An academic? Check. A party girl? Check. An online superstar? Check. Essence already knows she can do it all — and as a new chapter in her life begins, the 25-year-old influencer is ready for the world to learn that, too.
Though she’s now based in New York City, Essence grew up moving between Illinois and Georgia. “My childhood was never consistent,” she says, estimating that she attended more than a dozen schools before graduating high school. That trend continued into college, with Columbia University, where she just completed her degree in film and media studies, being the third university she attended. “I sometimes felt like I was thriving in moments in my life, but it was never really what was actually happening,” she continues. “I finally picked from surviving to thrive. I just took it on a whim to apply to Columbia, and I got in.”
It wasn’t until her time at Columbia that Essence started her medical transition, but she’d already been exploring her gender for years. At 19 years old, she left the musical theater program at Syracuse University and moved to Chicago, where becoming part of the city’s queer community helped her discover her own transness.
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“I remember my trans awakening. I didn’t really have a lot of influence of trans women. Like, I might have watched Pose throughout this time, but I probably didn’t know what a trans woman was until I was like 18 — which sounds crazy, but I grew up in a small Republican town. I knew it, but I didn’t know the proper terms. Like, I wasn’t as woke, right?” she explains with a laugh. “I remember looking at my boyfriend like, ‘I think I’m a trans woman. I don’t know what that means still.’”
Essence started experimenting with her gender presentation through hair and makeup, both in her everyday life and as a drag performer — the latter of which she jokes is “everyone’s little gateway to transitioning.”
“With drag and keeping the wigs on, it was a way for me to always femme-present,” she explains. “And when people would ask me, I’d be like, ‘Oh, I have a drag show tonight.’ Girl, I didn’t have a drag show. I just didn’t wanna take the wig off.”
Doing drag is no longer part of Essence’s life, but she doesn’t take its impact on her identity for granted. “I love drag, but I think you could say that it was absolutely a segue for me to start transitioning and a way that I could just ease my family and friends into accepting me as a femme person,” she says.
On TikTok, Essence now has more than 70,000 followers. In her bio, she describes herself as “the black ivy league doll,” a reference to one of the videos that’s defined her social media career: one where, after telling the camera that she was Black and trans at an Ivy League university, she bolted for her dorm window as if to jump.
“I started off as a comedy girl on the internet, and when I made that joke […] there were people who were curious about what that meant,” Essence explains. “They were like, ‘Wait, we’ve never seen this before. No one’s been talking about — like, there’s a trans girl at an Ivy League. That’s kind of insane. We need this representation.’ People started asking me questions, and slowly and surely, they got me to start exploiting my transition and being trans at an Ivy League.”
While documenting her Ivy League experience, Essence also started a meme that changed the gay lexicon forever. She popularized the term “DL trade” — which, when you stop to think about it, is an absolute oxymoron. Both “DL” and “trade” have their roots in Black queer culture, Essence points out, so by nonsensically putting them together, she aimed to see how the internet would cannibalize the content she created from a Black and trans perspective.
“The DL trade joke started as a social experiment, because I wanted to see how the internet was going to treat me as a trans woman,” she says. “I knew that though I could have the same vernacular as — I mean, love my sister Dylan Mulvaney. Obviously, I’m Black on the internet and trans. I think the internet is going to perceive me differently. They’re going to want this ‘yass, mama, god.’ They’re going to want this, and I’m like, ‘Let me give it to them in the most corrupt way in the world.’”
Of course, the term quickly left Essence’s bubble, as folks took what she intended to be comedic with deadly seriousness.
“People didn’t like that joke. I remember old heads were coming to me like, ‘Girl, you need to stop this. This is not cute,’” she recalls. “And when you are Black and trans, and people do look up to you, it’s like, ‘Okay, well, how do I also please everyone and be the representation that they want?’ And girl, a couple months ago, I was like, ‘Girl, you can’t please every-f*cking-body.’ People are gonna hate.”
Ultimately, being in the social media spotlight has been a mixed bag for Essence. Looking back, she says she wished she’d been more mindful about not overexposing herself. “A lot of my Black and trans documentary has been kind of wiped from the internet. I think I didn’t really understand being perceived and over-exploiting my life,” she says. “I had a stalker. People emailed my school and tried to get me expelled.”
But despite those fraught periods in her life, Essence’s social media career has also come with plenty to be thankful for. “My social media journey has been crazy, but it’s come with meeting so many friends and making community and being able to use my platform to uplift other trans women and give back in financial ways that I never thought was possible,” she says. “Social media has been heavenly highs and the lowest hells. And we’re just making do at this moment with social media. I still don’t know where I belong.”
Nowadays, Essence’s content ranges from fashion, hair, and beauty, to storytimes and comedy inspired by her life (including antics with her circle of circuit gay besties). Out of all the times she’s gone viral over the years, Essence says her favorite videos she’s ever made are those highlighting her relationship with her great-grandmother.
“My great-grandmother is my biggest fan, my biggest supporter, and she has been behind everything,” she says. “Any moment I get to share her story on the internet and it goes viral, and I get to show the depth of our love, is something that I’m forever grateful for. We talk about four times a day. That’s actually been my favorite piece of content that I’ve been able to make, is just sharing the generational love between a Black trans woman and her very old Black grandma.”
This spring, Essence made the leap from being Black and trans at an Ivy League university to being a Black and trans Ivy League alumna. With her degree from Columbia, she’s facing the same question looming over every recent graduate’s head: what’s next? To that, Essence fires back with her own question: what isn’t?
“Now I’m kind of looking to get into things that I dreamed as a little kid, and that was fashion and comedy,” she shares. “I want to do stand-up so badly. I would love to be on SNL — but then I would also like to be on a reality television show. I really want to do the whole world!”
“Now, being trans and seeing all this pushback, I just want to do everything. […] I kind of like that I’m confused. I don’t know where I want to go. I’m in my messy era, as I like to call it: my messy DL trade era,” she jokes. “I’ll clean up later.” ♦
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