Lorde Says Her Gender Is ‘Way More Expansive’
In case you haven’t heard, Lorde summer is almost here. The singer is getting ready to drop her new album, Virgin, next month, four years after her last album release. So, what has she been up to in that time? Turns out, a lot. In an interview with Rolling Stone, Lorde opened up about her shifting gender identity, explaining that, after years of psilocybin therapy and repairing her relationship with her body, she feels “in the middle gender-wise.”
During the past few weeks of her album rollout, Lorde has alluded to being on a bit of a gender journey. In an interview with Emma Chamberlain on the Met Gala carpet, she said her outfit — which included a metallic skirt and matching jacket with a floating bra top — was an homage to where she’s at “gender-wise,” saying she feels both “like a man and a woman.” Days earlier, she told the magazine Document Journal she was feeling her “gender broadening a little bit.”
Now, it sounds like she’s opening up about these feelings on the new album — the first track, according to Rolling Stone, includes the lyric “Some days I’m a woman / Some days I’m a man.” In the interview, Lorde said that she developed an eating disorder during the pandemic and recalled feeling “so hungry and so weak” while promoting her last album, Solar Power, in 2021. In 2022, she said, she began MDMA and psilocybin therapy to help deal with severe stage fright, which she continued with through 2024. At the same time, she got off birth control for the first time since she was 15, which she said made her feel like she’d “cut some sort of cord between myself and this regulated femininity.” The psychedelic treatments and stopping birth control altered her feelings about her body, she said, and her “gender got way more expansive when I gave my body more room.”
As she started considering her identity, she apparently opened up to Chappell Roan, who has recently become a close friend. “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 said. “I know that’s not a very satisfying answer, but there’s a part of me that is really resistant to boxing it up.”
Lorde’s openness regarding her gender has also prompted plenty of speculation from fans and followers about the details of how she identifies. She clarified that she still considers herself cis and isn’t planning on changing her pronouns. In a time when trans and nonbinary people are under attack, she said doesn’t see her shifting identity as particularly “radical,” acknowledging that she’s “comparatively, in a very safe place as a wealthy, cis, white woman.”
“I see these incredibly brave young people, and it’s complicated,” she said. “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.”
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