This week, Ethel Cain's album Preacher's Daughter reached the no. 10 spot on the Billboard 200 chart — a huge milestone for the transgender artist. However, news outlets subsequently covered this achievement in a way that unfortunately disregards other artists in the LGBTQ+ community.
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2022's Preacher's Daughter — Cain's debut album — made its way into the top 10 of the Billboard 200 chart, which ranks the 200 best-selling albums in the U.S. market. As reported by Billboard, the three-year-old LP reached the no. 10 spot after a huge boost in sales following the album's first-ever vinyl release.
Specifically, Preacher's Daughter sold 37,000 physical copies, which pushed it to the no. 1 spot on the publication's Top Album Sales chart. That remarkable number of physical sales, along with 2,000 SEA (streaming equivalent album) units, added up to a grand total of 39,000 equivalent units. So, without a shadow of a doubt, Preacher's Daughter did enter the top 10 of the Billboard 200 — a historic moment for Cain's career, a striking case study given that the project was three years old, and an exciting landmark for musicians in the LGBTQ+ community charting on mainstream rankings.
Things got a little bit confusing when, on Sunday, April 13, an X post from @PopBase reported that Ethel Cain had become "the first openly transgender artist to earn a top 10 album on the Billboard 200" chart for the week of April 19.
It's worth noting that Billboard did not claim, at any point, that Cain was the "first openly transgender artist" to enter the top 10 of the Billboard 200 chart. Neither did other popular X/Twitter pages for music charts like @PopCrave and @chartdata. That claim can only be traced back to the post above shared by @PopBase.
As of this writing, the @PopBase post has 8.5 million views, 185,000 likes, and 15,000 reposts. And while the X post doesn't have any sources for that claim, or a Community Note further verifying that information, it's now been used as a source for dozens of articles from various publications.
Since Sunday, Cain has been called the first out trans artist, musician, singer — among other non-gendered/universal qualifiers — to enter the top 10 of the Billboard 200 by news outlets such as Vice, NME, Attitude, Dazed, PinkNews, GCN, The Music, Far Out Magazine, and UPROXX. Some outlets included the @PopBase post as a source. A few others made the claim but did not include any references.
In its report, NPR acknowledged that this is an exciting moment given that Preacher's Daughter is "not the typical stuff of the Billboard top 10." Gay Times also worded things differently, reporting that Cain was the "first openly trans woman" to enter the top 10 of the Billboard 200.
Given Kim Petras's notoriety as a trans woman in music and Grammy Award win for "Unholy" in 2023, most of those reports pointedly underscored that no, Petras's Feed the Beast did not enter the top 10. It peaked at no. 44 on the Billboard 200, and that is true.
However, while explaining that "Unholy" was a hit single that did not propel Feed the Beast to rank higher as an album, @PopBase, as well as the aforementioned news reports, did not mention or reference the other musician in "Unholy," Sam Smith, who first spoke about being nonbinary (albeit not yet sure of what they'd call their gender expression) during an interview with The Sunday Times from October 2017. Just a month later, in November 2017, Smith's The Thrill of It All peaked at no. 1 on the Billboard 200.
Sam Smith on the Billboard 200 chart.
Billboard
If one is to argue that Smith publicly discussed their gender expression but fell short from naming it appropriately, such logic still disregards the fact that Smith came out as nonbinary and updated pronouns to they/them in September 2019 (via BBC News). In November 2020 — a full year after disclosing that they are nonbinary — Smith's third studio album, Love Goes, peaked at no. 5 on the Billboard 200. In February 2023, Smith's fourth studio album, Gloria, peaked at no. 7 on the Billboard 200. The latter included the song "Unholy" as its lead single, which was used to compare Cain and Petras as trans women but entirely disregarded Smith as a nonbinary person.
The same can be said about Demi Lovato, who came out as nonbinary in May 2021 in an Instagram video with 5.2 million likes. In September 2022, Lovato released the Holy Fvck album, which peaked at no. 7 on the Billboard 200 chart. While the singer's statements about re-embracing she/her pronouns made headlines in 2022 and served as fodder for conservative pundits to keep dunking on nonbinary individuals, Lovato has clarified a few times what they really meant by that previous statement.
"I still feel very comfortable with they/them," the singer told SPIN. "I've made a few headlines by saying I'm accepting of the pronouns she/her. It's not that I'm changing anything about myself. I'm just accepting my femininity back. I felt like I had to reject it for a minute because that's how I was feeling at the time, and because I wanted to escape that feminine popstar role that I was playing. I had to get away from that."
As of this writing, Lovato's Instagram bio includes "they/them/she/her" pronouns.
Demi Lovato's Instagram bio as of April 17, 2025.
Instagram (@ddlovato)
Organizations such as the Human Rights Campaign, The Trevor Project, the LGBT Foundation all acknowledge that while some nonbinary people do not identify as trans, many do. Overall, the nonbinary gender identity is a literal category under the trans umbrella. Various publications (like Teen Vogue) and social media forums (like on Reddit) have reminded others that the white stripe at the center of the transgender flag is inclusive of people with undefined gender expressions — such as being nonbinary.
Transgender activist Monica Helms, who literally created the transgender flag, explained in a January 2008 post on her official blog that "the stripe in the middle is white, for those who are intersex, transitioning, or consider themselves having a neutral or undefined gender."
Mey Rude, a trans staff writer for Out who has been covering trans issues for over a decade, writes:
"Nonbinary people have always been a part of the trans community. The word 'transgender' simply means that you do not identify as the gender or sex you were assigned at birth. As no one is assigned 'nonbinary' at birth, anyone who identifies as nonbinary would, by definition, also be trans. Treating 'trans' and 'nonbinary' as two distinct categories only serves to divide the trans community, making it weaker and more fragmented."
Ethel Cain's sophomore album, Willoughby Tucker, I'll Always Love You, is scheduled for a release in August 2025.
