Chappell Roan Straight Up Asked Lorde If She’s Nonbinary

May 15, 2025
6:52 pm

Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Mike Coppola/MG25/Getty Images, John Shearer/WireImage

Chappell Roan went from singing “God, what have you done?” to asking “Lorde, what’s going on?” In a recent interview with Rolling Stone, Lorde said that Chappell — who has become a close friend of hers over the past year — has asked her about her gender identity and what’s changed. “She was like, ‘So, are you nonbinary now?’” Lorde recalled. “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.” The lyrics on the opener of her upcoming album, Virgin, express a similar sentiment: “Some days I’m a woman / Some days I’m a man.” Another track, “Man of the Year,” was written while she was trying to visualize how her gender felt at the moment and saw herself wearing men’s jeans, a gold chain, duct tape on her chest, and nothing else. Lorde said she got tape, put it on, and took a picture staring at herself. “It scared me what I saw. I didn’t understand it,” she said. “But I felt something bursting out of me. It was crazy. It was something jagged. There was this violence to it.” She told Rolling Stone that she is “in the middle gender-wise,” with the outlet noting that she still uses she/her pronouns. Although opening up about her identity does scare her, Lorde emphasized that she doesn’t want to “take any space” from trans people who have “more on the line” since she’s “comparatively, in a very safe place as a wealthy, cis, white woman.”

The “What Was That” singer previously shared that she began to feel her gender “broadening” before she made Virgin. She expanded on that experience to Rolling Stone, sharing that in 2023, she went off birth control for the first time since she was 15. She ovulated for the first time in a decade — an experience that she describes as “one of the best drugs she’s ever done” — and was later diagnosed with premenstrual dysphoric disorder, ultimately going on to insert the IUD that is on Virgin’s album cover. Stopping birth control made her feel like she had “cut some sort of cord between myself and this regulated femininity,” she said. Also in 2023, Lorde was beginning a journey to develop a healthier relationship with food and her body and return to the person she was before she’d developed disordered eating habits and a fixation on being thin: “My gender got way more expansive when I gave my body more room,” she reflected. And “coming into” her body also meant understanding both “the grotesque nature of it and the glory” of it, she said. That has influenced her approach to her album’s lyrics, which she said often attempt to hit on a kind of “gnarliness or grossness” that she’s never heard in a song. Until June 27, we’ll just have to wait and see what lyrical places Lorde’s Virgin may have touched for the very first time.