You can try to categorize Janelle Monáe, but they defy every label.
The visionary singer-songwriter behind albums like The Electric Lady and Dirty Computer appeared on the season premiere of Jada Pinkett Smith’s Red Table Talk Wednesday, casually tossing out a big detail about herself: they now identify as nonbinary.
“I’m nonbinary, so I just don’t see myself as a woman, solely,” Monáe explained early in the conversation. “I feel like God is so much bigger than the ‘he’ or the ‘she.’ And if I am 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 everything that I am. Beyond the binary.”
In a Los Angeles Times interview published on Thursday, Monáe also noted, “My pronouns are free-ass motherfucker — and they/them, her/she.”
For longtime fans, this information might not come as a huge bombshell. After coming out as pansexual in a cover interview for Rolling Stone in 2018, Monáe tweeted “#IAmNonbinary” two years later, but hedged in subsequent interviews, telling The Cut she used the hashtag “to bring more awareness to the community.”
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As Monáe revealed to Jada and Willow Smith (who made a special request to invite Monáe on the show), she simply wasn’t yet ready to fully unveil herself to the world back in 2020.
“I thought I needed to have all my answers correct [before coming out as nonbinary,]” they told the Smiths. “I don’t want to say the wrong thing, and also I hadn’t had the necessary conversations yet with my family [...] I didn’t want to work that out with the world.”
Monáe’s family has always been deeply religious and conservative, she explained. “But I was ready,” she added. “I was like, ‘You know what, if they don’t love me, don’t call me asking for no money.’”
Monáe’s The Memory Librarian, an anthology of Afrofuturist fiction in collaboration with five other Black writers, hit bookstores on Tuesday as they began their book tour promoting the project. Speaking with Shondaland ahead of its release, Monáe explained the anthology is “grounded in the human trials of identity expression, technology, and love, and exploring how the different threads of liberation become entangled in a total totalitarian landscape.”
“I think that being Black and brown in this world puts you in a space where you are haunted, hunted, and erased,” Monae reflected. “But we don’t stay there.”
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