Former Coronation Street star Shobna Gulati has identified as non-binary, meaning that they do not refer to themselves as male or female.
Gulati who played Sunita Alahana in the soap between 2001 and 2013, has clamed that they were introduced to the term by a young colleague they were working with, and realised that it was their identity, having previously "never had a word for it".
"(I've) become more happy in myself, describing myself as a person", the actress said in a recent interview on the How To Be 60 With Kaye Adams podcast.
They continued: "What do people call it now? Non-binary, so I suppose that’s who I am, and I’ve never had a word for it, but I’ve learned from our younger generation what that might look like in terms of a word, because I know what it feels like in terms of being me".
"I didn’t have the words for that all the way through my life. I’ve never had the words for that, and I’ve never managed to sort of explain that".
"And I suppose my family, my immediate family, have not really thought about it", they added. "They’ve just sort of (thought) Shobna’s either extremely feminine or extremely masculine, because I was just accepted as the person who fell out of the tree, and equally, the person who put on all this makeup and did a dance".
Elsewhere, Kay Adams then asked Gulati how they "came to that realisation".
"I was just doing a show, and then the sound person, they said to me that they were non-binary, and I said, 'oh, what is that?’, the former Corrie star replied. "So then they explained, and I thought, ‘well, I feel like that’, but I didn’t ever have that vocabulary".
The actress added: "They said that they saw themselves as a person and that the gender, he or she, wasn’t important to who they are, and I thought that’s all I’ve ever thought".
"And I think now I’m free to say it out loud, I think people who have been around me have accepted who I am for a long time without any explanation, but I suppose when I’m asked now, I’ll say it".
