I met Robin Copley for coffee on a Sunday afternoon this fall. She had just recently resigned from her position as Madison’s Independent Police Monitor citing personal health reasons, and the news cycle had been less than kind to her about it. Her decision had been covered by several media outlets, with the attention prompting many to poke into her private life, post scathing comments online, speculate about her health and identity, and even cast damning allegations against her on platforms like Reddit.

But despite the public’s reaction, there’s something everybody seems to have missed: The truth. That’s the story Robin wanted to tell me.

Where it All Began 

“In the weeks before my interview for the City of Madison’s new Independent Police Monitor position, I had left my fiancé and began a new relationship. After I accepted the position, we moved to Madison. I remember moving during a huge snowstorm. That was February of 2023.

Shortly after arriving, I threw my back out, so I was lying on the floor all weekend. My then-partner went to pick up a friend of ours who needed a place to stay. She was a trans woman whose partner had been violent with her. We had the space, so I said yes.”

A week earlier, Robin had finally told her partner that she’d been experiencing gender dysphoria since she was eight years old. It was a secret she had never shared with anyone before. “I wasn’t even sure how to talk about it,” she said. “I just said, I think this has been part of me for a long time. I didn’t know what to do with it.”

Her partner brushed it aside. Then, days later, told Robin they’d shared that private revelation with the friend now sleeping down the hall. “There was no way to express the level of betrayal I felt,” Robin said. “I had nobody I could trust. It didn’t matter how accepting the other person was. That wasn’t the point. I’d kept this secret for over two decades because I didn’t feel safe. This was the first person I felt safe enough to open up to, and now I needed to be careful about what I tell them.”

What followed was a slow corrosion of safety, the kind that hides itself behind intimacy. “At first it was small things,” she said. “Without my knowledge, they would review this ‘Digital Wellness’ app on my phone to see how much time I spent on my browser that day. Then they would ask strange questions and build from my confused answers.”

“A month or two after I told them about my feelings of gender dysphoria, they started saying really weird stuff about ‘male socialization,’ and about how trans women can still benefit from being assigned male at birth. I didn’t push back on most of it. Sometimes I tried to ask questions to see if I could get that reasoning to another place or get them to hear what they sounded like, but it never went anywhere.”

By August, Robin’s work life had grown more demanding. She was running Madison’s Office of the Independent Police Monitor, a small department next door to the Common Council’s office. The more time she spent in the office, the more her partner, who worked from home, grew suspicious and began accusing her of being distant, unavailable, and cold.

“I was just saying no to sex more often,” Robin told me. “I didn’t want to explain why, but the truth was, I didn’t trust them anymore. Months later, I learned I was right to distrust them. I learned they had been reading my messaging history from the last several years, a diary I started keeping a few years after getting sober from opiates, and a journal I was using in my current therapy sessions.”

After examining Robin’s phone activity, her partner confronted her about finding erotic stories about men becoming hyper-feminine women and reveling in their new lives. “Those stories made me happy,” recalled Robin. “But my partner didn’t like that. She asked, ‘Is this a sexual thing? Do you get off on this?’”

Though there’s obviously a sexual dimension to it, for Robin, that was not the appeal. “I don’t think you can fully disconnect gender and sexuality. There’s this debunked psychology about a fetish called ‘autogynephilia’ that seeks to erase trans identities as nothing more than a fetish. Unfortunately, that’s the lens they saw my every action through.”

Robin’s interest in trans content at large was more about identity and validation than anything, but none of that mattered. “I remember one of our biggest fights happened because she walked into the living room to find me watching a YouTube video uploaded by a popular streamer who had just started HRT and was explaining their experiences. That was obviously not sexual. It was testimonial,” said Robin. “But by then, they had already decided I had a sex addiction.”

That accusation changed everything.

A Twisting of the Mind 

Robin is 15 years sober from opioid addiction. When her partner told her she might be a “sex addict,” she didn’t argue. “If there’s one thing I know about addiction,” she said, “it’s that I’ll always be the last person to see it. Everyone else will notice before I do. And this was still the person I trusted more than anyone. So, I said, okay. Let’s get treatment.”

Shortly thereafter, Robin started seeing a therapist who specialized in sex addiction and joined a 12-step program called Sex Addicts Anonymous. She would return home from these meetings to her partner’s suspicion and resentment. “Every day, it was some new interrogation,” she told me. “Why did you say this? Why did you think that? Why did you look at that website? And it all came back to two things: That I was a deeply misogynistic person, and that I was being abusive by hiding all of this from my partner. And the only way to correct that was to give them more access to my private documents, my writings, my devices, and my time.”

The therapy’s goal, she explained, wasn’t recovery. It was erasure. “By the end of it,” Robin said, “I didn’t just feel ashamed of who I was. I felt guilty for being who I was. It made me feel like it was something I was choosing because I was a bad person.”

In the time since Robin went through that experience, she has been through a lot of therapy and has come to realize that there was something much more sinister than simple insecurity or misunderstanding happening in that room. “What was happening is the difference between therapy and conversion,” Robin stated. “Therapy starts with the idea that you can heal. Conversion starts with the idea that you’re wrong.”

The Crossroads of Sex, Gender, Morality, and Purity 

In the United States, sex addiction treatment can occupy an odd and sometimes dangerous intersection between pop psychology and moral panic. Groups like Sex Addicts Anonymous are run by members—other addicts—with no professional facilitators present. The program borrows the structure of 12-step recovery, but when improperly administered, runs the risk of leaning on moral language about purity, accountability, and sin. And because the morals of sex are often the most heavily policed in religious spaces, sex addition treatment programs thrive in places like church basements and private clinics. These places promise transformation but often deliver shame, especially for queer and trans people who are already pathologized simply for existing outside the heterosexual norm.

While there are people who suffer from legitimate sex addiction and benefit from treatment, Robin’s experience shows how those systems, when abused, can replicate the same power dynamics they claim to treat. “Every conversation in the ‘recovery program’ was about how I was objectifying women and how my existence was proof of male entitlement,” she said. It was a pipeline for TERF ideology disguised as recovery.

Sex addiction groups, like much of recovery culture, are rarely designed or run with queer and trans people in mind. They often rely on binary gender scripts that declare men as pursuers and women as direct or indirect victims, and collapse under the weight of anyone who doesn’t fit neatly inside them. For trans people, these spaces can become a minefield of misgendering, moralizing, and violence disguised as care.

What makes this especially dangerous is that these programs are filled with people who have no idea trans participants are even in the room. Her story sits at the crossroads of several American obsessions: The addiction industrial complex, the policing of sexuality, and the medicalization of gender. It reveals how easily good intentions curdle into coercion when the underlying belief is that some people are broken.

Robin’s story is a reminder that healing isn’t possible inside systems built on shame, and that calling something “therapy” doesn’t necessarily make it humane. It is also a reminder that visibility, the simple acknowledgment that trans people are in the room, is itself a form of survival.

Stepping Out of the Fog 

By December, Robin’s world had collapsed to the four walls of her apartment. Her partner controlled when she could leave, whom she could talk to, and even which friends she was allowed to text. “They told me to delete old photos, stop talking to friends in California, including people I’ve known my whole life,” she said. “They said I was probably cheating, and because I was so deep in the recovery rhetoric, I started believing it. I thought, maybe I really am this horrible person.”

That spring, Robin attempted suicide. “I took out a revolver,” she told me, “and I put one round in. I kept an open space for every person I could think of who would miss me, and spun the wheel. Then I pulled the trigger.” She survived. “After that, the police came and I went to the hospital still believing I was an irredeemable sex addict who was unworthy of love and frankly, a burden on everyone around me.”

When she was discharged, Robin checked herself into a residential mental health facility for two months. “I was really upset when there weren’t any personality disorders like Narcissistic Personality Disorder, sociopathy, or addiction on my diagnosis,” she said, all things her partner had claimed she was. “It was just PTSD, gender dysphoria, anxiety, and depression. And that was a painful moment for me to realize that this person I’d been with, that I had trusted with my life, was wrong about me. All the stuff I went through wasn’t treatment. It was abuse.”

Reconciling Recovery & Life 

After leaving treatment, Robin returned to work, trying to rebuild some sense of normalcy. But the PTSD followed her. The gaslighting, suspicion, and constant need to prove she wasn’t lying was all being reiterated in new forms.

“I was working for the city, overseeing police oversight,” she said. “Every day was some new political fight. It was like being back in that relationship, the same kind of manipulation, the same power games, the same disbelief.”

Eventually, she felt she had no choice but to leave. “I realized I could work through the PTSD, or I could work through the institutional abuse, but I couldn’t do both,” she told me. “They interplay with each other, and life’s too short to spend it constantly wanting to die. Working in policing was full of triggers for me.” Robin was dealing with flashbacks from her relationship, and at the same time, handling graphic police cases, dealing with budget cuts, and feeling like a political punching bag between the mayor and City Council.

At a certain point, it all became too much. In early October, Robin chose to resign as Madison’s Independent Police Monitor, a move that was met with a surprising amount of public ridicule and personal allegations being published about her online.

But for Robin, giving this interview and telling her story isn’t about responding to that news cycle. “I’ve seen accusations that my health concerns are a plea for sympathy, which doesn’t make a lot of sense if I haven’t disclosed these health problems until after I resigned. I have nothing to gain.” Robin sought to share this story for others that might be or can avoid landing in the position she did. “It’s about shedding light on the experience I went through so that maybe other people won’t have to go through the same thing in the future.”

Reclaiming a Life 

I asked Robin what she plans to do next. She hesitated before answering. “I once wrote in a report in the office that said we’re living under fascism, and that caused a huge uproar. But I meant it. Trans people aren’t safe here. We’re told we’re predators or perverts. And it’s really hard for trans people to plan any kind of a future right now. Honestly, the way things are right now, I don’t know if I’ll even stay in this country, let alone this state.”

“It breaks my heart that I can’t continue as a police monitor because this is all I have ever thought about doing,” Robin told me. “My dad was a cop. I come from a family of conservatives in a very, very red county, and policing was just an inescapable part of all our lives. The city was undergoing this gang crackdown when I was in high school, and I remember riding the bus and seeing cops pull kids off the bus simply because they had the wrong tattoos. So, I always knew there needed to be more oversight in the way we handle policing.” While in law school, Robin focused her education on Constitutional Criminal Procedure and interned with the State Public Defender’s Appellate Division.

“The last five years in this work has been very hard, and I don’t think I’ll be able to return to it again. But I’d like to say I’m hopeful,” she concluded. “Maybe I’ll get some middle-management job with the state. Something nine-to-five where I can come home and have the rest of my life to myself. That would be nice.”