Survivor 47 fourth-place finisher Teeny Chirichillo has come out as a trans man and shared details of his journey to self-discovery and acceptance.
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Teeny shared how he began the Survivor game planning to "conceal the parts that felt too vulnerable" to expose to the world.
"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. An intense game of social politics and millions of viewers worldwide felt like a scary time to come out as... I didn't even know what," Teeny recalled.
"And a small part of me feared that asking my tribe to use pronouns other than he/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."
Teeny acknowledged it would be an "almost unavoidable" error for people who are "still learning" to make.
"And maybe, I thought, that would be a good enough reason to eliminate me from the game," Teeny admitted.
"Was I looking out for their potential discomfort or my own? In an effort to open up, 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."
Teeny, who dubbed himself a freelance writer from New Jersey, apparently joked with the Survivor cast about how he was giving his boobs "one last treat" before putting 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 quipped.
Once Teeny returned home and waited for Survivor to air on CBS, he realized that the conversation surrounding pronouns still needed to be had.
"And thus began another game of identity I've found myself playing almost as if I'm still on that beach. At least on Survivor, there's a million-dollar prize," Teeny wrote.
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Teeny then watched Survivor unfold, and he could tell that his "lack of clarity" was bleeding through the screen.
"[It infected] all of the commentators of the show with the same confusion I was feeling inside. I was he 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," Teeny explained.
"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."
Teeny recalled how friends started shifting the language they used for him, with some of them feeling like they had missed the chapter where he "properly came out as binary."
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Teeny said he attempted to acknowledge the ambiguity of how he identified on the show vs. real life, knowing his Survivor storyline may expose him even more.
"As the season went on, I knew all too well, I'd felt extreme resentment toward a fellow castmate, which I only realized and owned was dysphoria-induced jealousy in the final stages of the game," Teeny admitted.
"Episode after episode, I felt this push and pull between my public persona and my private sense of identity. I couldn't break my NDA, couldn't speak over a past version of myself, couldn't post a caption that made it all make sense."
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But Teeny suggested that he wanted to be liked while Survivor was airing to "counteract my polarizing character on the show" and so he told people they could call him whatever they wanted to avoid an awkward exchange.
"Increasingly, people decide to use 'they,' as my presentation fits that of a Gen Z nonbinary person in an almost comically on-the-nose way," Teeny joked.
"My haircut, my curated vintage fashion, my flat chest. You scroll past a different version of me on #masc #butch #tboy TikTok every day."
Teeny admitted the state of his life since Survivor has been "full of uncertainty" and he had to do a bit of soul searching after living a double life.
"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," Teeny shared.
And Teeny said his girlfriend "affirms" him as a man in every sense he "could have ever dreamed of" and
"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," Teeny clarified.
"Even in knowing this, in writing this, there is a part of my brain that can't shut off."
Teeny is apparently wondering how family, friends, colleagues and strangers will all react.
"I'm 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 wrote.
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He added, "I'm thinking about how much testosterone will cost, even with health insurance... 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."
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"As my life moves further away from the niche celebrity of Survivor, I'm grappling with the fact that I was given a gift the day the promo aired. Though at the time it felt like an extreme pressure to be this genderfluid representative, what it really did was open the door for everyone in my life to know I'm not cisgender without my having to initiate these conversations," Teeny shared.
"There is no promo coming this spring to show me sitting on a rock with some beard stubble growing in and a deeper voice. There is nobody who can be the architect of this outing besides me."
But Teeny noted, "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."
Teeny stated that now begins the process of bridging the gap between his private and public identities as well as realizing that he'll never be able to please everybody.
"As I adjust to life on the flip side of living one childhood dream, what I really want is to give the Teeny who wore all Tony Hawk line boy clothes to elementary school a fist bump and tell him that we're back," he concluded.
Teeny finished in fourth place after losing the fire-starting challenge to Sam on Night 24 of the game.
Survivor crowned Rachel LaMont the winner of Season 47 in a landslide vote over runner-up Sam Phalen during the December 2024 finale on CBS.
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Sue Smey placed third with zero jury votes at the Final Tribal Council.
About The Author: Elizabeth Kwiatkowski
