Outwitted, Outplayed, Finally Out: How the Chaos of ‘Survivor’ Led Me to the Clarity of Being Trans
On the flight home from competing in Survivor season 47 in Fiji, I opened my phone to find hundreds of people talking about my five-second cameo in the promo. It aired while I was still in the throes of the game, far from cell service and society and any human outside of the 17 castmates marooned with me on that beach. Scrolling for the first time in a month, I dropped into a conversation that transcended usual cast-leak speculations. People were theorizing about how the producers were going to adapt, within the parameters of historically gendered tribe divisions, to a nonbinary contestant. To me.
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. 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. 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.
Prior to the opening ceremony, when players arrived on the beach in our tribe colors and were birthed into the game through a mud pit, the cast lived among each other, prohibited from interacting, for five days. Between meetings with the doctor, production, press, and wardrobe, the only way we could kill time was by making silent assumptions about each other. Gabe was reading The 48 Laws of Power, Sol wore rainbow earrings, and I was dressed like either Zack or Cody, depending on the day. At a pregame HR presentation, the network showed a slide about respecting people’s gender identity and pronouns. Luckily, there wasn’t some clip-art image inserted, because I fear that a nonbinary cartoon would have had an uncanny resemblance to me. I could already sense I was the one people were curious about, although they were unable to ask and I was unable to explain.
On night three of the game, Sol and I were lying on the beach, harsh wind whipping the sand onto our skin, and having one of our first private conversations.
“You know, I wanted to ask you before the game started if you want me to use different pronouns than she/her,” he said.
I knew I’d enter Survivor playing a social game. 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.
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.
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.
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. 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. Chest binding on a deserted island for 25 days is a no-go.
Back home, as I waited for my season to air, it became clear that the conversation surrounding my pronouns was not going to stop. 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.
Season 47 began airing. 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. 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. My Notes app filled up with unposted drafts, half-written paragraphs where I tried to acknowledge the ambiguity of how I identified on the show versus in real life, all while I suspected there was a developing storyline that would expose me 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. 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. I placed “she/they/he” in my Instagram bio and watched as people replied back and forth, correcting and then recorrecting, on my behalf.
Throughout all of this sudden visibility, a large part of me has wanted to be palatable to everyone, maybe to counteract my polarizing character on the show. Brushing off the pronoun question with a “whatever you want” makes the moment pass quicker. 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. My haircut, my curated vintage fashion, my flat chest. You scroll past a different version of me on #masc #butch #tboy TikTok every day. The pronoun question, I’ve come to learn, isn’t always intended to be a catalyst into an in-the-weeds conversation about gender. It’s to make sure that whatever word they say next doesn’t offend me. And so answering with a “whatever” feels easier than derailing our conversation into the personalized gender studies curriculum that cycles through my head almost constantly.
The state of my life since Survivor has been full of uncertainty. I didn’t come back to a spouse or a full-time career, like many of my castmates did. I didn’t have a passion to replace the 15-year quest that was getting cast. 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.
The growing stack of trans memoirs on my nightstand, the packers hidden in a shoebox, the late high school nights of Miles McKenna YouTube videos. The way I described my energy in casting as a mix between a pickpocket from the Oliver Twist universe and the sixth member of One Direction. The ninth-grade hours spent writing Wattpad stories from the male POV. 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.
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.
Even in knowing this, in writing this, there is a part of my brain that can’t shut off. I’m thinking about having to come out in loud bars and on the first days of new jobs. I’m thinking about my grandma reading this and her wondering if it means I’ll have a mustache next Christmas. I’m thinking about the flinches on my friends’ faces after they slip up and say “she.” 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. 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. I’m thinking and I’ll likely never stop.
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. 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.
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. 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. And it’s not what anyone is asking of me. 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.
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