Actor Ilana Glazer says her pregnancy helped her embrace being nonbinary

Broad City co-creator and star Ilana Glazer has opened up about how being pregnant helped her embrace being nonbinary.

The queer comedian, actor, and activist told the U.K. outlet The Independent that “being pregnant on paper was the most female thing I could ever do, but it actually highlighted both the masculine and feminine inside of me.”

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Glazer, who uses they/she pronouns, and husband David Rooklin, a computational biologist, welcomed their first child in July 2021.

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“For so long, my masculinity felt like something I had to hide or make a joke of, and my femininity was something that felt like drag,” Glazer told The Independent. “There was always this element of comedy to it that was limiting my genuine personal experience. Then this gift of being pregnant made space for me to be real with myself.”

The four-time Emmy nominee described this new perspective on her gender identity as “a point in the process of a long journey of self-actualization.”

“I’m moving through the world in a way that’s truer,” they said.

Glazer has spoken openly about her queerness and gender identity going back to at least 2020. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter In Studio, she explained how both she and Broad City co-creator and co-star Abbi Jacobson came to understand their queerness better through working on the Comedy Central series.

“We’ve both experienced this unique, privileged version of self-actualization, where we’ve gotten to work it out on the show and then reflect and be like, ‘Damn, I wasn’t joking. That was me,’” Glazer said. “So, I’ve learned a lot from Broad City, including my own queerness and identity politics from reviews and reading people’s pieces.”

She also credited the LGBTQ+ community, and particularly trans people of color, with furthering the conversation around gender norms. “They paved the way for everyone else who maybe appears like they fit in more,” she said. “They paved the way for everyone else to feel more fluid within themselves.”

While Glazer still described herself as cisgender in that 2020 conversation, she has previously talked about being nonbinary.

“That’s what feels true to how I feel in my body, which is actually something I discovered while I was pregnant,” they told USA Today in late May. “For the first time, my femininity didn’t feel like drag or a joke or a role, but a powerful, open space. And my masculinity was also something I didn’t need to make a joke out of. It was something that I thought was cool and hot and a part of me. That was an interesting aspect of being a queer, birthing person.”

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