MrBeast’s Kris Tyson, who’s known for appearing in videos with the popular YouTube star, has come out as transgender.
Tyson officially came out as a transgender woman during an interview with YouTuber Anthony Padilla, shared on 21 July. During the conversation, Tyson went on to reveal her pronouns, while noting that the spelling of her name has gone from “Chris” to “Kris”.
“I am a woman! She/her,” she said. “I’ve never said that publicly, but I’ve been fully confident in that decision for over a year now.”
Tyson said that, while she made changes to her appearance eight months ago, such as growing out her hair, she wasn’t sure how to describe her gender at the time. However, she said she still knew that she “was not cisgender” and “needed the freedom to figure out” who she was and “express” herself.
She recalled that, after she questioned what masculinity means, she realised that she felt defined by being the “guy” in MrBeast’s videos.
“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?’” Tyson explained. “After a lot of talking with a therapist and a lot of self-reflection, I realised 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.’”
Tyson then recalled how she first publicly shared in April that she’s been doing hormone replacement therapy (HRT), which is when people take hormones as part of their “gender transition to help their bodies and appearance align with their gender identity,” according to Planned Parenthood.
As she expressed how “freeing” it was for her to officially come out in her interview with Padilla, she also described how the HRT allowed her to “accept [herself] and be able to look in the mirror and say, ‘Yes, you are a woman.’”
She went on to recall the “vivid dreams” she had about being a woman, during a point where she didn’t feel “connected” to herself. However, according to Tyson, that ultimately changed when she started taking her hormones.
“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,” she said. “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 noted that, after two to three weeks of taking HRT, she had a “mental clarity” in which she felt like “a fog that had been around [her]” had “just went away”.
“I could see things clearly, 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,” she said.
Following her interview with Padilla, Tyson also shared a post on Twitter on Friday about coming out as a transgender woman. “New pronouns just dropped,” she tweeted.
On Saturday, she also shared a screenshot of an April tweet from MrBeast, in which he defended her against a YouTube video, titled: “Why Chris will be a nightmare for MrBeast.”
In response to the title, the YouTube star – whose real name is Jimmy Donaldson – expressed that he supported Tyson’s decision to undergo HRT. “Yeah this is getting absurd. Chris isn’t my ‘nightmare’, he’s my f***en friend and things are fine. All this transphobia is starting to piss me off,” he wrote.
During her interview with Padilla, Tyson praised her friends for their support and recalled how she first told them years ago that she “didn’t want to be a man anymore”.
“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.
She later acknowledged that she’s ready to embrace who she is, explaining: “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.”
Months before coming out as transgender, Tyson spoke out about starting HRT. In a tweet shared in April, she wrote: “Informed consent HRT saved my and many others’ lives. The hurdles [gender non-conforming] 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.”
According to Healthline, “HRT involves receiving a regular dose of testosterone or estrogen to bring about desired changes to your secondary sex characteristics”. The goal of this treatment is “usually to raise someone’s hormone level to the average level of that hormone found in cis people”.
