Former Coronation Street star Shobna Gulati has said they are non-binary, meaning they do not identify as male or female, explaining they had previously "never had a word for it".
The 58-year-old actress, who played Sunita Alahan on the soap between 2001 and 2013, explained on the How To Be 60 With Kaye Adams podcast that they had been introduced to the term by a young person they were working with and realised it was their identity.
Gulati said: "(I've) become more happy in myself, describing myself as a person.
"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’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."
Former Loose Women presenter Adams asked Gulati how they "came to that realisation".
They replied: "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?’.
"So then they explained, and I thought, ‘well, I feel like that’, but I didn’t ever have that vocabulary.
"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."
Source: Press Association
