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‘I am everything’: Janelle Monáe confirms she’s not binary in new interview

Musician and actress Janelle Monáe has confirmed that she’s not a twin, meaning she’s neither male nor female, and discussed what it means to her in a recent interview with “Red silver table, ” A talk show hosted by Jada Pinkett Smith; her daughter, Willow Smith; and her mother, Adrienne Banfield-Norris.

“I’m not binary, so I don’t just see myself as a woman,” Monáe said in the episode released Wednesday. “I feel all my energy. I feel like God is much greater than ‘he’ or ‘she’. If I come from God, I am everything. I am everything, but I will always, always stand with women. I will always stand with Black women. But I just see things beyond binary.”

In one 2018 Rolling Stone cover story, prior to the release of the album “Dirty Computer”, Monáe appeared as pansexual, which is something that appeals to people regardless of their gender or gender identity. She said she initially identified as bisexual, “but then I read about homosexuality and said, ‘Oh, these are the things that I identify with as well.’ I am open to learning more about who I am. ”

In her interview with “Red Table Talk,” she said that when she sees people, she sees their energy.

“I don’t understand how you define it,” she said. “And I feel that makes it possible for you to love anyone, with any beautiful spirit.”

The episode marks the first time Monáe has officially confirmed that she’s not binary. In January 2020, she tweeted the hashtag “#IAmNonbinary” and fans consider it to be her debut time.

She clarified a month later in an interview with author Roxane Gay that she is tweeting in support of Non-Binary Day “and to raise more awareness for the community.”

“I retweeted the ‘Steven Universe’ meme ‘Are you a boy or a girl? I was an experience’ because it resonated with me, especially as someone who has crossed the line. gender since the beginning of my career,” Monáe told Gay, “I feel my feminine energy, masculine energy and energy that I can’t even explain.”

In one Interview with Variety in June 2020, Monáe said she was “exploring”.

“I am very open to what the universe is teaching me and teaching us all about sex,” she said.

She didn’t make it clear in her “Red Table Talk” or any other interview whether she would use different pronouns, but in her interview with Variety, the reporter told Monáe that someone changed the pronoun on her Wikipedia page from “she” to “they . ”

“That’s not me,” Monáe replied. “I think people can call me whatever they want to call me. I know who I am. I know my journey. And I don’t have to declare anything”.

Willow Smith asked Monáe on Wednesday’s episode what made her ready to go public, and she said she has to work things out for herself before sharing who she is with the world.

“I think I need to get all of my answers right,” she said. “I don’t want to say the wrong thing. And I don’t have the necessary conversations with my family. I’m not ready for my family to question my personal life or take calls from people who still look at me like a pumpkin kid,” which is what her family calls her.

She said her grandmother, for example, was very religious.

“My whole family is church, church, church. And I just wanted to, well, what does it mean to go against your whole family about this? ” she said. “But I was ready. I was like, you know, if they don’t love me, don’t call me asking I don’t have the money. You’re not getting my LGBTQIA+ money.”

Although Monáe doesn’t advocate for herself now, she says it took “a lot of healing” and introspection, even during the pandemic, to get there. She said she faced rejection, because as a young girl she didn’t have long hair like her friends and she never felt good enough.

She said she also had to deal with her fear of abandonment, because when she was a child, her father faced substance abuse. He’s sober now, but “at the time, I was facing real rejection, abandonment problems.”

She said she felt like “if I wasn’t perfect, would they leave me?”

Pinkett Smith says that a fearful past requires people to understand that when they are who they really are, they may lose people, but then they will find their true community.

Monáe agrees and compares self-discovery to a play.

“There will be repeat characters,” she said. “There will be people who cannot return to the second act, and we have to accept to let go. You go to different levels in your life. People can’t come.”

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