There were expectations placed on Lorde about how a girl becoming a young woman should act. It was another way she made herself small, trying to please the world and be good. But as she oozed, she redefined herself, and she saw that her gender identity could get bigger, too. On Virgin‘s opening track, she lays the tale of her rebirth bare: “Some days I’m a woman/Some days I’m a man.”
I ask her how she identifies now, what it means and what’s changed. “[Chappell Roan] asked me this,” Lorde recalls. The pair have become close friends over the past year. “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.’ I know that’s not a very satisfying answer, but there’s a part of me that is really resistant to boxing it up.”
Though Lorde still calls herself a cis woman and her pronouns remain unchanged. She describes herself as “in the middle gender-wise,” a person more comfortable with the fluidity of her expression. In some ways, she feels like her teenage self again, back when her friends were mostly boys and there was a looseness in how she dressed and acted.
In 2023, she went shopping at clothing store C’H’C’M’ and tried on a pair of men’s jeans. She sent a picture to Stack to get his opinion. “He was like, ‘I want to see the you that’s in this picture represented in the music.’ This was before I had any sense of my gender broadening at all.”
Toward the end of that year, she went off birth control for the first time since she was 15. “I’ve now come to see [my decision] as maybe some quasi right-wing programming,” she admits, presumably referring to years of far-right influencers pushing anti-contraception disinformation. “But I hadn’t ovulated in 10 years. And when I ovulated for the first time, I cannot describe to you how crazy it was. One of the best drugs I’ve ever done.”
She wrote the album’s opening track soon after, as well as “Man of the Year.” She felt like she had superpowers, like being off birth control had peeled a film off her life. But the “best drug” came with bigger crashes than she had ever experienced. She would be diagnosed with premenstrual dysphoric disorder, a severe form of PMS that causes debilitating mood swings, among other symptoms; she has since inserted the IUD visible on her album cover. The experience opened up an avenue of discovery she hadn’t anticipated. “I felt like stopping taking my birth control, I had cut some sort of cord between myself and this regulated femininity,” she explains. “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.”
When Lorde wrote “Man of the Year,” she was sitting on the floor of her living room, trying to visualize a version of herself “that was fully representative of how [her] gender felt in that moment.” What she saw once again was an image of herself in men’s jeans, this time wearing nothing else but her gold chain and duct tape on her chest. The tape had this feeling of rawness to her, of it “not being a permanent solution.”
“I went to the cupboard, and I got the tape out, and I did it to myself,” she tells me. “I have this picture staring at myself. I was blond [at the time]. It scared me what I saw. I didn’t understand it. But I felt something bursting out of me. It was crazy. It was something jagged. There was this violence to it.”
We talk about the Trump administration’s war against the trans community. While opening up about her own identity terrifies her, she knows she has less on the line than people whose gender identity does not match what they were assigned at birth.
“I don’t think that [my identity] is radical, to be honest,” she says. “I see these incredibly brave young people, and it’s complicated. 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.”
Also while nonbinary people can also identify as cis, I can’t help but wonder if her saying her identity isn’t “radical” is some internalized exorsexism. Like, Lorde my friend Lorde, you are describing a very raw and real genderqueer experience, you don’t need to add a disclaimer that you aren’t Really Radical because you are still comfortable being a woman as well. The answer “I’m sometimes a woman and sometimes a man” IS a satisfying answer to people who care about multigender folks.
Also this is a really good example of why I as a nonbinary person really dislike defining “transgender” as “not identifying with your identity assigned at birth” because it’s a definition that really prioritizes binary trans people above all else, as opposed to the older definition which emphasizes genderqueerness in all forms.
Anyways! Really cool to see!!!! We are in such desperate need of mainstream multigender representation.
also it’s so incredibly cool and swag to see lorde not just calling out anti-contraceptive right wing propaganda as being what it is, but also saying that going off birth control made her realize she’s also a guy. given how there’s whole conspiracies around how the rise in BC is using artificial hormones to warp good cishet girls minds into scary leftist dykes it’s soooo cool and sexy to say that ovulating for the first time in years “cut the cord” of regulated femininity. what a great fuck you to the people who think that the “natural” state of the “female” body is heterosexuality and cisgenderism.
sorry ALSO i love seeing her talk about going out and buying men’s jeans. its a little detail but people still act like crossdressing doesn’t mean anything for people assigned female. i love seeing people talk about wearing men’s clothes and the freedom and intensity that it can create.
