Shawn came out and revealed that he "can't express how happy" he felt when she came to him with the news. But to honour her, Shawn has left all pronouns out of his new album, Shawn Mendes: The Album, which has just been released.
"Yeah, it’s true," Shawn said when Entertainment Weekly asked if the decision was in fact for Teddy. "It doesn’t matter. Everything is up for your perspective. Let it be you. It really just doesn’t matter to me at all nowadays. I love how open everybody is and how open everything is. It just makes life more fun."
Shawn continued, "The whole album. I made the whole album with her. I met Teddy the night I cut ‘Stitches’ and we’ve had a really special connection ever since then. And for her to feel so comfortable with me and the other songwriters the night she came out… I can’t express how happy that made me."
Shawn remembers the look on Teddy's face when he used the correct pronoun without even thinking about it.
"It’s a very new thing, right? People transitioning. There are still a lot of people who don’t understand it, and to refer to somebody as a pronoun that you haven’t been referring to them as their entire life, your entire life, is very difficult," he explained. "But the thing that’s amazing is that I remember the day I said ‘she,’ and it wasn’t because I said it consciously, it was because I said it without thinking, basically just in conversation. I didn’t realise I did it, but she looked at me and she had the most incredible look in her eyes."
THIS is why we love Shawn so much.
"If every person in the world had one of their best friends look at them that way, and express that much joy in what it meant for her to be referred to as the pronoun she is, there would no longer be an argument [over trans rights]. People would just understand. It’s so powerful to have somebody you’re so close to go through something like that. It’s just f*cking beautiful, man. I really wish you could have seen it."
