These 11 Non-Binary Celebs’ Quotes About Coming Out Are Seriously Inspiring

A year after confirming their pronouns are they/them in a Tumblr post, actor Amandla Stenberg spoke about their coming-out journey during an April 2017 interview with People. By coming out, Stenberg said they hope to “show people who follow what I’m doing that you don’t really have to conform to those constructs in order to be valid or be worth something.” They added, “It’s been such a blessing to watch people who care about what I have to say feel more comfortable in their identities because they see I’m out here doing my thing.”

13 Reasons Why actor Tommy Dorfman spoke about their coming-out journey for the first time during a November 2017 interview with Refinery29. “I decided that if I was going to be in the public eye, I was going to be unequivocally myself. If anything, I was going to be a little bit more,” they said, later adding, “There was a part of me that was like, ‘Whatever. Someone’s going to see these pictures and feel better about themselves and feel OK, like maybe they can try this and dress the way they identify. Or, even better: There’s a little queer actor out there who can see me and think there’s a place for them in this world.’”

Chilling Adventures of Sabrina actor Lachlan Watson previously came out as a lesbian, then a transgender man, and they currently identify as gender non-binary. For Watson, finding genderqueer activist Jacob Tobia’s work made all the difference. “Seeing someone else being openly gender-free and being comfortable with that and being articulate about that and being proudly that was huge,” they explained to MTV during a December 2018 interview, later adding, “I’ve found it a really beautiful thing to just not limit myself as much as I used to.”

Best known for their roles in Vida and East Los High, Latinx actor Ser Anzoategui admitted it took a while for them to feel like a member of the queer community. “I grew up thinking queerness wasn’t meant for brown kids,” they wrote in June 2019 op-ed for the Los Angeles Times. Eventually, Anzoategui came out as non-binary and found their place. As they told Latinx Now! in June 2020, “I really had my experience and knew this feels good, and it not just ‘feels good’ — it aligns. I am free. I am flowing through my day-to-day, and I feel this vibration, this energy that I haven’t felt before. That’s when I was like yes, I am definitely, definitely queer.”

Singer Sam Smith first came out as non-binary during a March 2019 interview with actor Jameela Jamil for Jamil’s Instagram show, I Weigh Interviews. “When I saw the words ‘non-binary’ and ‘genderqueer’ and I read into it and I heard these people speaking, I thought, f*ck — that is me,” Smith said. When asked by Jamil what those words meant to them, they explained, “[They] mean to me that you do not identify in a gender. You are just you. You are a mixture of all different things. You are your own special creation.” In September 2019, Smith announced their pronouns are now they/them.

Asia Kate Dillon first discovered they were non-binary after getting cast as Taylor Mason on Billions — the first non-binary role on American series television. “When I got to the script for Billions and the character breakdown for Taylor Mason, the character that I play, said female and non-binary, a little light bulb went off in my head,” Dillon explained to ABC News in January 2018. “…I did a little bit of research and discovered that female is an assigned sex and non-binary is in reference to gender identity and those are two different things. It finally helped me put language to a feeling that I’d had my entire life.”

Best known for playing Abby Hammond in Santa Clarita Diet, Australian actor Liv Hewson always knew they didn’t fit the gender role they’d been assigned at birth. After years of experiencing gender dysphoria, discovering the term ‘non-binary’ online was a lightbulb moment for Hewson. “…it was like someone punched me in the face,” they explained during a May 2018 interview with A Beautiful Perspective. “There was just this massive sensation of, ‘Oh! Oh, OK. That’s what’s been happening.’ It was a massive, massive relief.”

Best known for their roles in The Politician and Work in Progress, trans non-binary actor Theo Germaine (who uses he/him and they/them pronouns interchangeably) spent most of their life feeling trapped by the gender binary. “It takes a lot of learning to not listen to somebody else in regards to what’s beautiful,” they explained to Vogue during a June 2020 interview. “Because I grew up around these rigid gender roles, when I was 18, 19, my coming-out process was about over-correcting myself in order to fit into this other part of society … Then at some point, when I was around 22, I just stopped. I was like, ‘I’m just going to do whatever I want and I hope that some other people follow suit.’”

Whether you’re non-binary, genderqueer, gender fluid, agender, demigender, bigender, or something else entirely, there’s no wrong way to express your gender identity, y’all, and these celebs are living proof.