In a profile for The Independent, Ilana Glazer (of Broad City fame) discussed their newest movie Babes, their nonbinary identity, and how pregnancy helped them realize their gender identity.
After Glazer became pregnant, they immediately realized they had to make a movie about the experience. Not because it was dramatically traumatic, but because it was funny. “Real hard comedy is physical. It’s falls. It’s pukes. It’s slapstick,” they told The Independent, and so is pregnancy. Babes is their way of expressing this strange and unspoken form of comedy, as it follows Glazer as a woman who gets pregnant after a one-night stand and decides to keep the baby and her journey through pregnancy with her exhausted new-mother friend played by Michelle Buteau.
As well as opening their mind to the comedic potential of pregnancy, their pregnancy allowed them to realize their nonbinary identity. “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,” Glazer explains.
“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. There was always this element of comedy to it that was limiting my genuine personal experience,” they continued.
While Glazer never formally came out, they have spoken about their nonbinary identity before. In an interview with USA Today, Glazer discussed the combination of their masculine and feminine traits and said that pregnancy allowed them to experience these different sides in different, more affirming ways. It allowed them to experience their femininity positively, as a “powerful, open space,” and made them realize that their masculinity was something that they “didn’t need to make a joke out of,” as well as the fact that it was “something that (Glazer) thought was cool and hot and a part of (them).”
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