Survivor star Teeny Chirichillo has come out as a transgender man.
Chirichillo, 24, who competed on season 47 of the reality show, opened up about how public speculation about his gender identity affected him in a personal essay in Cosmopolitan.
“The state of my life since Survivor has been full of uncertainty. I didn’t come back to a spouse or a full-time career, like many of my castmates did,” Chirichillo said.
“People were theorizing about how the producers were going to adapt, within the parameters of historically gendered tribe divisions, to a nonbinary contestant. To me,” he wrote.
“The invasive questions about my biology, prompted by my androgyny, weren’t what made my shrunken stomach sink though — if anything, those are the posts I return to,” he continued. “What made me dizzy was the pressure for me to represent as the first openly nonbinary Survivor player.”
He added: “But on my backpack, wedged under the plane seat, was a pink ribbon — given to me by the production team — because I’d never declared anything that would indicate I wasn’t a cisgender girl. Before flying out, I made a choice: I wasn’t ready to launch into labeling myself any which way for the first time on national television.”
Chirichillo went on to admit he did open up to his cast a bit when they were filming in Fiji.
“I told them about the top surgery consultation I’d had a few days before I left America, about how my boobs were a part of my body that I’d never wanted and how funny it was that my tits’ final act on Earth was running around a jungle lying to people,” he wrote.
“Season 47 began airing. And right away, my lack of clarity seemed to bleed through the screen and infect all of the commentators of the show with the same confusion I was feeling inside,” Chirichillo continued. “Queer and trans people were messaging me with preemptive gratitude, while I had guilty flashbacks to declaring myself as the leader of the all-girls alliance.”
At one point, Chirichillo decided to update his Instagram bio with the pronouns, “she/they/he.” However, this only prompted more outside noise.
“How long can I “whatever” my way through it? My noncommitment to a label like nonbinary and my lack of attachment to the policing of my own pronouns is because, until right now, I had been a closeted trans guy,” Chirichillo said.
“I don’t expect everyone to reach the same level of ease with my gender that I’ve arrived at after a lifetime of suppressing and then exploring the boyhood in my soul. But I know who I am,” he added.
Chirichillo’s candid remarks come less than two months before Pride Month, a month-long celebration of the LGBTQ+ community and all its contributions.
Celebrations occur in June because of the Stonewall riots by gay rights activists against a police raid at the Stonewall Inn in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village on June 28, 1969.
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