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Kris Tyson is coming out as transgender.
On Friday, the Youtube star — known for appearing alongside MrBeast — appeared on content creator Anthony Padilla’s show and revealed that she changed her pronouns and the spelling of her name from Chris Tyson to Kris Tyson.
“I am a woman! She/her” she told Padilla. “I’ve never said that publicly, but I've been fully confident in that decision for over a year now.”
The 27-year-old explained that she was fully able to accept herself after starting hormone replacement therapy in February. At the time, she grew out her hair and was more public with her femininity.
“I wasn’t quite sure who I was yet, but I knew I was not cisgender. So I needed the freedom to be able to express myself and be able to figure out who I was,” she explained. “For a while, I was trying gender fluid. I was like, ‘What is making me feel like I’m bi-gender? What is tying me to this masculinity?’
"After a lot of talking with a therapist and a lot of self reflection, I realized it was really just this societal pressure of, ‘You’re Chris from MrBeast. You’re the guy that starts the fires. You’re the guy that builds the stuff.’ My whole life I’ve enjoyed doing those things, but I’ve never really felt like ‘the guy.’ ”
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Tyson said she was scared of how others would react growing up in a small conservative town and then becoming a global content creator with millions watching.
She said that today, she’s happy to say she’s a woman, calling it “so freeing” that hormone replacement therapy allowed her to fully accept herself. Hormone replacement therapy (HRT) is a process that helps gender nonconforming people achieve a more traditionally masculine or feminine appearance, according to the Cleveland Clinic.
“For so long, every day I would go to bed and I would have vivid dreams that I was a woman. And I would wake up in the morning and it was just like getting ripped out of a reality that I didn’t want to be taken out of,” Tyson shared. “There were times where I would just sleep all day because it was more fun or more enjoyable to do that because the real world. I didn’t feel connected to it.”
“I really never felt connected to my body until I started taking HRT,” she added, noting that she felt a “mental clarity” just weeks after starting the medication. “It felt like a fog had been around me and just went away, and I could see things clearly and I felt confident in who I was. I knew who I was finally, surely, truly without a shadow of a doubt and that is what really saved my life.”
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After the emotional chat with Padilla, Tyson shared the news on her Twitter account, telling her followers, “New pronouns just dropped 😱”
She also reposted an old tweet from MrBeast — whose real name is Jimmy Donaldson — as he defended Tyson and slammed a critic who claimed her transition would be a “nightmare” for the influencer.
“This is getting absurd,” Donaldson wrote, assuring that Tyson is his friend and they were just fine. “All this transphobia is starting to piss me off.”
In Friday’s interview, Tyson also recalled the moment she tearfully told her friends three years ago that she “didn’t want to be a man anymore” and how supportive they’ve been ever since.
“The support I got from them in that moment, that’s when I knew that I have my friends, f— everybody else. They’re really like my family,” she said. “I’m just so excited to authentically be myself. The person you knew for a long time was a facade. This is the real me. I’m still the same person, I just look a little different.”
Since starting HRT in February, the social media star has been sharing frequent updates with her fans.
After news of her transformation began to make headlines, Tyson spoke out about the treatment in a Twitter post in April, writing: "Informed consent HRT saved my and many others' lives. The hurdles [gender nonconforming] people have to jump through to get life-saving gender-affirming healthcare in a 1st world country is wild to me. Just let people make informed decisions about their own bodies."
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