Former “Survivor” contestant Teeny Chirichillo has come out as transgender.
The 24-year-old wrote an essay for Cosmopolitan published Wednesday and explained that his life “has been full of uncertainty” since appearing on Season 47 of the reality show last year.
“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,” Chirichillo wrote.
The New Jersey native recalled making the decision to identify as non-binary and use she/her pronouns when he did the show because “it felt like a scary time to come out.”
“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 shared. “And a small part of me feared that asking my tribe to use pronouns other than she/her would cause people to panic about messing up. Maybe they’d feel nervous about the hypothetical possibility of fan base cancellation for accidentally saying the wrong pronoun one too many times.”
“It’s an error almost unavoidable for those still learning. And maybe, I thought, that would be a good enough reason to eliminate me from the game,” he added.
Chirichillo said that while he was flying home from Fiji in June 2024, he faced “invasive” comments from critics online after the Season 47 trailer dropped.
“During the 11-hour flight, 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,” Chirichillo 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.”
Chirichillo, who had top surgery after filming the show, said they continued to struggle with their gender identity while watching the season on TV, before realizing he “had been a closeted trans guy.”
“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,” Chirichillo wrote. “But I know who I am.”
After the Season 47 finale in December, Chirichillo exclusively spoke to The Post about the “incredible response” they got from fans for opening up about their gender identity on the show.
“I’m forever grateful that it was included in the show and that I actually did allow myself to get that vulnerable because it’s so authentically how I felt in that moment,” he said. “And I’ll forever have that to look back on as I continue to grow and change.”
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
