The Girlfriend Who Didn’t Exist: the Manti Te’o hoax revisited with sympathy

, the romantic hoax at the heart of Te’o’s national humiliation was about much deeper and more interesting questions of identity, faith and belonging – for minorities in particular – in early 21st century America.

As the story reverberated across the internet, Teo’o was painted as both a fool , and, potentially, a liar: many pundits speculated that Te’o may have been complicit in the scheme all along as a way to gain national attention. A grubby undertow of homophobia accompanied the salaciousness with which Te’o’s trauma was covered, dissected, and gawked at , while one news report added some racism for good measure, describing the whole affair as a “weird Polynesian plot to embarrass” Te’o.

“The Lennay profile was not necessarily a way out but a way to something else,” she says. “At that time, I knew for sure there was something inside of me that just wanted to scream out and be like, ‘Why am I different?’ There were a couple of encounters online where it was like, ‘This guy’s cute. Let’s see where this goes.’ I knew what was right and wrong, but I was too far in love with being looked at in this way. It was completely selfish, but it was what made me happy.

“But I hate football,” she says in The Girlfriend Who Didn’t Exist. “I just wanted to play football out of obedience, and I wanted to make my dad happy. But I totally felt this heaviness of fear. I didn’t have that courage to just be like, you know what, this is who I am. I truly believed in my heart, being natural-born male, I could never be who I wanted. That was when I had decided that I would be able to have that experience in the life of a female, even if it were fake.

Tuiasosopo moved back to American Samoa after the scandal broke and found support among the local LGBTQ population, which includes a large and well-established community of people who identify as“I just had to start living my life,” she says. “And I wanted to be able to live my life as trans. I still feel horrible [about the hoax], and sometimes I wish that everything had been undone.

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