 |
| Lorde performing at the Ultrasound Tour, Austin Texas, 17 September 2025 |
“I was trying to make a document that reflected my femininity: raw, primal, innocent, elegant, openhearted, spiritual, masc”, Lorde wrote in the announcement of her newest album Virgin. Femininity, described as masc? Good starting-point for a Gay Saint article. Released on June 27 2025, Lorde’s fourth record revolves around her changing relationship to her body and how that has impacted her gender identity.
Across the eleven tracks, Lorde chronicles the bodily experiences of an AFAB person. ‘Clearblue’ makes a pregnancy scare a moment of salvation, whereas ‘Broken Glass’ discusses dysmorphia within the context of an eating disorder. The singer seems to achieve an armistice with a body she has been at war with throughout her life.
This is situated within Lorde’s complicated feelings about womanhood. On ‘Hammer’, the lyrics read: “Some days I’m a woman / Some days I’m a man.” On ‘Man of the Year’, Lorde sings: “Take my knife and I cut the cord / My babe can’t believe I’ve become someone else / Someone more like myself.” Are these lyrics divorces from conventional femininity? Do they exist within the realm of womanhood? Can we call these songs genderqueer anthems? Can anything nonbinary come from the mouth of someone cisgender?
Lorde does identify as cisgender, though the singer has called the album a broadening of what gender means to her. In Rolling Stone, Lorde told Brittany Spanos about a time when Chappell Roan asked about her identity: “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.”
I, for one, love Lorde’s gender trouble. It’s fantastic that a mainstream pop artist is opening up publicly about her ongoing gender-related revelations, an act that converges with making peace with a body she has felt alienated from. It’s distinctive, and it’s refreshingly honest.
During the album roll-out, fans and journalists alike speculated on Lorde’s gender identity. Is she trans? Is she nonbinary? Does she just not know it yet? Or is she totally cisgender and taking up space in a conversation she has no business being a part of? Drew Burnett Gregory of Autostraddle wrote, “[Some people] questioned how someone with such a large platform could describe a trans experience without owning the label.”
James Factora of Them, however, criticises this kind of guesswork: “Even celebrities should have the freedom to explore their gender as extensively as they want without fear that others will make it into a whole thing. [...] Not to mention, speculating about someone’s gender identity is pretty invasive.”
These two responses reflect a broader cultural divide. Both inside and outside the LGBTQIA+ community, there is an eagerness to staple people to labels, as if a one-word explanation of everything gendery going on inside them validates them as – yes! – truly queer. Lorde’s refusal to identify as anything beyond “in the middle, gender-wise,” is unsatisfying for those who chase clarity when it comes to gender. But I think who or what Lorde ‘really is’ is totally besides the point.
My esteemed friend Daisy Gillam attended Lorde’s Ultrasound Tour in Glasgow on 19 November. Of the concert, Daisy said: “I came out of it feeling very inspired by the way she dresses, dances, and presents in general. As someone who is not nonbinary but is a queer person, gender is still very weird to me, and I found the concert really transformative and liberating in light of that.”
Lorde exemplifies that even someone who identifies as cisgender can experience fluidity, tension, and expansiveness, and there is power in allowing those contradictions to exist without rushing to resolve them. Moreover, this mainstream discussion of gender as felt sooner than named is valuable to all kinds of people – whether you’re queer, straight, trans, cis, or nonbinary.
It is my belief that language occupies an intermediate position in the LGBTQIA+ movement. It is the way through which queer people can self-express identities that heretofore have been misunderstood or hidden. Yet, it is also one of the strongest chains of patriarchy: everyday speech sustains heterosexism. I don’t think we yet have the language for so many experiences and feelings in regard to gender. We don’t yet in everyday speech know how to locate gender outside of pronouns, names, and the labels widely known.
Lorde calling herself the man of the year exceeds our current vocabulary – it is a way of inhabiting masculinity without renouncing womanhood, of borrowing from the binary without pledging allegiance to either side. In that sense, her androgyny does not signal uncertainty but possibility: a reminder that sometimes the feeling comes first, and the language comes thereafter.
Virgin demonstrates that gender expansiveness is not the exclusive property of any one identity category, and that art can be genderqueer even if its maker resists the term. If gender is lived experience before it is named identity, then artistic expression might too precede identity politics. What’s more, anyone, regardless of the labels they identify with, has grounds to openly discuss this stuff without being pigeonholed as not knowing yet what they really are. For that, let’s hear it for the man of the year!
By Bel (she/her)