(LifeSiteNews) — Oscar-winning actress Olivia Colman has announced that in her marriage – to husband Ed Sinclair – she identifies as a gay man. Colman is one of the U.K.’s most famous actresses and lauded for roles such as Queen Elizabeth II in The Crown. She is currently promoting her latest project, the “queer film” Jimpa, in which she plays the mother of a “nonbinary” child.
The recently invented term “nonbinary” refers to someone who claims to be neither male nor female and often uses “they/them” pronouns. Colman claims that she, too, feels “nonbinary.”
“Throughout my whole life, I’ve had arguments with people where I’ve always sort of felt nonbinary,” she explained in an interview with Them. “I’ve never felt massively feminine in my being female. I’ve always described myself to my husband as a gay man. And he goes, ‘Yeah, I get that.’ And so I do feel at home and at ease.”
Colman and her husband have three children and have been married for 25 years.
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Colman’s comments highlight the irony of the identity grift: Because she apparently defines “feminine” as something other than female, she must insist that she feels “nonbinary” or like “a gay man” rather than simply admitting that there are many different ways of being female. Those seeking to escape stereotypes most often confirm them.
“I don’t really spend a whole lot of time with people who are very staunchly heterosexual,” the actress said. “The men I know and love are very in touch with all sides of themselves … I think with my husband and I, we take turns to be the ‘strong one’ or the one who needs a bit of gentleness. I believe everyone has all of it in them. I’ve always felt like that. I’m not alone in saying, ‘I don’t feel like it’s binary.’ And I loved that. I came away from making this film with, yeah, I knew I wasn’t alone.”
In summary: everybody is basically nonbinary. Or, conversely, nobody is.
Colman is a longtime LGBT activist; she was awarded her Oscar for Best Actress for The Favourite, in which her character (Queen Anne) has an affair with Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough. In the Netflix series Heartstopper, Colman played the mother of a bisexual teenager. Her latest film is directed by Sophie Hyde, who based the story on her own life and is open about the fact that this film constitutes LGBT activism:
My dad died in 2018, and he was like Jim in the film; a very eccentric, very provocative man, openly gay, an AIDS activist and health worker, and very publicly queer. I always knew him as someone who kind of put his body on the line and didn’t have much choice about whether he was political, but kind of went with it.
When he died, my child, who’s a trans nonbinary queer person, was really starting to come out and speak about their own queer identity. They were doing that quite publicly too. And I wish that they could sit down together and talk about it and talk about the hard stuff of that – how volatile it is and how much attacked you might be – but also the really great bits that you discover when you have that kind of reckoning with yourself and the world.
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Colman emphasized that the film had helped her, as well. “I do think I learned an awful lot on the way as well,” she gushed. “Actually, I’m not sure that I spent so much time with anyone in the trans community before then, thinking about it, you know. Yeah, I did learn a bit, and I got better at pronouns as well.”
The term “nonbinary” first appeared around 1995 and it was rarely used until the 2010s. The trend of “preferred pronouns” was only used in “LGBT spaces” starting in the early 2000s, and again, was not pushed in the mainstream culture until the 2010s. Hollywood, however, is doing the heavy lifting to hold out against the backlash to trans activism – with Colman claiming that she identifies as a gay man just so she can feel like part of the “queer community” she spends so much time with.
