Janelle Monáe has publicly come out as non-binary.
“I just don’t see myself as a woman, solely,” the singer told Jada Pinkett Smith in the latest episode of Red Table Talk. “I will always, always stand with women. I will always stand with Black women. But I just see everything that I am, beyond the binary.”
In 2020, Monáe tweeted the hashtag “IAmNonbinary” but later said it was meant as a show of support, not a personal declaration. “It resonated with me,” they told The Cut, “especially as someone who has pushed boundaries of gender since the beginning of my career.”
On Red Table Talk, the 36-year-old singer explained why they were coming out now. “Somebody said, ‘If you don’t work out the things that you need to work out first before sharing it with the world, then you’re going to be working it out with the world.’ That’s what I didn’t want to do.”
Monáe came out publicly as pansexual in a 2018 interview with Rolling Stone. “Being a queer black woman in America, someone who has been in relationships with both men and women – I consider myself to be a free-a** motherf**ker,” they said. (Pansexuality is defined as an attraction to people regardless of their sex or gender identity.)
Singer Demi Lovato publicly identified as non-binary last year “after a lot of healing and self-reflective work.” In 2019, Sam Smith announced that “after a lifetime of being at war with my gender I’ve decided to embrace myself for who I am, inside and out” and adopted gender-neutral pronouns.
Last year, Halsey shared on Instagram that she is “happy with either pronouns” and said: “I thought pregnancy would give me very strong, binary feelings about ‘womanhood’ but truly it has levelled my perception of gender entirely. My sensitivity to my body has made me hyper aware of my humanness and that’s all.”