Survivor' Contestant Teeny Chirichillo Shares Personal Journey

Teeny Chirichillo – known as a competitor on "Survivor" Season 47 – has come out as a transgender man in a revealing essay.

"From the moment the first season 47 promo was released," People Magazine relayed, "Chirichillo said viewers designated him as the show's first nonbinary contestant, and despite his own 'uncertainty' about the label, he went along with it."

Published in Cosmopolitan, the essay reflects on Teeny's time on the island with castmates who, he worried, might "feel nervous about the hypothetical possibility of fan base cancellation for accidentally saying the wrong pronoun one too many times."

"I knew I'd enter 'Survivor' playing a social game," Teeny, 27, wrote. "Trying to ride the middle, to keep all my alliances open, to be myself (or an edited version of it)."

"And to win that game, I thought, I'd conceal the parts that felt too vulnerable for public consumption."

Even before the season aired, there was intense speculation around Teeny, who allowed himself to be identified as nonbinary. "People were theorizing about how the producers were going to adapt, within the parameters of historically gendered tribe divisions, to a nonbinary contestant," Teeny wrote of the online content he surveyed while flying back from the island. "To me."

Back home, "Season 47 began airing," Teeny wrote. "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. I was she on TV, but in every 'Survivor' podcast, there were two to three minutes spent debating what current-day Teeny wanted to go by, usually landing on the safe choice of they/them."

"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," the essay continued. "My friends were starting to shift the language they used for me, some of them feeling like they'd missed the chapter where I properly came out as nonbinary."

But now it's time for a new, more definitive chapter.

"When I think about my future, there's a lot of blurriness," Teeny wrote. "But there's a lifelong accumulation of artifacts that has pulled my identity into focus, inside the museum of my own transness. "

He went on to describe "The growing stack of trans memoirs on my nightstand, the packers hidden in a shoebox.... The tboys in my phone teaching me how to crop my shirts for a more masculine fit, the pursuit of HRT before the government makes it impossible to get, the way my girlfriend affirms me as a man in every sense I could have ever dreamed of."

"I have lived this double life, where my inner world is at peace and aware of how I want to grow older and my outer world remains in this label limbo brought upon by me."

Teeny explained in the essay that his "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. "

Now that he's out, though, he's "thinking about how my mom and dad won't be able to call me their daughter without the air in the room turning cold," Teeny recounted.

"I'm thinking about how my queer girlfriend is going to navigate talking about me as her boyfriend. I'm thinking about how much testosterone will cost, even with health insurance. I'm thinking about how much I'll miss the girls' bathroom if I start to pass. I'm thinking about whether passing as a cis man is even something I want."

"I'm thinking about all the trans people who have been brave enough to live in their authenticity through the horrors of our past and current political state and how much I admire and thank them for paving the way for me," he went on to add.

There might not be any easy answers, but Teeny isn't going to shy from the questions.

"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 declared. "But I know who I am."

That should be more than reason enough to take him at his word and let Teeny be the one to tell the world who he is.