‘Survivor’ star Teeny Chirichillo comes out as trans man

Survivor star Teeny Chirichillo, who became a fan-favorite contestant on the Fiji-set 47th season of the long-running CBS reality competition series in 2024, has come out as trans in a powerful new essay.

The 24-year-old New Jersey native discussed his identity in a Cosmopolitan essay published Friday, in which he recounted internally confronting questions about himself after “scrolling for the first time in a month” through fan speculation about him after the season’s first promotional footage was released while he was traveling home from the competition.

“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.

He added, “What made me dizzy was the pressure for me to represent as the first openly nonbinary Survivor player. It’s the kind of sentiment a player would proudly declare in their first confessional. But on my backpack, wedged under the plane seat, was a pink ribbon—given to me by the production team—because I’d never declared anything that would indicate I wasn’t a cisgender girl.”

Chirichillo recalled fellow contestant Solomon “Sol” Yi asking him about pronouns, after they went through an HR training about respecting people’s pronouns during production.

Still, Chirichillo, who ultimately placed fourth on the season, says he didn’t quite have a full grasp on who he was at the time, and that he “wasn’t ready to launch into labeling myself any which way for the first time on national television” in front of Survivor fans.

He also said that Survivor marked the first time he hadn’t wrapped his chest in binding material in nearly two years.

“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,” Chirichillo remembered. “And how funny it was that my tits’ final act on Earth was running around a jungle lying to people.”

Upon returning home from the show, Chirichillo said he again navigated intense fan scrutiny over his identity, which he likened to confronting a “lifelong accumulation of artifacts that has pulled my identity into focus, inside the museum of my own transness.”

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He now feels assured and thankful that the discourse over his Survivor promo opened “the door for everyone in my life to know I’m not cisgender without my having to initiate these conversations,” and that he now doesn’t feel pressure to continue a “lifetime of suppressing and then exploring the boyhood in my soul.”

“But I know who I am. Now begins 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,” Chirichillo concluded. “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.”