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 was assigned female at birth and grew up in a Chicago suburb. As a child she liked reptiles and science fiction, rather than looking pretty, and 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. Her puberty was hard, she hated her body's softness and vulnerability. 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".
Transition
By college, in 2004, Schevers was identifying as a trans man. Instead of ostracism, her transgender status got her positive attention as a minor campus celebrity. In the spring of Schevers's sophomore year in college, her mother, who had been suffering from depression, died by suicide. Three months later, Schevers had dropped out of college, and began the medical transition to male. 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 she felt 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 describing herself as trans. Neither felt completely right. She began describing herself as genderqueer and talking to an older woman who had detransitioned.
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. Meditation, physical work on a friend's farm, and writing about the process online helped. She blogged and made online videos as Crash and CrashChaosCats from 2013 to early 2020, about her transition and detransition. 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.
In 2014 and 2015, Schevers led workshops on detransitioning at the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, where most of the audience were trans-exclusionary radical feminists. In the summer of 2016, she attended what she believed to be the first in-person gathering of detransitioned women, with sixteen participants on the West Coast. Writing as Crash, Schevers contributed multiple articles to the 2015 detransitioned women's zine Blood and Visions: Womyn Reconciling With Being Female, 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. In 2017, the Illinois Family Institute and LifeSiteNews wrote about her transition, calling it tragic, and implying it was only a response to trauma. Schevers said her words were misused and taken out of context.