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 MTV (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. While accepting an award for Favorite Female Personality in 2009, Rose impulsively blurted a question for her teenage tormenters: "Where are you now?!" The statement catapulted her to legitimate Australian sweetheart status, and won her a prestigious contract with Maybelline.

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. Throughout her life, she has oscillated between presenting as feminine and masculine (her “reincarnations,” she calls them), to varying degrees of happiness. In 2013, she cancelled a series of DJ gigs, citing “your ugly old friend Mr Depression.”
Last week, Rose released a very personal short film to tell that story, a gender-fluidity tribute called Break Free. 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 Phoebe Dahl, and along with a lot of very loved-up pics, Rose’s Instagram 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. People want to have meetings and I'm like, "Oh, I'm in Martha's Vineyard."
It's kind of a family vacation. Me and my fiancée [designer Phoebe Dahl] come from very different backgrounds: I come from a poor background, and she came from a wealthy, well-known family. 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.

You’re well known as a media personality in Australia, but now you live in Los Angeles. Introduce yourself for those who don’t know who you are already.

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. So I grew my hair, got [a hosting gig on] MTV looking like that, and probably spent six months doing MTV before I was like, "I need to go back to who I am." I cut my hair off and kind of got more in tune with who I was. 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.

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. It's like: "What?! What just happened?"

So, let's talk about the video.

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. I used to pray to God that I wouldn’t get breasts.

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. I shaved my head and just went "Fuck you" to everyone who thought I need to look a certain way. And I got bullied after that. I found myself in really dangerous situations, where, if a guy said something to me like, "What are you? You're a girl but you're trying to be a boy," or "Look at you, you're disgusting" … if I talked back, a few times I got hit by guys. They'd say, "I would never hit a girl, but you're not a girl."
Eventually I went, "That's it! I'll grow my hair again, and try and be a girl." Because I was pretty determined to get into entertainment, because I was bullied so much. I always said, "You watch! One day, I will do something, it will be great!" So I kind of did the more feminine thing again, did MTV, and after a little bit chopped everything off and am kind of back where it started.

So that's kind of the video. You can watch it both ways: you can watch it from the end to the beginning, and it's exactly the same as watching it from the start to the end, depending if you're a guy that feels like he’s in a woman's body or a woman that's in a guy's body.

Were you hesitant to do the video?

I'd been wanting to do [the film] for years and years, but I always had something else first, or I always think, God, is this going to create a whole lot of backlash? 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. It got to the director and he said: "Nah, she can't play the sexy girl. She looks like Justin Bieber." And that weekend, when I got told that I wasn't going to do that huge film, I thought: no, I'm going to do this movie. 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. It was a reference to Taxi, where Robert De Niro is like, "Are you talkin' to me?" And that's how I am if sometimes I'm feeling insecure and I know I'm going somewhere that this [androgynous style] is not the norm: you do have to psyche yourself up.
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 was just like [lowers voice slightly]: "Hey," you know? "Hey. How you doin'?" And I played with my voice and played with that character and tried to find how I was in that gender. 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.

He is Australian! And he's so beautiful. We worked together for Myer, which is like Macy's or Bloomingdales. We had change rooms next to each other, and I came out for a hair check and he came out for a makeup check, and we looked at each other, and I was like, "I love you!"

I just remember thinking, God, he is really an extraordinarily beautiful, like, creature. 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. I remember thinking, "Do I have that? Do I really need to go and put myself through that?" And I thought, No, I don't. 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! — made her understand, and lose a lot of resentment that she had for her ex.
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.

If you’re struggling with questions about your sexuality, The Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center is the largest provider of services to the LGBT community in the world. Visit www.lalgbtcenter.org