Comedian Ilana Glazer has come out as nonbinary in a new interview for The Independent. In the interview, the Broad City star and co-creator speaks about how it was pregnancy that made them realize they were nonbinary.
The realization that they're nonbinary comes in the middle of a long journey of more deeply finding her own sense of self. Glazer talks at length about the hardest part of her Broad City success, which has been the amount of people who cannot separate Ilana Glazer, the hardworking comedian/writer/actor/auteur, from the raunchy, honest, lovable, perpetually stoned and exceedingly horny character Ilana Wexler. Since the show's fifth and final season aired in 2019, Glazer has been given more room to separate one Ilana from another.
"It has taken me years to parse these parts of myself out,” Glazer said, crediting much of the progress on this journey to years-long standing appointments for psychoanalysis three times a week. “I’ve found a real dedicated practice to understanding myself. “I really used to believe those people [who thought I was Ilana the character] had seen these personal parts of me, but that’s not true. I now understand better who I am.”
That better understanding of self goes deep, with Glazer now understanding herself to be a "nonbinary woman." It was their pregnancy to their now 3-year-old daughter that brought these feelings to the surface, even though, "Being pregnant on paper was the most female thing I could ever do," she says, "but it actually highlighted both the masculine and feminine inside of me." Glazer is just one of many nonbinary people and trans men who have spoken in recent years about the experience of being pregnant while transgender, and what that's like to navigate internally and externally.
“For so long, my masculinity felt like something I had to hide or make a joke of," explains Glazer, continuing, "and my femininity was something that felt like drag. There was always this element of comedy to it that was limiting my genuine personal experience,” they say. It was pregnancy that allowed themself to embrace their whole, complete being without caveat or comedy. “This gift of being pregnant made space for me to be real with myself.”
Lastly, Glazer is asked if it's changed much day-to-day for them to put a name to her identity. “It’s more a point in the process of a long journey of self-actualization," they say. "I’m moving through the world in a way that’s truer.”