organization defending transgender rights.

Early life

Ky Schevers was born in . 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. 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.