Survivor 47 fourth-place finisher Teeny Chirichillo came out as a trans man in an essay for Cosmopolitan, published Wednesday, April 9 — four months after his season aired.
Teeny, 24, recalled the struggle of discovering his identity and sharing it with the world on the CBS reality hit — and how it led him to the decision to come out.
“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 wrote.
Teeny chose to enter the game as the first openly nonbinary contestant, hoping it would be a middle ground that wouldn’t alienate his castmates.
“I wasn’t ready to launch into labeling myself any which way for the first time on national television,” he said. “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.”
“I knew I’d enter Survivor playing a social game,” Teeny continued. “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.”
Teeny, who has used he, she and they pronouns in the past, may not have labeled himself as trans prior to Survivor, but knew that he wanted to undergo top surgery and take testosterone prior to flying out to Fiji.
He even joked about it to his tribe in footage that didn’t make the final cut of the show. Teeny hoped it would build trust.
“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,” he recalled. “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.”
As a player who made it all the way to the Survivor 47 finale, Teeny was on screen far longer than most others in the cast. His strong showing and compelling story also makes him a solid candidate for Survivor 50, which will feature all returning players.
Though Teeny didn’t touch on his Survivor future in the essay, he said that now he must begin “the process of bridging the gap between my private and public identities, of surrendering myself to the fact that trying to please everyone as this moldable gender putty isn’t pleasing me.”
“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,” Teeny concluded.
