Kris Tyson is coming out as her truest self.
Just a few months after opening up about starting hormone replacement therapy (HRT) the YouTuber has shared that she is transgender.
"I am a woman! She/her!" Kris—who also updated the spelling of her name from Chris—happily told YouTuber Anthony Padilla in a video released July 21. "I've never said that publicly, but I've been fully confident in that decision for over a year now."
The 27-year-old also reflected on her gender identity journey, explaining what her headspace was like in April when she first shared that she'd begun HRT—which is a hormone therapy that can help gender non-conforming or transgender people achieve a more "traditional" masculine or feminine appearance—a few months prior.
"I wasn't quite sure exactly who I was yet," Kris, who wrote in her Twitter bio at the time that she responded to all pronouns, told Anthony, "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. So 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?'"
And she shared that after working with a therapist, Kris realized a lot of it was tied to her public identity as someone who frequently appeared in childhood friend Jimmy "MrBeast" Donaldson's YouTube videos.
"I realized it was really just this societal pressure of, ‘You're Chris from MrBeast,'" she explained. "'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.' "
At one point, Anthony expressed that he'd noticed a "dramatic shift" in Kris' more recent photos compared to those from before she'd begun HRT. He noted how unhappy she looked in the older photos.
"It wasn't a real smile," Kris agreed, speaking to the older photos. "It was a performance smile. In the back of my head it was something I constantly felt like I wasn't being true to myself. I wasn't being true to the people who are fans of me because I was hiding my true self from them."
But now, Kris is proudly sharing her news.
On her Twitter account, she retweeted the link to her video with Anthony, writing, "New pronouns just dropped."
She also retweeted a screenshot from Twitter of MrBeast defending her against a YouTube video titled, "Why Chris will be a nightmare for MrBeast." In the screenshot, MrBeast can be seen replying that Kris is his friend, not his nightmare, adding, "All this transphobia is starting to piss me off."
In fact, Kris also noted to Anthony how much the support of her friends has meant to her, describing the moment she first told them she "didn't want to be a man anymore" three years ago.
"The support I got from them in that moment," she shared, "that's when I knew that I have my friends, f--k everybody else. They're really like my family."
As Kris later put it: "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."