Gigi Goode, a Los Angeles-based queen best known for competing on Season 12 of RuPaul’s Drag Race, has come out as trans and nonbinary.
Goode, who ultimately tied for second place on last year’s season of VH1's drag competition series behind winning competitor Jaida Essence Hall, shared the news with her fans in an Instagram video posted Sunday, Out reports. She is one of over a dozen trans, nonbinary, and genderfluid contestants to have been featured on the program.
In the approximately eight-minute video, Goode clarifies: “I do identify as a trans, nonbinary person, but I do prefer she/her pronouns.” She is also in the process of legally changing her first name to Gigi, she says. “That is proving to be quite the long and strenuous process,” she adds. “To those of you who have known me before as [my previous name], that’s great. I love that for you. But it’s pretty much Gigi from here on out.”
The entertainer, who appeared in a Moschino ad campaign earlier this month with fellow House of Avalon member and Drag Race Season 13 winner Symone, goes on to disclose that she has been medically transitioning since January. For Goode, this has involved hormone replacement therapy, also known as HRT—specifically, a combination of estrogen and testosterone blockers “as a means of bringing in the woman and pushing out the man,” she jokes.
“[Being alone during the coronavirus pandemic] gave me a lot of time to think and reflect,” she says. “I think if the world hadn’t shut down and I was going on tour [to promote Drag Race as it was airing last year], I wouldn’t have been able to process [my gender identity] further. Just because of the sheer fact that I had this much time to myself and my thoughts, I had a lot of realizations. One of those realizations came from watching the show Veneno... The story and the characters and the actresses who played those characters on that show completely opened my mind up to who I am and who I’m supposed to be, and to me that is a trans, nonbinary person.”
Bandaged and slightly bruised, Goode shares that she also recently underwent facial feminization surgery, or FFS, as part of her transition. The gender-affirming procedure, she explains, is really a set of many different surgical procedures done in conjunction with one another. FFS is “different for everyone,” as she says in the clip, and really depends on what the patient wants, what they can afford, what their insurance is willing to cover, and a number of other factors. (I wrote an essay about my experiences with FFS for Esquire last year if you’d like to learn more about the procedure. For further reading, I also recommend journalist Alex V. Green’s piece on the procedure’s general inaccessibility and how we could reverse that. Spoiler alert: communism!)
In closing, Goode says that she is happy to have kept her transition private for the better part of this year. She now feels comfortable and confident enough in who she is to be able to share that with her fans.
Watch the full video below.