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YouTuber Kris Tyson came out as transgender over the weekend.
“I am a woman,” the content creator best known for collaborating with MrBeast said in an interview that aired Friday.
Tyson told fellow YouTuber Anthony Padilla, “I've never said that publicly, but I've been fully confident in that decision for over a year now.”
The interview on YouTube has almost 1.5 million views so far. Tyson herself has more than 2.6 million followers on Instagram besides the 170 million subscribers who follow MrBeast videos on YouTube — Tyson often appears in those videos.
Tyson said that she’s known she wasn’t cisgender for a while now.
“For a while, I was trying gender fluid,” she explained. “I was like, what's making me feel like I'm bi-gender? What is tying me to this masculinity? And really, it was after a lot of talking with a therapist and a lot of self-reflection, [that] I realized it was really just the societal pressure of, 'You're Chris from MrBeast. You're the guy that starts the fires. You're the guy that builds the stuff.' And like, my whole life, I've enjoyed doing those things, but I've never really felt like 'the guy.'”
In April, MrBeast — Jimmy Donaldson — fired back at transphobic comments targeting Tyson. Donaldson wrote in response to negative tweets about Tyson going on hormone replacement therapy, "All this transphobia is starting to piss me off."
Many thought Tyson was coming out as trans back in April.
Tyson told Padilla, "I'm like, No, I didn't! No, I didn't...yet — until today."
She explained that she wasn’t ready then to come out. She said that coming out as gender fluid then allowed her to be more open in some respects, like dressing more feminine.
Tyson said it took a while for her to accept her own identity over fears that once she did accept herself as a woman she’d hear others say, “no, you’re not.”
She said the MrBeast team has supported her throughout her journey since she came out to them three years ago.
At the end of the interview, Padilla told Tyson, “Congratulations on everything and I think your story is incredibly inspiring. And I think you’re going to change a lot of people’s lives just by authentically being yourself.”
While Tyson said she’ll be using a new name with her family and friends, she’ll be going by Kris and using she/her pronouns for her internet work.
"For the longest time, even to say it to some of the closest friends, it would make my hands shake. I would get so nervous. But now, I can say I'm a woman,” Tyson said. “I'm happy to say I'm a woman. It's something that's honestly so freeing.”
You can watch the complete interview below.
I spent a day with KRIS TYSON
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