Notable nonbinary people include celebrities, activists, and historical figures who identify outside of the Western gender binary, regardless of whether they have used the word "nonbinary" for themselves. They may call themselves genderqueer, use an indigenous word for their identity, or they may simply describe their identity with words like "I'm not a man or a woman," "I'm some percentage of both," or "I often change back and forth." They were not necessarily born physically intersex, and they do not necessarily transition. This article is about a few such people who are well-known. Due to the nature of how people become well-known, people who are musicians, actors, or activists tend to be overrepresented in this list. (There many more nonbinary people all over the world who are not famous, and who have other types of careers.) The entries in the below table are sorted alphabetically by surname. You can click on the headings to change it to sort by birthdate, nationality, or gender identity instead.
Both. Andersson was assigned female at birth and presented as male. Andersson was subjected to a criminal trial for marrying a woman. In the trial, Andersson was asked: "Are you a man or a woman?" It was recorded that the answer was that "he believes he could be both."[6][7][8]
Actor. Best known for portraying the butch widow Eddy on the drama Vida (2018-2020), and the masculine of center character Daysi Cantu on East Los High (2015-2016).[10] Anzoategui was nominated for “Best Supporting Actor” for their Vida performance at the 2019 Imagen Awards.[11]
Bigender. "I happen to be transgendered person as well, bi-gender in particular."[17] Prefers the name Maťo when presenting as a man and the name Matia when presenting as a woman.[18]
Music producer and DJ. The artist's first major label release was "Beautiful Lies", which appeared on the compilation Sick Music from Hospital Records. The compilation went on to reach the top 30 on the iTunes UK Download Chart, and was in the top 5 on the Beatport Drum and Bass Chart.[19][20]
Bond said, "for me to claim to be either a man or a woman, feels like a lie. My identity falls somewhere in the middle and is constantly shifting."[23][24][25][24][26]
Singer-songwriter, author, painter, performance artist, actor. Most famous for v's cabaret character Kiki DuRane. Bond is a Tony-nominated (2007) performer who has received GLAAD (2000), Obie (2001), Bessie (2004), Ethyl (2007), and a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists (2012) awards.
Nonbinary. Currently (as of 2019), Bornstein's site says they identify as nonbinary.[27] Bornstein has said, "I don't call myself a woman, and I know I'm not a man." Their transition included gender affirmation surgery.[28]
Author, playwright, performance artist, and gender theorist
Nonbinary, which Briffa says reflects the intersex condition with which she[29] was born. She obtained a birth certificate with a blank sex designation.[30] "My natural female and male biology also reflected how I felt as a person. I'm more than just a woman or a man - I'm both."[31][32][33]
Politician and intersex advocate. The world's first openly intersex person elected into public office.[34]
neuter. In their autobiography, Disavowals, they explained, “Masculine? Feminine? It depends on the situation. Neuter is the only gender that always suits me.”[39]
Artist in the surrealist movement. Writing, photography, and theatre. Most remembered for highly staged self-portraits and tableaux. Cahun and their life partner Marcel Moore were both Jewish, adopted gender-neutral names, and often collaborated together in art. In WWII, the couple engaged in resistance work and activism against the Nazis during the German occupation of France.[40]
Genderfluid. "One of Irish broadcaster RTE’s best-known journalists just [in 2015] came out as 'gender fluid,' and the response so far seems wholly positive."[47]
Butch: "Nobody taught me how to be butch; I didn't even hear the word until I was twenty years old. I first became something I had no name for in solitude and only later discovered the word for what I was".[50] Coyote describes themself as "a trans person who doesn't fit neatly into the gender binary,"[51] and has said "I don't want to be a man but don’t feel like a woman either, and that's a difficult place to be in, yet that is my authentic self and there is nothing harder than spending an entire lifetime trying to cover up your authentic self."[52]
Writer. Coyote has made significant contributions to the representation of queerness in Canadian literature. They have won the ReLit Award for Best Fiction (2007), and the Stonewall Honor Book Award (2017).
Cyrus said in a 2015 interview, “I didn’t want to be a boy, ... I kind of wanted to be nothing. I don’t relate to what people would say defines a girl or a boy, and I think that’s what I had to understand: Being a girl isn’t what I hate, it’s the box that I get put into.”[53]
Singer, songwriter, and actor. Cyrus was included on the annual Time 100 list of the most influential people in both 2008 and 2014.
zero gender, all gender.[59] Dove said, "in all reality... I am nothing. Neither a man nor woman. I am a human. I just have specific anatomical capacities that I am satiated with and do not want to change."[60] "I don’t identify as 'male' or 'female' but rather as I am I."[61]. Often tweets with the #genderqueer hashtag.[62]
Model, actor, and activist. Dove uses their naturally androgynous look to model for both men's and women's lines of clothing.
Genderless. The Friend's transition started with a religious vision as part of a near-death experience at age 26, followed by a name change to the Public Universal Friend,[72] wearing androgynous clothing, and asking that others use no pronouns for this person.[73]
Preacher. The Friend traveled the early USA on horseback, preaching a theology similar to that of orthodox Quakers, attracting many followers who became the Society of Universal Friends. The Friend persuaded followers who owned slaves to free them. The followers included people who were black, and many unmarried women who took on prominent roles in their communities usually reserved for men.
Filmmaker, actor, model, activist. Gallo wrote, directed, and acted in the 2019 short film Ponyboi, which is the first film to feature an openly intersex actor playing an intersex person.[78]
Hall was intersex, and had preferred to alternate between feminine and masculine attire from one day to the next, until being accused of the crime of having sex with both men and women. Common law required that an intersex person should live the rest of their life as either male or female, whichever their anatomy resembled most closely. In this case, the medical examination was inconclusive, so the court ruled that "hee is a man and a woeman," and gave the injunction that Hall must from then on wear both masculine and feminine clothing at the same time.[85][86]
Artist, writer, and reiki healer. Their writing has been featured in NPR’s Code Switch, Immigrant Review, Nonbinary: Memoirs of Gender and Identity (Columbia University Press, 2019), Good Mood, LiveWire Issue 7, Hayden's Ferry Issue 64, BreakBeat Poets Volume 4: LatiNEXT and the March issue of POETRY Magazine. Hernandez’s art work has been showcased at Galería de La Raza and Residency Gallery as part of Inglewood Studios.
Actor and playwright. Hewson starred in Santa Clarita Diet, Before I Fall, and Dramaworld. In 2020, they received the Human Rights Campaign Visibility Award for their LGBT+ advocacy.[93]
Izzard identifies primarily as a transvestite, but also uses the word transgender,[96] and has stated "I am 100% boy, plus extra girl."[97] "I am a transgender guy. [...] I identify somewhat boy-ish and somewhat girl-ish. I identify both but I fancy women."[98][99]
Comedian, actor and writer. Izzard has won numerous awards, including a Primetime Emmy Award.
Androgyne, invert, urning, bisexual (in the sense of being both male and female), and fairie, which were contemporary terms for gender and sexual variance. June wrote of feeling like a combination of male and female, and of alternating between these two gender expressions.[103]
Law clerk and activist. June was one of the earliest trans people to publish an autobiography in the USA,[104][105] to help create an accepting environment for young adults who don't conform to gender and sex norms.[103] June and other androgynes in New York formed the Cercle Hermaphroditos, "to unite for defense against the world's bitter persecution," and to show that it was natural to be gender and sex variant.[106]
Writer, poet, editor, professor. Lemberg's speculative fiction has been published in Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Sisters of the Revolution, and Uncanny Magazine.
Genderfluid/nonbinary.[132] "When I get comments about not being 'gay enough' it hurts. Aside from the way my marriage may look to others, I'm pretty gay. I'm attracted to women, I date women, I sleep with women, my friends are queer, I feel/think queer, I identity as gender fluid / non-binary, my partner the same."[133]
Fitness entrepreneur and LGBTQ activist. Bethany C. Meyers launched the fitness app for be.come, specializing in body-positive workouts. They also gave a TED talk on empowerment and body neutrality.
Nonbinary. "I'm like this weird non binary alien nerd and I think I'm okay with that."[136]
Voice actor. Mongillo has played many roles in animation and video games, best known for portraying lead character Shinji Ikari in the Netflix English dub of Neon Genesis Evangelion.[137]
Genderless. In a Facebook post about transphobia and the drag scene, Monsoon said, "I, myself do not identify as cis-gendered. I am genderless."[140][141]
Actor, singer and winner of RuPaul's Drag Race season 5.
Transgender. In a 2009 interview O'Brien spoke about an ongoing struggle to reconcile cultural gender roles and self-described as being transgender or possible third sex. O'Brien stated, "There is a continuum between male and female. Some are hard-wired one way or another, I’m in between."[143] O'Brien expounded on this in a 2013 interview which covered using oestrogen for the previous decade, and identifying as 70% male 30% female.[144]
Writer, actor, television presenter and theatre performer. O'Brien wrote the musical stage show The Rocky Horror Show in 1973, which became an international success and has remained in continuous production. He also co-wrote the screenplay of the film adaptation The Rocky Horror Picture Show, released in 1975, appearing in the film as Riff Raff.
Pandrogyne.[152] After marrying Lady Jaye Breyer P-Orridge in 1993, Genesis and Lady Jaye began the performance art piece "project Pandrogeny" to become Breyer P-Orridge, an entity described as an "amalgam" of their two selves. Genesis Breyer P-Orridge continued this project after the death of Lady Jaye in 2007.
Singer-songwriter, musician, poet, writer, performance artist
Ray said, "I am half and half and whatever you call me is fine. [...] I work every day to be comfortable in my body and in rare transcendent moments, I am, but it’s the job of my lifetime to appreciate my physicality and always project what is inside me so I can celebrate this life I’ve been given."[157]
Singer-songwriter. Ray is a member of the contemporary folk duo Indigo Girls. She also pursues a solo career and has released six albums under her own name, and founded a record company, Daemon Records.
Genderqueer and a gender outlaw. "I do mostly go by she and her and I consider myself a woman in most senses of the word. I sometimes consider myself part of the trans community and I don't mind at all when people call me he if that's how they see me.[165]
Nonbinary and genderqueer[169] "When asked if they feel like a cisgender man, they [Smith] replied: ‘No. I mean, I’ve got these tattoos on my fingers.’ They pointed to small tattoos of the gender symbols and smiled: ‘I don’t know what the title would be but I feel just as much woman as I am man.’"[170]
Singer. Smith is a top-charting singer and songwriter.
[172] After a decade of living as a trans man,[173] Spoon noted a preference for the pronoun "they" in 2012 during an interview with cartoonist Elisha Lim, a fellow advocate for the gender-neutral pronoun.[174] They explained to Now Magazine, "after years of fighting to be called 'he,' the idea of coming out again made me tired. But now I feel kind of rejuvenated, ready to fight on some more. I think the 'they' pronoun is a pretty cool thing. It's letting a lot of people not have to identify as a man or a woman. Whatever it means to them."[175]
Musician and writer. Spoon was awarded an Honour of Distinction from the Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBT writers in 2014.
Actor and singer. Stenberg has won the BET Awards for YoungStar Award. Stenberg acted in feature films such as The Hunger Games. Stenberg was included in Time's list of Most Influential Teens in both 2015 and 2016.[179][180] In 2016, she was included in Oprah Winfrey's SuperSoul 100 list of visionaries and influential leaders.[181]
"Asked if she had come out to her friends and family, she [Eliot Sumner] said that she hadn’t because 'no one had ever asked'. 'They knew already,' she added. 'So I didn’t need to. I’ve never come out to anyone. My friends always knew and I always knew'. [...] She said she did not believe in gender “labels” and preferred to dress down, shunning the glamour attached to some singers. Asked whether she identified with a particular gender, she replied 'no', saying she defined herself simply as a 'musician'. 'I don’t believe in any specifications,' she said."[187] (Note that this article uses "she" pronouns for Sumner, but Sumner's pronoun preference hasn't been stated.)[188]
Musician, singer-songwriter. Sumner is also well-known due to being the child of Sting.
"I don’t know if I could ever really say that I was a girl – I was kind of a boy for a long time. I don’t know, who knows? It changes."[189]
Actor. Swinton has won numerous awards for her career as an actor, including an Academy Award, the BAFTA Scotland Award, the Volpi Cup, the European Film Award, and the Richard Harris Award. Swinton has played gender-variant characters, such as the lead in Orlando, and the genderless angel Gabriel in Constantine.
Writer, psycholinguist, editor, translator. They are Jewish, and have written Torah-inspired work. They won the Lambda Literary Award for Best Transgender Fiction.
Drag queen, comedian, Black activist. Tidicue is known for winning the eighth season of RuPaul's Drag Race. In June 2019, New York magazine published the results from their panel of judges and writers which ranked her in the top twenty Drag Race superstars. She was also nominated for the WOWIE Awards for best podcast.
Writer, actor, performer, producer, artist activist. In 2019, they published their memoir, Sissy: A Coming-of-Gender Story. They are the voice actor for a nonbinary character in the Dreamworks animated series She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, Double Trouble.[201]
Actor, writer, and stand up comic. They have appeared in the Amazon short film Soojung Dreams of Fiji (AAIFF “Audience Award”) and played the lead in Anatomy of an Orchid. Their writing has been published by Reductress, By Shondaland, and Condé Nast's Them. In collaboration with fellow comedian Chewy May, Jes Tom wrote, co-directed, and starred in the viral video Ghost In The Shell PSA, which received praise on platforms such as Buzzfeed, Upworthy, Nextshark, iO9, and Perez Hilton. Jes has been featured in GO Magazine, Splitsider, and the Fader, and were named one of TimeOut New York's "LGBTQ POC Comedians We're Obsessed With." Jes was a 2018 StandUp NBC semifinalist.
Actor, writer, and model. Tortorella is known for roles in films including Scream 4, the Fox crime drama series The Following, and the TV Land comedy-drama series Younger.
"I know how it feels to be a woman because I am a woman," Townshend said in an interview with White that ran on White's radio show in September 1989. "And I won't be classified as just a man."[206]
Musician. Townshend is the guitarist, backing and secondary lead vocalist, principal songwriter, co-founder and leader of the rock band The Who. His career with the Who spans over 50 years, during which time the band grew to be one of the most important and influential rock bands of the 20th century.
"I've been misquoted as saying that I'm more female than male. Let me set the record straight -- it's more half and half, and I love the fact that my feelings are akin to puella eternis (Latin for 'the eternal girl')."[209]
Musician. Tyler is best known as the lead singer of the Boston-based rock band Aerosmith. Tyler is included among Rolling Stone's 100 Greatest Singers. He was ranked third on Hit Parader's Top 100 Metal Vocalists of All Time. In 2001, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with Aerosmith and in 2013, Tyler and his songwriting partner Joe Perry received the ASCAP Founders Award and were inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame.
Nonbinary, genderqueer[212] "The older I get, the more I think that I’m nonbinary — I’m gender nonconforming. Like, some days I feel like a man, but then other days I feel like a woman. I don’t really — I think my energies are really all over the place. Any opportunity I have to break down stereotypes of the binary, I am down for it, I’m here for it. I think that a lot of times gender is used to separate and divide. It’s this social construct that I don’t really feel like I fit into the way I used to."[212]
Hairdresser, podcaster, television personality. One of Queer Eye's "Fab Five".
"I have always identified a fair amount with the female gender..... Masculinity to me has always made me feel like it wasn't right for me."[219]
Musician. Way is best known as the lead vocalist and co-founder of the rock band My Chemical Romance. He also wrote the Eisner Award-winning comic book series The Umbrella Academy.
Gigi was born intersex, and underwent nonconsensual surgery after birth to appear "male". Some of the words Gigi has used to identify are "hermaphrodite", "third gender", and "ladyboy".[223] "[S]ociety does not allow my true gender to exist [...] I am neither female nor male, and I am both female and male."[223] "Spiritually, I have never been comfortable with a male body, nor would I have been with a female body. I am hermaphrodite. That is my true gender."[224]
Writer and activist. Wilbur is one of the people who created Celebrate Bisexuality Day (September 23, which is Gigi's birthday).
↑Andersen, Corinne (2005). "Que me veux-tu?/ What do you want of me?: Claude Cahun's Autoportraits and the Process of Gender Identification". Women in French Studies. 13: 37–50 – via Project MUSE.
↑Elferen, Isabella van; Weinstock, Jeffrey Andrew (2015). Goth Music: From Sound to Subculture. New York: Routledge. p. 44. ISBN9781317962977. Born male and never operated, Cantodea rejects fixed gender and regards herself as both/neither male and/nor female.
↑Perla, Cory (August 17, 2016). "Spotlight: Uncertain". The Public. Buffalo Public Media, LLC. Archived from the original on August 26, 2016. Retrieved April 14, 2017. CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)
↑ 103.0103.1Meyerowitz, J. "Thinking Sex With An Androgyne". GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 17.1 (2010): 97–105. Web. Retrieved April 13, 2017.
↑Pasquale, Cynthia (September 17, 2015). "Five questions for sj Miller". CU Connections. University of Colorado Boulder. Retrieved March 22, 2017. CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)
↑Azzopardi, Chris (August 30, 2007). "Goodbye, guitar". PrideSource. Archived from the original on July 27, 2011. Retrieved January 27, 2010. CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)
↑Brookover, Tim (1 January 2008). "Beyond Two Genders". OutSmart Magazine. Retrieved 25 March 2020.
↑Blair, Chad (February 2015). "Kumu in the Middle". Hana Hou: The Magazine of Hawaiian Airlines. Retrieved 21 February 2017. CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)
↑Yarian, Karekin (October 11, 2017). "Welcome to me". PunkMonk. Retrieved October 11, 2017. CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)