For Demi Lovato, being nonbinary means healing and finding freedom — not just being stuck in a different kind of box.
During a keynote conversation on Thursday hosted by nonbinary reporter Kate Sosin for The 19th’s Represents Summit, the singer-songwriter shared that their journey with gender is a lifelong one that is still underway.
“There might come a time where I identify as trans,” Lovato shared. “Like, I don’t know what this looks like for me. [I might] identify as nonbinary and gender-nonconfiorming my entire life, or maybe there’s a period of time when I get older that I identify as a woman.”
“I have a feeling that it’s not going to ever go back to one way or the other, but it’s about keeping it open and free,” they continued, adding, “I’m a very fluid person.”
Back in May, the singer came out as nonbinary in an episode of their podcast, 4D With Demi Lovato, which also featured nonbinary poet Alok Vaid-Menon. When asked by Sosin if there was an “aha” moment when they understood they were nonbinary, Lovato pointed to a poetry reading they attended with fellow nonbinary musician Sam Smith, where they heard Vaid-Menon’s poetry for the first time.
“It was when they were speaking on the stage that I had tears coming down my face [and] I was belly laughing,” Lovato shared, noting that the moment “changed everything.”
But one moment of clarity doesn’t have to dictate your gender for the rest of your life, and Lovato isn’t closing any doors for the future — nor should anyone else.
“Being nonbinary, what that means… is that I’m so much more than the binary of man and woman, and that we are all so much more if we allow ourselves the ability to look within ourselves and challenge that binary that we’ve grown up living in,” they said.
This shouldn’t be interpreted as an invalidation of trans people who do identify as “one or the other,” of course, but rather an exhortation to examine the stereotypes and expectations imposed on us from a young age.
When they were entering middle school, Lovato explained, they consciously pushed down any masculine expressions because they worried about being bullied and feared not being “digestible” for their new classmates.
That same feeling cropped up again in 2020, when Lovato was dating The Young and the Restless actor Max Ehrich. During that relationship, Lovato said that they felt pressured to perform femininity.
“When I said goodbye to that relationship, I also said goodbye to everything that was holding me back from being my most authentic self,” Lovato said.
Lovato’s comments about their continuing gender journey are nuanced and significant — and it’s equally important that they be interpreted in the right way. Anti-LGBTQ+ bigots who advocate for conversion therapy, for instance, like to claim people can change their sexual orientation in order to perpetuate abusive pseudoscience.
What Lovato expressed, though, was something much more real and freeing. It’s okay for your personal relationship with your sexuality and your gender to change throughout your life as long as you’re not being pressured to do so. Nobody is locked into one way of being queer from womb to tomb, and it’s okay to come out multiple times if necessary until you find who you are. That's a process that can take months, years, or even a lifetime.
So here’s to Demi, to change, and to the freedom that comes from being totally ourselves.
May we all find it someday.
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