"So, I suppose that’s who I am."
Shobna Gulati has revealed they are non-binary and have recently fallen in love.
The 58-year-old actor, best known for playing Sunita Alahan on Coronation Street, spoke about their gender identity for the first time on the How to Be 60 podcast.
They said they have always felt this way but only recently found the right term to describe their identity.
Shobna 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.”
A non-binary person does not exclusively identify as male or female. Their gender identity may be fluid, or they may feel a mix of both genders or neither.
Shobna lists their pronouns as “she/they” on Instagram.
Shobna 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.”
Shobna Gulati credited a conversation with a sound engineer as a turning point in understanding their identity.
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.”
Reflecting on societal pressures to appear more traditionally feminine while growing up, Shobna Gulati explained:
“My father would say things like: ‘Oh, you haven’t dressed up today’, or ‘You haven’t washed your hair’, or ‘Your hair looks limp, you can’t go out like that.’ I’d say: ‘Why not?’
“He’d make comments along the way… ‘I walk like a boy.’
“Lots of people tell me I walk like a boy, and I do. I just don’t know quite where it all comes from; it’s just who I am, and I’m happy in that now.”
Shobna was married to architect Anshu Srivastava for four years, and they became a single parent to their son, Akshay, now aged 30.
They said balancing parenthood with acting came at a cost.
Shobna told podcast host Kaye Adams:
“I did have relationships, but then they were very public.”
“It was sad for me because I didn’t feel that I got enough time to have a relationship and to have more children and have a private life because it was so un-private and so exposed.
“But it’s done now, and I haven’t had any more children. I didn’t get that opportunity, which sometimes I feel sad about, or I didn’t meet the right people because of everything that was out there.”
Now, Shobna has found love again, saying: “I think I’ve loved this person all my life.”
However, they remain open to dating men or women in the future.
“That is also something I’m looking at – what that means to me. So yes, I would go for a person absolutely, regardless of their gender.”
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