Emma Dumont is ready to speak about their coming-out journey after announcing that they are trans masculine nonbinary earlier this month.
The Oppenheimer actor, Nick Dumont who clarified that they now use they/them pronouns, spoke about how ‘rewarding’ coming out was in a statement to Out.
Emma Dumont, who has had small roles in the Paul Thomas Anderson films Inherent Vice and Licorice Pizza, also shared that they would continue using their birth name, Emma Dumont, for work projects, but they plan to go by Nick Dumont in their personal life.
‘Coming out to myself as trans has been one of the longest challenges I’ve faced in life. It has also been the most rewarding by a mile,’ they said.
Dumont went on to describe how they came to understand their gender gradually over the years.
‘I lived in an authoritarian household for many decades where it wasn’t safe to be myself at home. I knew at 13/14 I wasn’t ‘like other girls,’ I knew I liked girls and I knew I didn’t feel right in my body,’ they continued.
The film and television actor described a moment of gender euphoria they experienced around a decade earlier when they played a transgender character.
‘Around 19, I was cast as an [assigned female at birth] trans teenager in a TV pilot,’ they explained. ‘I looked at myself in my trailer in basketball shorts, bandage wrapped around my chest and I thought, “Damn I look good!”
‘A decade later, I found a safe community, figured out I was nonbinary,’ they continued. ‘Now I’m out, have a life I could have only dreamed of as a kid, and I still get to play women at work.’
Dumont proudly declared: ‘I’m trans. I love being trans. We’re here. We’ve always been here.’
They added that they were ‘grateful’ to live in the present and to have access to ‘safe spaces and support’ and to be able to ‘go to the LA LGBT Center and get medical care without fear.’
‘That hasn’t been the experience many have had,’ Dumont noted, before sharing their ‘gratitude’ for the ‘courageous queer people’ who came before them.
They concluded by revealing that they had originally planned to take more time before sharing their gender identity with the world.
I didn’t think I’d be out to everyone so soon but I made a promise to myself that if someone asked, I would share,’ they said. ‘Someone did ask and I shared…because I’m proud.’
Dumont appears to have first signaled their coming out by changing their name on Instagram and adding they/them pronouns, although their username still includes the name they plan to use professionally.
They also showed off a newer, more androgynous look with shorter, tousled hair in their profile photo, though it’s unclear when that was changed.
Dumont’s most high-profile project to date has been the Oscar-winning biographical drama Oppenheimer, in which they played Jackie Oppenheimer, the sister-in-law of the title character, the nuclear physicist and ‘father of the atomic bomb,’ J. Robert Oppenheimer.
That was a small role, however, and Dumont has had larger parts in smaller films, such as the thriller What Lies Ahead,
Dumont has also worked extensively on television. They were a series regular on the X-Men spinoff series The Gifted, which aired from 2017 to 2019, and they appeared in the vast majority of the David Duchovny–starring detective series Aquarius in 2015 and ’16.