Nikkie de Jager, more commonly known as worldwide beauty YouTuber NikkieTutorials, revealed to fans in an emotional video that she’s transgender – after people tried to blackmail her by threatening to leak her story.
The 25-year-old, from Wageningen, Netherlands, has been uploading makeup tutorials to YouTube since 2008. Over the past 12 years, she’s built a huge following, with more than 12.4 million subscribers.
However, after people threatened to tell the press about her personal journey, Nikkie felt it would be easier just to tell her fans herself. Now, other YouTubers and influencers are showing their support.
On Monday, January 13, she released a 17-minute video titled ‘I’m Coming Out’, discussing her childhood and path to transitioning.
Nikkie said:
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, and it looks like that chance has been taken away from me. So today, I am taking back my own power and I have to tell you something.
It’s time to let go and be truly free. When I was younger I was born in the wrong body, which means that I am transgender. 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.
Nikkie further explained that ‘by the age of seven or eight I fully wore girl’s clothes only and it felt amazing’. While she’d fully transitioned by the age of 19 and has wanted to share her story for some time, Nikkie wanted the channel to be about the art.
She added: ‘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. At the end of the day I am still Nikkie.’
Among the fellow influencers to chime in was Nikita Dragun – a prominent transgender YouTuber who also shares makeup tutorials – who wrote on Twitter:
TRANS IS BEAUTIFUL. @NikkieTutorials I am so proud of u! I know how hard it is. To see u out and living ur truth has brought me to tears! U don’t know how many people ur inspiring and helping by sharing ur story. I am one of them! She said WOMAN.
Jinkx Monsoon, a drag performer who won the fifth season of RuPaul’s Drag Race, also wrote: ‘NO ONE has the right to out anybody else. Period. Coming out is a personal thing, and you do not get to decide that for someone else. I’m so sorry, Nikkie, that you went through that, but I applaud how you handled it.’
If you have a story you want to tell send it to UNILAD via story@unilad.com
After graduating from Glasgow Caledonian University with an NCTJ and BCTJ-accredited Multimedia Journalism degree, Cameron ventured into the world of print journalism at The National, while also working as a freelance film journalist on the side, becoming an accredited Rotten Tomatoes critic in the process. He’s now left his Scottish homelands and took up residence at UNILAD as a journalist.