In a revealing new essay, Survivor star Teeny Chirichillo just came out as transgender.
On Wednesday, the Survivor 47 contestant got candid in a personal essay for Cosmopolitan where he talked about struggling with his identity.
“The state of my life since Survivor has been full of uncertainty,” he wrote for Cosmopolitan, per Page Six.
Chirichillo opened up about how much he struggled after the end of his Survivor season and how that played into discovering his own transness.
“I didn’t come back to a spouse or a full-time career, like many of my castmates did,” he said. “I didn’t have a passion to replace the 15-year quest that was getting cast. When I think about my future, there’s a lot of blurriness. But there’s a lifelong accumulation of artifacts that has pulled my identity into focus, inside the museum of my own transness.”
The 24-year-old reality TV star already identified an nonbinary while competing on Survivor and had to deal with “invasive” comments about his pronouns.
“I waded through debates over my pronouns, whether I would ‘count’ as a girl or a boy or both or neither, if I had a penis, and (my personal favorite) if I had tboy swag or nonbinary tea,” he said.
Chirichillo admitted he “wasn’t ready” to come out as trans while competing on the CBS reality show, especially considering it’s a “game of social politics.”
He went by she/her at the time before later using they/them pronouns, and Chirichillo worried that his fellow Survivor stars would “panic about messing up” his pronouns.
“It’s an error almost unavoidable for those still learning,” he wrote.
While on the show, Chirichillo opened up about getting a top surgery consultation right before the start of Survivor.
“I joked with my cast that I was giving my boobs one last treat before I put them down by wearing a sports bra instead of a binder for the first time in nearly two years. Chest binding on a deserted island for 25 days is a no-go,” he said.
But it wasn’t until the season ended and Chirichillo came back home to New Jersey, that he began to question his nonbinary identity and came to the conclusion that he “had been a closeted trans guy.”
He continued, “Even in knowing this, in writing this, there is a part of my brain that can’t shut off.”
Chirichillo also admitted that he wonders whether “his parents, grandmother and girlfriend” feel about him coming out as trans.
“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,” he wrote. “But I know who I am.”
