Lorde is getting candid on her gender identity.
The two-time Grammy winner (real name Ella Marija Lani Yelich-O’Connor) recently explained how her gender has become “way more expansive” over the last few years, leading her to clarify if she’s nonbinary in a recent interview.
The topic came up on her forthcoming album Virgin, with the “What Was That?” singer beginning her opening song with the lyrics, “Some days I’m a woman/Some days I’m a man,” which caused friends like Chappell Roan to check in on her self-expression.
“She was like, ‘So, are you nonbinary now?’” Lorde told Rolling Stone in an interview published May 15. “I was like, ‘I’m a woman except for the days when I’m a man.’ I know that’s not a very satisfying answer, but there’s a part of me that is really resistant to boxing it up.”
Despite describing herself as “in the middle gender-wise,” though, the 28-year-old isn’t keen on updating her pronouns and still identifies as a cis woman. Plus, she doesn’t want the world to see her gender journey in a light that overshadows the stories of people who identify as trans and nonbinary.
“I don’t think that [my identity] is radical, to be honest,” Lorde said. “I see these incredibly brave young people, and it’s complicated.”
She added, “Making the expression privately is one thing, but 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.”
As for how Lorde ended up at her newfound gender understanding of her gender? She said it was a result of her focus on mental and physical health, including the use of psychedelics. She also stopped taking the birth control medicine she had been regularly taking for 10 years.
Matt Baron/Shutterstock“I felt like stopping taking my birth control, I had cut some sort of cord between myself and this regulated femininity,” she continued. “It sounds crazy, but I felt that all of a sudden, I was off the map of femininity. And I totally believed that that allowed things to open up.”
Read on to see more stars who have been open about their own mental health journeys.
Sansho Scott/BFA.com/ShutterstockPenn Badgley
The Gossip Girl alum detailed his experience as a child actor with what he described as “body dysmorphia.”
“I know that I hated my body,” Penn told The Guardian in April 2025, “and simply wanted a different one.”
In response to the weight he gained following his parents’ divorce, he added, “There was just a period where, coming out of depression and isolation, I was jumping wilfully into, but also being thrust into, this world where the more conventionally beautiful I seemed, the more successful I might be, the more value I might have.”
Despite the mental struggles, though, Penn credited his ability to persist to his spirituality.
“That is what allowed me to persevere through the disillusionment, all the things I’d been grappling with,” he explained, “and then come back to it all, but with hopefully some kind of inner transformation.”
