In my experience, nobody loves gossip about the LGBTQ+ community more than…well, members of said community. To wit: I’ve recently been involved in a lot of conversations about what, precisely, is going on with Lorde’s gender identity, a topic that the 28-year-old musician shed new light on in an interview with Rolling Stone this week.
“My gender got way more expansive when I gave my body more room,” Lorde told interviewer Brittany Spanos, echoing a line from the as-yet-unreleased opening track of her next album, Virgin—“Some days I’m a woman/Some days I’m a man”—and comments she made about feeling “like a man and a woman” in custom Thom Browne at the 2025 Met Gala. Apparently, no less a queer authority than Chappell Roan has also chimed in with questions about how Lorde identifies: “She was like, ‘So, are you nonbinary now?’ And I was like, ‘I’m a woman except for the days when I’m a man,’” Lorde recounted. “I know that’s not a very satisfying answer, but there’s a part of me that is really resistant to boxing it up.”
Hearing all the chatter, I can’t help feeling a little bit protective over Lorde. As someone who has struggled to put my feelings about my own gender into words (and frequently tripped over myself, trying to reassure people that my use of she/they pronouns isn’t something they need to worry about or consider in any way whatsoever), I wish that we could all just be cool about whatever it is Lorde is working through, gender-wise.
I don’t think it’s inherently harmful to have questions about a public figure’s gender identity, and I also know that as white, upper-middle-class, AFAB people, Lorde and I aren’t the people directly being harmed by the virulent transphobia coursing through the Trump administration. (To her credit, Lorde has acknowledged this, too, telling Spanos: “I want to make very clear that I’m not trying to take any space from anyone who has more on the line than me. Because I’m, comparatively, in a very safe place as a wealthy, cis, white woman.”) But I would also throw out there that my life got instantly better and easier once I started to see gender as an individual mode of expression that had nothing to do with anyone else’s.
My partner is a trans man, and while he has encouraged me to find joy in my gender presentation (whatever that may look like), for a long time I worried that any gender-related exploration that I did for myself somehow conflicted with my support of his transition. But in reality, gender is a vast spectrum that can feel almost impossible to categorize at times—and that’s okay. After all, who benefits when we contrive limits? Is it our queer and trans siblings, or is it the transphobes and assorted bigots who don’t actually believe for a second that our lives and identities are our own to define? Do we really want to live by their scarcity-model mindset?
Don’t get me wrong: I’ve previously been all too happy to dive into conversations about Lorde’s whole deal (I mean, that carabiner-esque chain belt and crisp white shirt in the “What Was That” video were absolutely giving Shane McCutcheon from The L Word!), but I’m starting to think more critically and carefully about the messages I’m sending when I participate in discourse about what Lorde or any other famous person “owes” us when it comes to their personal information, especially that related to gender or sexuality. Obviously, Lorde likely doesn’t care what some random blogger is saying about her, but I really don’t want to suggest to the people in my life who might be wrestling with their gender that I need a firm, absolute, nailed-down answer as how they identify. Instead, I want to demonstrate that I have the capacity to receive and celebrate them in all their fullness and occasional contradiction, and maybe that starts with…letting Lorde be Lorde.
