NikkieTutorials’ Trans Coming Out Video Is Bittersweet (2024)

Photo by Jamie McCarthy via Getty Images

Everything Caroline Cossey had dreaded came to pass one Sunday morning in the fall of 1981. For three years, a reporter named William Rankine had hounded the English model, known professionally as Tula, contacting everyone from family and neighbors to childhood schoolteachers in pursuit of a major scoop: that the glamorous Cossey, whose modeling success had led her all the way to a minor cameo in the James Bond film, For Your Eyes Only, was a transsexual who had transitioned as a teenager almost one decade prior.

“When I was younger, I was born in the wrong body, which means that I am transgender,” de Jager says in the video. “I am NikkieTutorials, and I am Nikkie. I am me. We don’t need labels. But if we are going to put a label on it: Yes, I am transgender. But at the end of the day, I am me.”

I’m happy for de Jager, of course—how could I not be? In her own words, she describes her public coming out as “liberating and freeing.” I also appreciate that in sharing certain details of her story, like the fact that she began socially transitioning at 6 before starting hormones at 14, de Jager has provided yet another solid counter example to the reactionary fear-mongering that would paint juvenile transitioners as some kind of contagious new phenomenon, a crackpot theory that conveniently ignores the existence of the numerous individuals who transitioned young in decades past.That said, I can’t help but feel bittersweet about the whole affair. De Jager might have been the one to release her coming out video, but only after her would-be blackmailers forced her hand. Four decades after a hairdresser’s assistant outed Tracey Africa on the set of an Essence shoot and News of the World published Caroline Cossey’s backstory without her consent, transness remains a liability to a woman’s career, one that can be weaponized against her even if she chooses not to make it known. “We all know what’s at stake in the question of ‘visibility,’” write artists Park McArthur and Constantina Zavitsanos in “The Guild of the Brave Poor Things,” published as part of Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility in 2017. “Representation can make us targets in offering, or imposing, recognition.”With a smile on her face but tears in her eyes, de Jager tells viewers that she’s “accepting” that she can’t close her past off to her public, that she’s “embracing” the opportunity “to be truly me for all of you.” But being “truly me” cost Caroline Cossey, Tracey Africa, and April Ashley so much. Hopefully, for de Jager’s sake, that much has changed.Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of VICE delivered to your inbox daily.Follow Harron Walker on Twitter .