Ilana Glazer has opened up about their pregnancy, saying that the experience helped them realize that they are nonbinary.
In a wide-ranging profile in The Independent, the Broad City actor, who uses they/she pronouns, discussed her May film, Babes, which recently premiered in the U.K. Co-written withJosh Rabinowitz and directed by Pamela Adlon (a.k.a. the voice of Bobby Hill in King of the Hill), the movie follows Eden (Glazer) as she navigates a pregnancy from a one-night stand alongside her best friend Dawn (Michelle Buteau).
Babes was inspired by Glazer’s own pregnancy, but the movie wasn’t the only major life development that resulted from that time. She told The Independent that “being pregnant on paper was the most female thing I could ever do, but it actually highlighted both the masculine and feminine inside of me.”
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“For so long, my masculinity felt like something I had to hide or make a joke of, and my femininity was something that felt like drag,” the actor said. “There was always this element of comedy to it that was limiting my genuine personal experience.” It wasn’t until “the gift of being pregnant” that she was able to “be real with [herself],” Glazer said.
When The Independent asked Glazer whether identifying as nonbinary had changed much in their day-to-day life, they responded that the label is “more a point in the process of a long journey of self-actualization.” “I’m moving through the world in a way that’s truer,” she concluded.
This isn’t the first time that Glazer has spoken about their nonbinary identity; they also discussed it in a May interview with USA Today, in which they said that calling themself nonbinary is “what feels true to how [they] feel in [their] body.”
Glazer added that pregnancy enabled her to experience femininity as “a powerful, open space” for the first time, and her masculinity was “something that [she] thought was cool and hot and a part of me.”
It’s unclear, though, when or if Glazer has ever “officially” come out as nonbinary, or if they’ve just kinda been soft-launching it — and we support both approaches, to be clear. Judging from a Reddit post, it appears as though Glazer has had they/she pronouns in her Instagram bio since at least March, when users spotted a pronoun change in the actor’s social media bios. We love a subtle nonbinary slay, especially when it comes from none other than Ilana Glazer.
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