Liv Hewson can’t remember a time before feeling “an inarticulate distress, a nebulous discomfort” in their body that they didn’t have words for and didn’t quite understand. Thus the Yellowjackets star, who is nonbinary, couldn’t tell anyone about it. How to begin describing gender dysphoria without a language for it in the mainstream? Nonbinary people are hardly a recent reality, but only in the last decade or so have public figures started identifying as such. Hewson tells Teen Vogue, “There was nothing to say.”
While growing up in Australia, Hewson tried to untangle their feeling without tools, but it “ate at” them. When puberty arrived with its bodily changes, they developed a “really nasty” case of anorexia. Through recovery, Hewson realized the eating disorder was in part a result of gender dysphoria — “a discomfort with and alienation from my body, and a need to control it or be in charge of it or shape it.” At that same time, around age 16, Hewson began learning about feminism and queer history, “reaching for information and community wherever I could find it.” They started to feel things click into place.
“I came across the term ‘nonbinary’ for the first time, and it was just immediate,” Hewson recalls. Oh, that's 100% what my deal is, they thought. That explains everything. “But very quickly on the heels of that was, I can't do anything with this. It's 2012, and I'm 16." They continue, "It was this beautiful, celebratory thing of that's me. I know exactly who I am, I've fixed it. But I couldn't tell anyone because, at the time, it really felt impossible.”
Hewson assumed they would always be closeted in their career, though they would tell friends and maybe family. “It was a simultaneous opening and closing of a door.”
Incomprehensible adolescent pain of another sort is a gauntlet for Hewson’s character on Yellowjackets, a show that is, at its core, about the trauma of being a teenager, and how we carry that trauma into adulthood. The Showtime series takes the flagrant gore and teen snideness of the 2009 film Jennifer’s Body — an important touchstone for Karyn Kusama, who directed that film and multiple episodes of Yellowjackets — and turbocharges it via Twin Peaks and Lost.
In 1996, a New Jersey high school girls’ soccer team flies to Washington state to compete at nationals, but they crash-land in the Canadian mountains. Nineteen months later, only some members of the team are found. Spoiler alert (but not really, because they tell you in the pilot): survival cannibalism. Twenty-five years later, we follow the aged-up survivors as they struggle to distinguish enduring mental health issues after what they went through from the potentially supernatural ideology they used to make sense of it while in the wild.
The characters on Yellowjackets make decisions that defy ethics, and are forced into circumstances in season two that push them further to the edge. In the show's pilot episode, before Hewson was brought on for the rest of the series, the actor introduces us to goalie Van Palmer, the dry-witted class clown, quick with a grin. Throughout season one, over and over, Van nearly dies by grossly violent means, but survives. Each time, a sliver of Van’s humor is removed, replaced by a steely determination to stay alive at any cost.
After the second season’s conclusion, online commenters found Hewson’s portrayal so chilling, they wondered whether Van was taking a villainous turn. But Van’s resilience seems more like the only coping method she knows: “I’m glad I’m alive, just like you are, and I don’t think anyone should be ashamed of that, ever,” Van tells another survivor, in a scene where Hewson’s performance deeply unsettled viewers. But how do you survive the unsurvivable without losing parts of yourself? What does it serve to call traumatized children “evil?”
These are questions that Hewson and I, as nonbinary people, find endlessly relevant in our political moment. American politics are hyper-focused on LGBTQ+ children, especially trans children, to the point of attempting to ban their existence. This ideological and legislative push is cannily framed as “in defense of children,” but in reality it seeks to punish deviations from a cisgender, white, heterosexual norm — consequently punishing anyone, including and especially children, who deviate.
During our childhoods, we never heard about transness or gender-affirming care as anything other than a punchline; now we’re living in a time when a 2024 presidential candidate compared puberty blockers to chemical castration before deriding top surgery on a debate stage. Conservatives talk about trans children as a historical anomaly, a failure of modern society, a social contagion, an impossibility; but people like Hewson have already lived otherwise.
If you overcome the erasure of your humanity and existence to realize yourself anyway, other barriers can seem small in comparison. Hewson, during the last seven or so years of a successful career, from Netflix’s Santa Clarita Diet to their compulsively watchable turn as Van, realized the closet didn’t have enough room for them and what they wanted to accomplish. The space for them — and those like them — was out and proud in the world. It’s been clarifying, they say.
“I'm just so done feeling any shame or apology about it,” Hewson says. “This is true about me, so why would I spend any time hiding or prevaricating around that or feeling shame and grief about it? This is who I am, and that's actually wonderful. Not only is it not a problem, it's a good thing, and it deserves space. I deserve to be in the world as much as anybody else; so do all nonbinary and trans people.”
Below, Hewson talks with Teen Vogue about what brought them here and where we’re all headed.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
Teen Vogue: It seems a lot of media coverage is like, “Oh, my God, nonbinary people, this thing that came into existence six or seven years ago, fully formed!”
Liv Hewson: I literally remember that not being true. In 2012, I told my friends to start using they/them pronouns for me, and it's not like I'm the only person who did that. The information that I was reading then came from somewhere. The way that nonbinary people are discussed, as we enter mainstream awareness, is completely ahistorical. That's a shame in so many ways. It's a disconnect to our history, and it's used as justification to dismiss us. It's so annoying.
TV: I don't know if you saw this, but it was reported that Demi Lovato started using she/her at some point in the last year after using they/them for a while, and they said, “It was absolutely exhausting. I just got tired.” A bunch of the responses to that were, like, “That’s how you know nonbinary people are fake!”
LH: That's in such bad faith. What [Lovato’s] describing is not a decision that's been made flippantly; it’s “I had to start doing something different because this was so painful.” That's real and significant and definitely worth discussing, but people don't want to engage with the pain.
So often what I see is a desire to not have to think about it: “I don't want to have to think about gender or anyone else's pronouns.” Why is thinking about it uncomfortable? Why is thinking about it bad? What is the resistance to thinking about it? Why don't you want to? Why is it so scary?
I think about it all the time. I have spent the last decade of my life thinking about it — longer than that, since before I knew what “it” was, and I'm okay, so maybe you should. Maybe it's a net positive for everybody to think about it a little bit.
TV: I want to ask you about your top surgery. Our culture is petrified of assigned female at birth people getting top surgery; conservatives and TERFs say things like, “Girls are mutilating their bodies” or “What if they regret it?”
LH: It's really misogynistic: “These girls couldn't possibly make this decision correctly and will need to be stopped from doing terrible things to their bodies.”
When people talk about gender-affirming surgery using words like “mutilation,” that's not very nice. Is that how you think about people who've had surgery for other things? It's a disgust reaction, and I do not take disgust into account as a legitimate point of discourse. I don't have to entertain it and I'm not going to. It's a waste of everybody's time, it's knee-jerk, it's not grounded in reality, and it's not useful.
And it's a squeamishness about medical intervention. I think the idea of making legislative or cultural decisions in and around [that] is laughable. Your squeamishness is not what the world turns on; it doesn't matter.
One time somebody left a comment under a picture of me where you could see the edges of my top surgery scars, saying something along the lines of, “This is like women cutting their fingers off.” At first that really disturbed me. I was like, “Man, that is just a horrible thing to say.” And then it suddenly struck me as a little bit funny. I was just like, "And are the women cutting their fingers off in the room with —
TV: — us right now?"
LH: Exactly. I am not going to entertain anybody's disgust over my body. It's my body, it’s healthy and strong and beautiful, and there’s nothing wrong with it. Point blank.
In terms of “What if you feel regret?”: Is the idea that nobody ever feel regret about anything? Aside from the fact that we have complete statistical information about regret rates of gender- affirming surgery and this is an absolute nonstarter, what? Are you also going to legislate against people getting tattoos? It's just control: “I want you to make decisions based on my level of comfort with your existence.” That is completely irrational.
TV: Have there been moments of gender euphoria for you since your top surgery?
LH: I cannot tell you the complete, fundamental shift that I have felt in the year since having surgery. I knew that I wanted top surgery for a decade; it's the longest I've ever thought about doing anything. The place where I went, I had that clinic's website open on my laptop for five years. It was this impossible mountain: I want that, but I'm never gonna get it. No one's gonna let me, blah, blah, blah. To have that be in the past now...
I stand differently, I walk differently, I carry myself differently. It feels different in my body than it ever has. I have just never been happier. I've never been more centered. I've never felt more stable and present and alive. It's the best thing I've ever done for myself. It’s taught me a lot.
The recovery process taught me about rest, accepting help, and caring for my body as something connected to me rather than separate from me, that I’m in opposition to: This is mine and I want to take care of it. I feel good in it and good about it.
Part of cis people's fear around gender-affirming surgery is the fear of surgery at all — “Oh, my God, but that's painful and scary!” My reaction to that is, “No, no, you misunderstood. It was painful before. Your worry has kicked in at the wrong time. The right time to be concerned was about the pain I was in before this. I'm great now." Everybody else's concern for me has been on a delay. There's no need to be concerned anymore. That's so freeing.
TV: Earlier this month, nonbinary actors J. Harrison Ghee and Alex Newell both won at the Tony Awards. A few months ago, you announced your refusal to participate in Emmy nominations because of the gender-specific categories.
LH: To see and hear nonbinary people on stages like that, talking about themselves, loudly and explicitly and proudly, that's incredible. I love it and I'm all about it.
My issue is so structural, I don't think it would be honest for me to attempt to work within this system. Here's what I thought about: Best-case scenario, career-wise, I, hypothetically, would be nominated for an Emmy, which would be an honor. Then the best-case scenario is that I would, hypothetically, win. And then I would go home with a trophy that says “actress” on it. I don't want that.
Even if that happens, even if I were able to be on a stage like that and talk about being nonbinary with the trophy in my hand, hypothetically, the dynamic at play is still that there's a category for men and a category for women. You're putting me in the woman one, giving me the best woman award, then I get onstage and thank you. I'm not going to do that.
The bewilderment I have is that acting is the only category that's separated by sex. We take for granted that this is how the world should work, but gender-neutral awards exist in every category but this one. There are multiple ceremonies where they don't exist at all, so it's absolutely possible. Isn't it a little bizarre that there's one job that's about men and women and the rest of them aren't?
TV: Let’s talk about Van. In the pilot, you pull a lock of hair over your lip as a fake mustache, and I’ve read you talking about something related to that from your high school theater experiences.
LH: Oh, my God, my friends and I, in high school, would perform sketches together — basically in drag — drawing facial hair on each other with eyeliner. There's always been a theatrical, flamboyant masculinity that's built into the way I do my job and how I live my life, frankly.
TV: How does that come across with Van?
LH: She's gay, she's a jock, she's funny, and she's kind. Pretty immediately I felt a physical comfortability playing her. I was just a kid in a sandbox. There are tiny things — the mustache was a really good example — when I just felt real freedom with her. Even back when I didn't have a lot of information to go on about who this person was, it was like, “No, I know who she is, and I'm going to have a lot of fun here.” Little touches like that were really important to me, to bring to her and to the show, that kind of physical, queer sensibility.
TV: That's something you and Jasmin Savoy Brown, who plays Van’s love interest, Taissa, talk about intentionally and often.
LH: Jasmin and I just straightaway looked at each other, looked out into the world, and we were like, “This is for gay people! That is who we're doing this for!” I really hope people know that, because in my work writ large, I really mean it. That's on purpose. To see people respond to it is the best. That's what I want.
TV: On the very active Yellowjackets subreddit, there’s been a lot of criticism of decisions the younger girls make in the wilderness, particularly for Van.
LH: It’s a need that people feel to explain away the complex or the uncomfortable or painful. Perhaps it's an invitation to empathy? “Why is this person making the decisions they're making?” As opposed to, “This person is making the decisions they're making because they're crazy!”
It's confronting to stare at human misery or rage, people having to make untenable, horrible choices in a situation they're trapped in. It's depressing to have to sit and stay there, but it's important too, because that's where you learn things.
It's a big, overarching thing for me in my life that I think about all the time. There’s a difference between discomfort and danger. For a lot of people, discomfort registers as unsafe, and it's not. Discomfort's good. It teaches you a lot. Provided you're not in danger, discomfort's amazing. It's super important to be able to sit in discomfort, to watch it and learn from it and feel it. To run away from it is a tensing up that locks you inside yourself, away from other people and the world around you.
TV: So, to fans who think Van is the “big bad” now…?
LH: Van, who's been minding her business in Ohio for 25 years? Give me a break. If somebody's “evil,” you don't have to think about what their motivations are.
You're invited to engage with these characters as human beings insofar as you want to or decide to, but to see people try and react to Yellowjackets as moral absolutism? I'm not sure what show you're watching. Everyone's gonna do terrible things on the “doing terrible things to survive” show!
TV: Finally, in honor of Pride month and whatever: What’s giving you hope right now?
LH: I feel a matter-of-factness within myself that is new to me, within the last couple years. In coming into the sense of stability, peace, and straightforwardness I feel now, everything's very simple. I am who I am. Those like me are the way that we are. We're alive now. We're in the world right now, we're not going anywhere, and you're simply going to have to deal with that. I do not feel any shame or sadness or guilt or fear about the person I am. I don't feel any timidity or uncertainty about my right to exist in the world.
At the moment, I get the most hope from the complete, fierce determination I have to insist on the right of me and others like me to be here — not only be here, but be healthy, safe, happy, successful, actualized, and participating; reaching for every joy that this life has to offer, because we deserve it.
That is an absolute nonnegotiable for me. It is concrete. How concrete that feeling is, that's where my hope comes from. I'm hopeful because the future is gonna be good, because we're gonna make sure that it's good, even through the bits that are hostile, complex, or difficult. We're gonna take care of each other, and we're gonna move through the world like we have a right to be here, because we do.
Photo Credits
Photographer: JJ Geiger
Photo Assistant: Jack Junk
Hair Stylist: Sheridan Ward
Makeup Artist: Meeks Silva
Stylist: Anna Schilling
Art & Design Director: Emily Zirimis
Production: Hyperion LA
Designer: Liz Coulbourn
Senior Fashion Editor: Tchesmeni Leonard
Fashion Editor: Kat Thomas
Assistant Fashion Editor: Tascha Berkowitz
Editorial Credits
Editor-in-Chief: Versha Sharma
Executive Editor: Dani Kwateng
Politics Director: Allegra Kirkland
Interim Features Director: Alyssa Hardy
Senior Culture Editor: P. Claire Dodson
Copy Editor: Dawn Rebecky
Audience Development Director: Chantal Waldholz
Senior Social Media Manager: Honestine Fraser
Social Media Manager: Jillian Selzer
Writer: Lexi McMenamin
Stay up-to-date with the politics team. Sign up for the Teen Vogue Take
