If you've ever looked at a little yellow fellow in dungarees and thought "there's something a bit queer going on here" — you were right all along.

Pierre Coffin, the French animator who created the Minions and voices every single one of them, has finally answered the questions fans have been asking for over a decade. And the answers are, frankly, the confirmation we've been waiting for.

Speaking to The Guardian on 2 July to promote the latest film, Coffin was asked whether we'll ever see a female Minion. His answer was refreshingly direct.

"A female Minion would be the beginning of the end," he said. "Universal would want to do it because they'd think it would please all the women out there. But I'm not convinced."

The studio apparently once considered an island of female Minions. It never went anywhere. "In my head, female Minions would look exactly the same as male ones. And in terms of how they breed: they don't. They just are."

Let's sit with that for a second. A species with no gender dimorphism, no reproductive drive, and relationships that exist purely for connection. Sound familiar to anyone?

Samantha Allen, managing editor of LGBTQ+ publication Them, picked up on exactly this in her analysis. As she put it: "It's entirely possible for Kevin to have a family without having sired children… it's entirely possible for them to form romantic connections without reproduction, as queer people know quite well."

The PinkNews piece exploring Coffin's comments made a sharp observation too — while Minions are clearly aware of human gender (they've happily thrown on dresses and wigs during their various heists), within their own society it just doesn't register. If there's no female or non-binary Minion to contrast against, the whole concept of "male" falls apart. Those he/him pronouns are basically just there for our convenience.

So there we are. Genderless, ageless, reproduction-free, and built entirely on chosen family. The Minions have been queer icons from the very first "banana" — we just needed Pierre Coffin to hand us the proof.