popstar is a type of transgender

on Lorde’s “Man of the Year” and being embarrassing

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Lorde put out a new song last night. It’s called “Man of the Year.” It’s pretty goofy. I listened to it like ten times last night and that’s more than enough for me. I do not like it as a ballad and I think it is a wack choice for second single in an album roll-out. That’s my take on that.

….but okay. Hear me out:

Something nobody tells you about being trans is that you get bored talking about it. You never really get bored with being trans, but after those first few years you run out of things to say. The irony here is that you certainly don’t have anything worth yapping about. You won’t until well past the time when you’d rather shut up. What the fuck is a gender journey anyway?

During that first bit, though, talking feels as real as doing. Telling people about your new body is just as novel as wearing a binder in public or dissolving frustratingly low doses of estrogen beneath your tongue. There is no meaningful delineation between language and desire and presentation and action yet.

Not to mention, you can get a lot of traction in those early years telling cis people basic observations about gender. It soothes them, I think, to hear easy capitulations to a worldview they have no urgency to abandon. In the absence of a developed community, the obsessive self-reflection could be mistaken for narcissism. Early in transition, lots of personal revelations do not really conflict with the common-sense wisdom of the average audience. A sampling of such assumptions follows as such: Trans people do not like being the gender they were born to be, unless they claim they do, in which case they are not really trans. Non-binary is a third gender between “man” and “woman,” and also a third category between “cis” and “trans.” Gender is solely self-identified, but transness is unmistakably visible.

Being out, you swiftly learn your way around these fallacies.¹ There is a satisfying and terrific masochism to getting labeled by others. It almost feels like being seen in public as yourself. It’ll seem obnoxious in hindsight, but the response to the enthusiastic sacrifice of your own privacy starts to resemble validation.

The best advice anyone can give a newly out transsexual is to shut the fuck up in public forums for about two years. Every trans person has gotten and given the exact advice Laverne Cox gave Dylan Mulvaney that one time. Not a single one of us has followed it.

Trans people are most useful, in 2025, as fodder for extrapolations on feminism, hyper-individualism, the malleability of truth, assimilation, body modification, wokeness, the grifter economy, the destruction of the nuclear family via the assertion that a child’s autonomous desire be respected, etc etc. Our existence can prove a point. It can sell t-shirts. We are a very fashionable scapegoat. Thus, no matter what you’re saying in a public forum, it irrevocably feeds into your own dehumanization. The rule of thumb is to be quiet until you see what’s really happening. There’s no point degrading yourself.

This is the world into which Lorde is dropping “Man of the Year.”

tweet that made me laugh courtesy of Charlie

Look, Lorde’s gender is none of my business. But on the other hand, Lorde’s gender is her actual business. Her new album, Virgin, drops in a month. The cover art features a X-ray of a crotch with a belt buckle. Later this year she’s going on The Ultrasound Tour. She wore a binder-skirt combo to the Met Gala and called it an “easter egg.” In unveiling her new era, Lorde has repeatedly centered what my old therapist would call “gender euphoria.”² The music industry has spent years making female songwriters designing elaborate ARGs for gay guys to solve in an approximation of vulnerability. It is both funny and charming that this rollout has been adopted by a bitch who doesn’t like labels.

This is not an essay speculating on Lorde’s pronouns or whatever. I do not care that much. Again, I do not like her music!³ I am not invested in her as an artist or as a person. Also, I think it’s rude to poke at a stranger’s gender like that, even if the person in question is famous and rich and refuses to stop bringing it up.

Language is messy and trying to decipher Lorde’s gender proves both inconclusive and unremarkable. In a recent Rolling Stone interview, Lorde discussed going off birth control. She described ovulation as a rush of supernatural desire and bodily actualization. She talked about it in the same reverent tone with which many wax poetic on HRT.⁴ Speaking of hormones, after speculation that Lorde was on low-dose testosterone, she revealed via Instagram that she was in fact on Spiro, a medication which has been shown to help with acne and also serves as a T-blocker frequently prescribed to trans women. In the aforementioned interview, Lorde shares an anecdote where Chappell Roan asked her, “So are you non-binary now?”⁵ only for Lorde to respond that she is a woman, except for the days where she is a man. The video for “Man of the Year” finds Lorde writhing around in DIY chest tape and men’s jeans, exclaiming that, “My babe couldn’t believe I’d become someone else / Someone more like myself.”

All the above examples fall into a kind of Schrodinger’s Gender Expression, where Lorde is both a trans person expanding herself beyond femininity, and a woman expanding her concept of femininity. In an effort to market herself and define her next iconic era, she has found herself stumbling through mundane musings that any they with a Grindr account could rattle off in their sleep.

You see what I’m getting at, right? Lorde’s experience of publicly filtering her gender as a celebrity is productively (if loosely) analogous to the experience of coming out as trans. It is a cacophony of double-speak and a conscious disentanglement of thought and action. If gender is performance, I figured transition would come easy to a popstar. Apparently not. Even she is not immune to the foibles of experimentation. She’s one of the most famous people on the planet and she’s gushing to strangers about how handsome she felt in a gold chain. She has the freedom to be totally ridiculous about it all and I find that utterly intoxicating.

I’m not here to scold anybody for playing detective, or to arbitrate whether Lorde is “good” or “bad” representation. Who knows what terms or pronouns Lorde will even settle on? She would not be the first celebrity to go on hormones, nor would she be the first person to flirt with genderfuckery only to decide against it. Such conclusions are, despite her fame and transparency, a private matter.⁶

I believe, firmly, that every single person on the planet deserves the freedom to gender their body as they see fit. Common-sense observations like that “femininity is a prison,” or that “transness is borne from the pain of dysphoria” do not serve me like they once did. Being trans is fun. Being a woman is fun. And despite my earlier pessimistic framing, talking about being a trans woman is fun. I do it all the time! And I did it even more in the nascent stages of transition.

The fundamental, communal truth of transition is that this freedom is ridiculous. It is humiliating no matter who you are, no matter how much grass you touch, no matter whether or not you even wind up trans in the end. Everybody deserves to be stupid and do so in a totally un-special way if they want.

I came out publicly via an Instagram story. I had spent all my money on a wig that I did not know how to put on. You could see the edges even in such low resolution. I did not have any wig glue or a cap, so it barely stayed on my head. I manually ruffled it up because I thought messy hair was cuter. My nails were chipped but I did not have time to repaint them before dinner, and I was too excited to wait. I was really into floral galaxy prints which is insane because like, it was 2019. I posted the photo alongside the song “Glory Box” by Portishead. I was clocky and cringe and so fucking embarassing. It was the happiest I had ever been.

love ya lots,

helmet girl xx

1. Everybody HATES when I say all trans people are non-binary, but none of you bitches have proved me wrong!

2. folks we MUST find a better antonym for dysphoria

3. I know Jack Antonoff didn’t produce her new album, but that lead single could’ve fooled me!

4. I don’t care if the obsession with ovulation is a/b/o-fueled hysteria or an attempt to reclaim sexual agency in a time when reproductive rights are being stripped from anybody with a uterus. I literally get it. I approach the estrogen in my own body with a similar level of mysticism. What good is flesh if it can’t withstand a bit of psychosomatic awe?

5. lmaoooo

6. Those answers will come at the point where the material realities start to make more of a difference: Lorde of course has access to whatever surgeries or clothing she wants. So my analogy-that-is-mostly-a-joke does eventually break down for real.