Eliot Sumner has famous parents. Maybe you've heard of Sting? (Okay, maybe your dad's heard of Sting.) And maybe you've caught that episode of Friends where Phoebe pretends to be the mother of Ross's child just so she can meet Mrs. Sting, aka Trudie Styler. But while that would be enough for someone to ride on quite happily for the rest of their lives, thank you, Eliot is carving their own path — both as a musician and as a person.
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In a new interview with Evening Standard, the artist opened up about their views on gender. Eliot would rather be defined as a “musician” because they "don’t believe in any specifications. I think forever I was trying to figure out maybe…what I am. But I don’t think anyone should feel pressured to have any kind of label or tag on them. We should treat everybody the same. Me, I don’t like to be put down to a specific thing. We’re all human beings," they said.
The musician also added that they never felt the need to come out to their family and friends because “they knew already. So I didn’t need to. I’ve never come out to anyone. My friends always knew and I always knew.”
It's also important to note that though Eliot says they don't believe in gender labels, the paper repeatedly refers to them as "she" and "her." Though it is entirely possible that Eliot never specified on their pronouns, told the reporter to make their own choice, or that the interviewer never asked, even small words like these reinforce the idea of a gender binary. The best thing to do would have been to ask — and then if Eliot didn't offer an answer, to note that in the story. (In the televised interview between Diane Sawyer and who was then Bruce Jenner, the Olympian noted a preference of "he" and "him" at the time. It was only when she unveiled herself as Caitlyn that she took on her feminized pronouns to correspond with her identity.) Because we are unsure of what Eliot uses, we have chosen to use "them" and "they."
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But Eliot doesn't want their gender identity to be what keeps people talking, as their second album, Information, is out next month — and that's their main focus at the moment. "If I’m proud of the music I am making, that’s all I can ask for. If I put it out into the world, it’s not up to me any more."
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