Gillian Anderson has finally settled on a word for her sexuality, telling The Australian she is "pan, as in pansexual, as in attracted to all genders." The comment, made while she promotes her new book More, caps off more than a decade of public reflection on the subject.
A Label Fourteen Years in the Making
Anderson's journey to this specific word has been public and unhurried. She first acknowledged relationships with women in a 2012 interview with Out magazine, though she stopped short of claiming any label at the time. In 2014 and 2015 interviews, she described herself as heterosexual while still acknowledging same-sex attraction, a contradiction that speaks to how much labels themselves can shift for a person over time. It wasn't until 2024, while promoting her book Want, that she first said the word out loud, telling The New Yorker: "Now, at the age of 55, I am thinking, Oh, am I pansexual? Am I bisexual?" This year, she landed on an answer.
In my younger years I was in relationships with women.
Gillian Anderson
Work That Kept Circling Back to Sex and Identity
It's hard to separate Anderson's personal openness from the roles that have shaped her career. Long before Dana Scully made her a household name on The X-Files, she was building a following among LGBTQ+ viewers who saw something knowing in her performances. That connection deepened when she played sex therapist Jean Milburn on Sex Education, a role she credits directly with giving her the language and comfort to talk publicly about her own desires, which in turn inspired both Want and More. Her latest film, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, keeps her in that same territory, casting her opposite Hannah Einbinder in a storyline built around sapphic intimacy.
MQ's Take
What stands out here isn't just the word Anderson chose, it's how long she let herself sit with the question before answering it. Plenty of public figures get pressured into locking down an identity the moment they hint at fluidity. Anderson took fourteen years, tried on different language in real time, and only claimed pansexual once it actually fit. That's a healthier model than the instant-labeling culture often expects, and it's worth normalizing for anyone still figuring out their own words.
She's also candid that this chapter may be closing. "Once this book is done and once this film is done, I feel like... it might be the end of this chapter of my life," she said. Whether or not that's true, her willingness to talk this openly, at this stage of a decades-long career, has already given a lot of people permission to stop rushing their own answers.
Sources: GCN, them., Pride, PinkNews, Out
Cover photo: SpiritedMichelle, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
