
“I am a woman. I’ve always been one.”
Hunter Hunt-Hendrix has come out as a transgender woman.
The musician, who is best known as the lead singer of American black metal band Liturgy, came out in a heartfelt post on social media accounts belonging to her and the band earlier this week (Tuesday 13 May).
“I am a woman. I’ve always been one,” she revealed to her fans.
“The love I have to give is a woman’s love, if only because it is mine. To varying degrees many already understand this, but I’d like to make a clear statement about my actual gender. I could have done this before Liturgy started, but I didn’t, out of fear.”
Hunter has always known she was female – “emotionally and in my experience of my body” – but refrained from coming out sooner due to fear of “social rejection, romantic rejection, career rejection” and rejection from her family.
Related: How to be a trans ally: tips to help you be the best advocate you can be.
“The vagueness and incongruity of my solution has afflicted me. I wish it had been different, though maybe that wasn’t possible. The feminine imbues everything I am, beyond ‘gender identity,'” she continued.
Hunter is now choosing to live authentically because “the music and ideas I compose come from a female heart, whatever that means, and I don’t want to partially distort the transmission through an ‘effemin’ male’ mask any longer.”
The star concluded her post by telling fans that she’s “free from some kind of compromise I felt I needed to accept, without being fully conscious of what I was doing or able to seriously imagine an alternative for myself.
“It has been very emotional, and it’s over now, so I am punctuating it.”
Read Hunter Hunt-Hendrix’s coming out post below.