It takes one heck of a woman to steal the show at the annual GQ Men of the Year awards, but then Ruby Rose is no ordinary woman. The model-cum-actress humbly took home the infamously sexy publication’s gong for Woman of the Year in Sydney on Tuesday night.
Sporting a Zuhair Murad black lace jumpsuit accessorized by piercing green eyes and braided hair, Ruby Rose looked hot as always as she walked the red carpet with mum Katia Langenheim and fiancé Phoebe Dahl.
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The award comes somewhat ironically, Rose revealing to Elle earlier this year that she identifies as neither a woman or a man. “Gender fluidity is not really feeling like you’re at one end of the spectrum or the other,” she said. “For the most part, I definitely don’t identify as any gender.”
Ruby Rose is a timely spokesperson for a new(ish) school of thought on sexuality and what it means to be gender fluid. “I want everybody to be celebrated and true and to be able to be honest with themselves,” she said. Further commenting that it feels strange, arriving from a conservative country such as the U.S. where it is now legal everywhere, that Australia still lacks marriage equality.
Ruby’s personal journey through what was for her, a confusing maze of gender identity, has not been an easy one. “For a long time, I wished I’d been born a boy,” she tells U.S Cosmo. “I didn’t know there were options like gender neutral or gender fluid … I later realized you could be a girl and dress like a guy … As soon as I met [my fiancée] Phoebe, I knew. She’s everything that I would want in somebody.”
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Prior to announcing her engagement to Phoebe Dahl, granddaughter to Roald, Rose was for all intents and purposes, a lesbian. After the July release of Break Free however, her short film about gender roles, she began to describe herself as gender fluid and is now the unassuming hero of others struggling with sexuality.
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In an interview earlier this year, says if she had to choose, she’d be a guy, but she’s lucky enough to have accepted her body. “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.”
Following her success as a season regular on Orange Is The New Black in the U.S., and her MTV Europe Music Awards hosting gig last month, Ruby Rose’s stardom has skyrocketed overseas. But the 29-year-old is not sure how to feel about Australia’s somewhat conditional embrace, now that she’s ‘made it’ in America.
“I have mixed feelings about that, because I really think that people underestimate you,” she said at the GQ Awards on Tuesday night.
Image Credit: GQ Australia
“There are so many talented people who worked really hard within Australia, they work their butt off and they don’t get the credit that they deserve,” she said. “Because we wait as a country, we wait for them to make it big overseas and I don’t necessarily agree with that.”
In hindsight, Rose says she made the right choice to leave her island home when she did. “I think people were sick of me and I think that I had done everything in Australia that I could do.” She speaks pensively of her professional career here, suggesting that perhaps she overdid it, accepting every job until she felt like we all hated her. “My relationship when I left was like ‘oh my god, they hate me’.”
“I feel the people I’m most excited to see [while I’m here] are the ones that were always rooting for me, they always thought that I was going to be something or do something I never thought I was capable of.”
Despite the fact that she once felt like she “had to leave” Australia, Rose has admitted she’s been left overwhelmed by the support she’s received from her Australian fans and is enjoying the ride. “I love people loving me here again.”