Model Carissa Pinkston admitted she lied about being transgender earlier this month after getting “death threats” over her past comments that were transphobic on social media.
It all started back in May, when Pinkston, a model for the Savage X Fenty lingerie line, posted a series of posts on Facebook under the name of Rissa Danielle, per NBC News in a piece published Wednesday.
“Being transgender does not NOT make you a woman. It simply makes you transgender,” the model wrote in one posts. (RELATED: Athletes With High Testosterone Can Be Barred From Women’s Sports)
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In another she wrote that transgender people “want to be perceived” as male or female, “in a biological context, there are males and females.”(RELATED: Biological Male Wins NCAA Women’s Track Championship)
When people called her out for being transphobic, she didn’t apologize and then compared a person labeling themselves as transgender to reclaiming their virginity.
Screenshots of those since-deleted posts resurfaced on Twitter last week and soon after the model was fired from her agency, Elite Models.
Pinkston then wrote an Instagram post on July 22 that she just wasn’t “ready to come out” yet and then claimed that she was in fact a “transgender.”
“I wasn’t ready to come out yet but today I got fired and I’ve been receiving hate mail and death threats ever since so I’m forced to tell everyone the truth,” the model wrote. “I’m transgender.”
However, shortly after her big reveal fellow models called her transgender declaration a lie.
“I’ve seen baby pictures of Carrissa, I’ve seen her fully naked, I’ve been around this woman long enough to fully know her,” Aleece Wilson, a fellow model, wrote. “We have many trans friends this conversation would have definitely been brought up.”
Meanwhile, a gender-nonconforming trans model, named Aaron Phillip tweeted that “I know this person IRL and she is so cisgender.”
“Imagine being a model who got exposed for being a raging transphobe/saying extremely transphobic sh*t in the past and then resorting to LYING ABOUT BEING TRANSGENDER ONLINE FOR CLOUT IN ATTEMPT TO SAVE YOUR CAREER…?” Phillip wrote.
Following the critics’ attacks, Pinkston finally admitted she lied and was not transgender.
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“I apologize for any transphobic remark I’ve ever made towards the trans community,” the model wrote. “I thought if I came out as trans that I could somehow make things better for myself but it appears I’ve only made things worse.”
In an interview Tuesday with Buzzfeed News, the model shared that people don’t know the “entire story” and that at times she did feel “like a trans person in a way — in high school I was really bullied.”
“People don’t know the entire story,” Pinkston shared. “Everyone was saying my original comment was transphobic, but you can’t expect everyone to know everything about a culture or movement if they never have taken the time to be fully educated on it.”
She also insisted she didn’t initially came out as trans to avoid a backlash over her past comments, but due to “death threats.”
“The only reason I had lied was because of the death threats. And I was scared, so I thought they would accept me only if I said I was trans,” the model explained. “I got an experience of what a transgender person goes through.”