In my experience, nobody loves gossip about the LGBTQ+ community more than…well, members of said community. To wit: I’ve recently been involved in a lot of conversations about what, precisely, is going on with Lorde’s gender identity, a topic that the 28-year-old musician shed new light on in an interview with Rolling Stone this week.

“My gender got way more expansive when I gave my body more room,” Lorde told interviewer Brittany Spanos, echoing a line from the as-yet-unreleased opening track of her next album, Virgin—“Some days I’m a woman/Some days I’m a man”—and comments she made about feeling “like a man and a woman” in custom Thom Browne at the 2025 Met Gala. Apparently, no less a queer authority than Chappell Roan has also chimed in with questions about how Lorde identifies: “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,’” Lorde recounted. “I know that’s not a very satisfying answer, but there’s a part of me that is really resistant to boxing it up.”

Hearing all the chatter, I can’t help feeling a little bit protective over Lorde. As someone who has struggled to put my feelings about my own gender into words (and frequently tripped over myself, trying to reassure people that my use of she/they pronouns isn’t something they need to worry about or consider in any way whatsoever), I wish that we could all just be cool about whatever it is Lorde is working through, gender-wise.

I don’t think it’s inherently harmful to have questions about a public figure’s gender identity, and I also know that as white, upper-middle-class, AFAB people, Lorde and I aren’t the people directly being harmed by the virulent transphobia coursing through the Trump administration. (To her credit, Lorde has acknowledged this, too, telling Spanos: “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.”) But I would also throw out there that my life got instantly better and easier once I started to see gender as an individual mode of expression that had nothing to do with anyone else’s.