Trans comedian James Tom just announced his new name!
In a new revealing personal essay for Them, Tom detailed the journey of self discovery he went through to get to a place where he felt comfortable announcing his name change and new pronouns to the world.
The stand-up comic and actor — best known as a writer for gay pirate series Our Flag Means Death and for roles on Life and Beth and the Ayo Edebiri and Rachel Sennott series Ayo and Rachel are Single — has identified as some version of queer since he was a teenager, and spent years experiencing people being confused by his gender expression and what pronouns to use.
“But for every frustration I faced, my nonbinary identity also freed me from the burden of other people’s perceptions. It was okay that people called me 'sir' from behind and pivoted to 'miss' when I turned around,” Tom wrote.
It wasn’t until 2022, after being on testosterone for three years and experiencing a breakup, that Tom realized he was attracted to men and started exploring that.
“Testosterone allowed me to access a latent desire for men that had likely always existed, but felt impossible to realize as a ‘woman.’ As a boy, though, dick became ubiquitous,” Tom revealed. “There are cathedrals everywhere for those with eyes to see. I took to f****try like a fish in water, and with my new gay surroundings came new ways for people to perceive me, and more importantly, new ways for me to perceive myself.”
At different points in his transition journey, Tom has identified as a butch dyke and then nonbinary, but it turns out identifying as a twink felt more authentic than any other identity he had landed on throughout his gender expression journey.
“To my surprise, I could see myself much more clearly as a beautiful twink than the butch-spectrum dyke I had tried to be for most of my life,” he explained. “No wonder I had always preferred Kylie Minogue to Tegan and Sara. But whereas my masculinity was taken at face value in dyke spaces, I knew I would have to really assert it around cis gay men.”
The comedian, who was part of of the all-genderqueer Netflix comedy special Hannah Gadsby’s Gender Agenda, started using “James” as his name on Grindr and then took a life-altering trip to Fire Island the year the Fire Island movie came out where he partied and was truly accepted as a man for the first time.
“Magically, Fire Island, a film about feeling out of place on Fire Island, had given me an opportunity to feel included on Fire Island. James was invited to the party,” he wrote.
That life-changing trip happened three years ago, but now Tom is ready to come out with his name change and new pronouns to the whole world.
“I’ve been out as various shades of gay since I was 13, but I’m still learning how to ‘come out,’” he explained. “Perhaps due to my own avoidant tendencies, I have never liked the thought of rupturing people’s existing idea of me. And because I’ve been openly queer for most of my life and all of my career, I have managed to circumvent a big ‘coming out moment’ until now.”
Tom has now had top surgery and has been on hormones, but publicly changing his name still felt “incredibly audacious.”
“For me, changing my body is about taking control of my vessel and being able to see myself. Changing my name is a demand that other people see what I see,” he wrote.Tom’s journey to self discovery and self acceptance hasn’t always been easy or seamless, but he’s learned to accept that he may continue to change.
“One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned through transition is that I can’t always predict the ways I will change, I can only be open to changing.”
He’s also aware that after coming out in such a public way there may still be moments of awkwardness or times when people are confused, but Tom is “ready to step through the portal and meet myself on the other side.”
“I like the person I am, or the person I’m becoming, and I think if I’d done it differently, I would be someone else,” he wrote. “It was Jes Tom who nailed the audition so that, someday, in the near future, James Tom will see his name in the credits. I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
