On January 13th YouTube had received some jaw-dropping, show-stopping, and never in a thousand years predicted news. In the beauty community on YouTube, Nikkie Tutorials, a prominent beauty guru with 12.8 million subscribers as of January 14th, released a video called “I’m Coming Out” on her channel that broke the internet and had everyone bowing down to the queen. Nikkie pulled a Trisha Paytas on all of us (except way better) and announced that she is transgender, male to female. I know right, never would’ve seen that coming! I literally am still trying to comprehend how she has had a YouTube channel since she was ten years old, and we never even noticed. Before I get into what Nikkie talks about in her video I just want to say, what she did was so brave. Coming out on a huge platform such as YouTube can often lead to an audience of people who will refuse to support or love you. By coming out at this point Nikkie already has a loving audience that, for the most part, will love her regardless, physical transitions or not. Unfortunately, 77,000 people missed the like button on her video, and it is hard to believe that in 2020 we still have transphobic people, like seriously, you better stop.
Right off the bat, Nikkie states that she is wanting to start the year off right, she wants to be honest with who is really is. Naturally, most of us viewers were predicting that she was going to come out as bisexual or lesbian. The next portion Nikkie says that she was born into the wrong body, making her transgender, girls grab your tissues! Nikkie says, “we don’t need labels, I’m Nikkie”, we should live our lives without restrictions and be ourselves, we really could all learn something from this statement alone.
Nikkie’s mother was convinced that she was having a girl to the point that she even refused to get ultrasounds. When Nikkie was born, it was a bit of a surprise that she wasn’t assigned to the right body. All throughout childhood Nikkie recalls feeling upset that she couldn’t be accepted by others for wanting to play with society’s portrayal of “feminine toys and clothing”. Nikkie thanks her mom for always supporting her unconditionally, and always being there when she needed her love the most.
By the age of seven or eight, Nikkie began her transition and was thankful for her teachers accepting who she is. At fourteen Nikkie fully transitioned to herself. Nikkie transitioned while on YouTube, isn’t that wild! We would’ve never known! She says that opening up to people about her past is hard because she has to have an immense amount of trust in everyone she tells. When it comes to fiancé Dylan, she waited quite some time to tell him. Although he knows now, Nikkie recalls having immense fear that he wouldn’t accept her for her past. And so, to her surprise, he did accept her, where did I put my tissues?!
Nikkie states that the last thing she wants from her audience is for them to view her differently, or to not trust her anymore. Nikkie said that she never shared this publicly because she wanted her art to speak for itself and didn’t feel like she needed to share personal information to showcase her skills and personality. She wanted to tell us on her own terms but due to some horrible human beings, she was blackmailed by someone threatening to leak her story to the press. The said person is not named, and honestly, this is a good thing. Why give this person credit for potentially ruining her career, just because they wanted something out of Nikkie? Nikkie gives a nice bird to the person who said she was lying to her audience and stating that she was too afraid to share her story publicly. I hope this person gets some real bad karma coming their way.
Overall why is this video such a big deal? Traditionally on YouTube, it is not uncommon for creators to come out and express who they are, so what makes this different? The difference is Nikkie put a new perspective on what it means to love someone regardless of knowing their past. We all could’ve died not knowing Nikkie past, and we still would’ve said: “she is a flawless queen with boss lady skills in make-up”. Nikkie didn’t allow us to judge her before we got to know her, she put her work first and let her skills speak for themselves. If the transgender community was treated the way Nikkie was all these years it wouldn’t matter if you were in the military, or in a commercial, or working in an office, because your work speaks for itself and how you express yourself and your past is no one’s business. As Nikkie says, “We are people, not labels”.