Popular beauty YouTuber and makeup artist, Nikkie De Jager - known on the platform as NikkieTutorials - has come out as a transgender woman in a new video.
The 25-year-old has been making makeup tutorials online for over a decade, and is one of the most recognisable influencers in this field. Yesterday, she posted a 17-minute video, entitled I'm Coming Out, where she came out as trans, saying that she had known since birth that she was a girl.
However, this cause for celebration was somewhat marred by the fact that De Jager revealed that she had felt forced to come out as she was being blackmailed.
"Today I am here to share something with you that I've always wanted to share with you one day, but under my own circumstances," she said. "It looks like that chance has been taken away from me, so today I am taking back my own power. When I was younger, I was born in the wrong body, which means I am transgender."
"I have been blackmailed by people that wanted to leak my story to the press," she continued to allege, but did not name the particular individuals.
[[youtubewidget||https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOOw2E_qAsE&feature=emb_logo]]
The Dutch beauty guru then went onto explain that coming out as transgender doesn't change anything in regards to her channel and identity;
"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. The last thing I want in my life is for you to not trust me any more or to look at me with different eyes."
Watch as Pritzker signs an order to protect transgender students:[[jwplayerwidget||https://content.jwplatform.com/videos/hIZeaAkW-Q0L14jDU.mp4||hIZeaAkW]]
De Jager also opened up about her childhood and early gender identity, stating that she always identified as female growing up.
"By the age of seven or eight I fully wore girl's clothes only and it felt amazing," she continued, adding that she had fully transitioned by the time she was 19-years-old.
