Lorde still identifies as a cis woman, and her pronouns remain unchanged, but in a new Rolling Stone cover story, she opened up about growing more comfortable with the fluidity of her gender expression as she worked on her upcoming album, Virgin. As she puts it on the album’s opening track: “Some days I’m a woman/Some days I’m a man.”
Lorde said she is “in the middle gender-wise,” and to clarify what this meant, she mentioned a recent conversation with Chappell Roan, who’s become a good friend. Roan asked Lorde flat-out if she was non-binary, and Lorde tells RS she responded, “I’m a woman except for the days when I’m a man.”
She added, “I know that’s not a very satisfying answer but there’s a part of me that is really resistant to boxing it up.”
For Lorde, this new way of thinking about gender has been part of a larger creative, emotional, and physical journey she embarked after releasing her 2021 album Solar Power, and as she worked on Virgin. She called this process “the ooze” — an act of letting herself take up more space in all areas of her life.
“My gender got way more expansive when I gave my body more room,” she said.
A pivotal, early moment came in 2023 when Lorde tried on a pair of men’s jeans and sent a photo to producer Jim-E Stack, her main collaborator on Virgin, to get his opinion. At the time, the two were still figuring out what the album would sound and feel like, and Lorde recalled Stack responding, “I want to see the you that’s in this picture represented in the music.”
Lorde added, “This was before I had any sense of my gender broadening at all.”
Another key moment was Lorde’s decision to go off birth control for the first time since she was 15. She said it made her feel like she had “cut some sort of cord between myself and this regulated femininity. 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.”
And when she wrote the Virgin song, “Man of the Year,” Lorde said 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.” She saw herself in men’s jeans, a gold chain, and duct tape on her chest. She created that look in the moment, and admitted that what she saw in the mirror “scared” her.
“I didn’t understand it,” Lorde said. “But I felt something bursting out of me. It was crazy. It was something jagged. There was this violence to it.” (This look Lorde describes has some resonances with what she wore to the 2025 Met Gala, which Lorde previously called an “Easter egg” for the album.)
Despite how deeply personal this journey was, Lorde acknowledged that she did not find her newfound sense of gender identity to be “radical,” especially in light of the Trump administration’s war against the trans community.
“I see these incredibly brave young people, and it’s complicated,” Lorde 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. Because I’m, comparatively, in a very safe place as a wealthy, cis, white woman.”
