Everybody has a crush on Ruby Rose. Her heart-shaped jaw and piercing eyes first caught the attention of modeling agents when she was a child, and by her teens she was known as the cool tattooed girl on Australian her audition process required her to pound shots of beer and make out with strangers in the street. And being gay was not much of a problem for mainstream television. But being a beautiful, down-to-earth lesbian is far less challenging to the status quo than say, secretly wishing you were a boy. These are feelings Ruby has had since she was five or six. Rose was the last person to predict the resonance that the video would have: at the time of writing, it has been watched almost 5 million times, and has gained Rose 200,000 new Facebook fans. The song, a previously unreleased, unmixed track by Butterfly Boucher, is being prepared for iTunes. It's a boon for Rose, who now lives in Los Angeles, where she is a relative unknown. She is deliriously in love with her fiancee, designer , and along with a lot of very loved-up pics, shows she has begun to settle into a very beautiful, streetwise kind of drag with her tattoo sleeves and full lips, she is sometimes mistaken for Justin Bieber. We spoke with Rose about her new life. Where am I speaking to you? I'm actually in Martha's Vineyard. I'm on a three-day holiday. Terrible timing, because the video's just gone so viral. So there's like a yacht, country-club thing, and we go there every day. It's just so funny to me, because I'm covered in tattoos, and the rest of the place is just so Wasp-y, wearing Polo shirts. I started off as an Australian model. I had so many knockbacks, having short hair and being rejected, and I always thought: I'm never gonna get to where I want to get unless I start looking more feminine. And then because I got to be who I was, people were inspired by it. I got to host a radio show, I got a clothing range, I was the face of fashion week, I got to do a whole television show with kids. Ruby Rose and her new haircut. Via Instagram I put this video out that I really intended to be therapeutic for myself and was intended to be viewed by, you know, the hundred-or-so-thousand people that are on my Facebook. Instead it's been viewed by 5 million people. I spent five years getting my 100,000 fans, and then in two days, I've got 300,000. So, obviously it's very autobiographical. As a little kid, I was convinced that I was a guy. I used to bind with ACE bandages, which is really, really bad for you. I was like, five or six? I was really young. I didn't have anything there to bind! I used to sleep on my chest because I thought it would stop me from getting boobs. Then in my teens, I tried to be quite feminine. My mum was pushing me to do some modeling — everyone said I was a very pretty girl. And then one day it just got too much. And I got bullied after that. I'll grow my hair again, and try and be a girl. One day, I will do something, it will be great! So that's kind of the video. Were you hesitant to do the video? Are people just going to think that this is too much information? Or are they going to think it's tacky or that it's a publicity stunt? Then I recently almost got a part in this really big franchise, an American film. She looks like Justin Bieber. I'm going to do my own movie. Who was that aggressive character you were playing? That character is not me trying to simplify what a gender is for a guy—I don't think that all men are aggressive. When I was 15 and I chopped all my hair off, before I went to school that morning, I did a really similar thing. I'm amping myself up to this new person, this new reincarnation. That's interesting that you and Andrej Pejić are both becoming known as genderqueer personalities, and he's Australian too. And he's so beautiful. We worked together for Myer, which is like Macy's or Bloomingdales. Like, he's not a boy, he's not a girl, he's just a being, with a beautiful soul. And you've said you're neither one gender nor the other, too. I feel like I'm neither, yeah. Well, if I had to choose it would be a boy, a guy. I feel like I'm a boy, but I don't feel like I should've been born with different parts of my body or anything like that. I feel like it's just all in how I dress and how I talk and how I look and feel, and that makes me happy. So you think you'll stay anatomically female? Yeah, I think I'm lucky enough to have accepted my body. I've done a lot of therapy. I have a lot of trans friends, and I've seen them go through the surgeries. I saw the desperation that they had. Do I really need to go and put myself through that? I really sit in a more neutral place, which I'm grateful for as well. I really admire the people that do it, and I think that they're amazing. I just wish that there was more support for them. Because it's an elective surgery it costs an arm and a leg — I did a lot of research into it. It's not a priority, but it should be. It's such a huge cause of suicide, a huge cause of self-harm. I think at this stage I will stay a woman but … who knows. I'm so comfortable right now I feel wonderful about it, but I also fluctuate a lot. What's been the most memorable response to the video? I had one girl that brought me to tears. She had broken English because she was from Austria. She was actually dating a girl that was transforming into a boy. She basically said to me that she was a lesbian in a lesbian relationship, and then because of her partner's choices, she was a lesbian in a straight relationship. And she didn't understand it: she hated it. She thought it was selfish. He was going through a lot of pain and suffering, treating her differently—probably a lot to do with being on testosterone. She said that my video really helped her realize what he was going through, and in the shortest amount of time — five minutes! He's got a girlfriend now, and she's got a girlfriend, but she knew that he watched the video as well, and she said she knew that he would've been thinking about her.
