CORONATION Street star Shobna Gulati has revealed she is non-binary and has 'fallen in love'.
Shobna, 58, best known for playing Sunita Alahan on the ITV soap for 12 years, spoke openly about their gender identity for the first time.
The actor also shared that she is currently in love but remain open to dating men or women in the future.
In a conversation with Kaye Adams on the How to Be 60 podcast, she revealed she has 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 is someone who does not exclusively identify as male or female.
Their gender identity may be fluid, or she may feel a mix of both genders or neither.
On Instagram, Shobna lists their preferred pronouns as “she/they”.
She continued in the interview: “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 shared that her understanding of being non-binary became clearer after a conversation with a sound engineer while working on a project together.
She added: “The sound person said to me that they were non-binary, and I said: ‘What is that?’ So, then she 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.”
Shobna, who first gained widespread recognition in the late 1990s for her role as Anita in Dinnerladies, reflected on the pressure she faced to appear more traditionally feminine while growing up.
She 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 first arrived on the cobbles in 2001, playing Sunita, who eventually married Dev Alahan.
In her personal life, she married architect Anshu Srivastava in a Hindu ceremony at the age of 23.
Their marriage lasted four years, and she became a single parent to son Akshay, now 30.
Shobna said balancing single parenthood with a high-profile acting career came at a cost.
She told Kaye: "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, concluding: "I think I’ve loved this person all my life." However, she remains open to dating anyone, regardless of gender.
"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."
