The 58-year-old star, who is well-known for playing Sunita Alahan on the ITV soap, recently spoke out about their gender identity and declared they have always felt this way.
Chatting with Kaye Adams on the ‘How To Be 60’ podcast, the actor said: “I’ve become more happy describing myself as a person. What do people call it now? Non-binary. So, I suppose that’s who I am.
“I’ve never had a word for it, but I’ve learnt 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.”
According to The Daily Star, they added: “All the way through my life, I’ve never had the words for that, and I’ve never managed to explain that. I suppose my immediate family have not really thought about it. They’ve just thought: ‘Shobna is either extremely feminine or extremely masculine.’
“Because I was just accepted as a person who fell out of the tree and equally the person who put on all this makeup and did a dance.”
Coronation Street’s Shobna Gulati comes out as non-binary
On Instagram, the actor who starred in Coronation Street for 12 years, has listed their pronouns as ‘she/they’.
The star rose to fame in the 1990s for their role as Anita in Dinnerladies before later making big splashes on the ITV soap.
They said they began to understand being non-binary better after chatting with a sound engineer during a project.
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They said: “The sound person said to me that they were non-binary, and I said: ‘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 – the he or the 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 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.”
