A moment that changed me: I was mistaken for a man – and embraced my androgyny
It was 2018. I had a craving for an overpriced can of Red Stripe and wanted to dance to Britney Spears. So my friend and I decided to head to a gay bar. We began the night getting ready with a few drinks. I had an androgynous new haircut, which was making me a little nervous. After thinking about cutting it short for years, I’d finally done it – and I couldn’t quite get used to it. While I loved how it looked, I worried others wouldn’t agree. I wondered if having it done in the first place meant there was something wrong with me.
Still, putting existential worries aside, we spilled out of the flat and headed to the bar. The club usually had quite a mixed crowd but it turned out to be a night mostly for guys. Toxic was already playing. Perfect.
I got talking to a guy around my age who was very complimentary about my dancing and my haircut, which I appreciated. I assumed he thought I was my friend’s Fun Lesbian Sidekick (some gay guys have one, like a Pokémon that knows about astrology), and we started dancing together.
I’ve always considered gay men and lesbians dancing together to be one of the purest unions in the world: no sexuality crossover, just good wholesome fellowship. This time was different, though. First, he put his hands on my hips, which I thought was a little fresh. And then he ran his hands up my body to my chest, and said: “Oh!” And I said: “Oh!” Quickly, I realised two things: one, he had thought I was another cis gay boy. And two, I am terrible at picking up on flirting. We looked at each other, and then we burst out laughing.
We both found it hilarious and kind of cute – a silly, practically slapstick moment we’d shared before he left me for a leather daddy. I never saw him again, but that moment has stayed with me since.
His flirtation affected the way I saw my new appearance and made me feel more secure. Growing up, my penchant for menswear had been treated as a sort of ugly, mildly immoral habit, like how people felt about smoking after 2006. With hindsight, I’ll admit that exclusively wearing baseball caps and Tshirts with wolves or dragons on them wasn’t doing a lot for me, but neither was the vague sense of shame about the way I looked that I had internalised.
I felt like it was wrong. My parents were great, supportive people, but they couldn’t completely undo the messaging of a whole society. In the end I caved and, when I was 10, I showed up to school in a skirt. “Wow,” one of the boys said, “you’re actually pretty!” It was a sentence adults had said to me too, when I was forced into dresses for family events.
I figured I had some sort of moral responsibility to look how the people around me wanted me to look. I’ve always been drawn to androgynous and queer people – my best friend, Rachel, has always been androgynous presenting – but being around people who accepted themselves (and me) didn’t make it any easier to have confidence in my own look.
But, as you’ll know if you’ve ever half-heartedly attempted a goth phase, you can only try to fake it for so long. Eventually I gave up on trying to look the way I thought I was supposed to. When that confused boy in a club tepidly felt me up, I felt the shame melt away. Suddenly, the way I looked made sense to me.
Androgyny isn’t ugly. If anything, it makes you attractive to a more diverse market. There’s nothing immoral or bad about not conforming to gender roles in the way you’re told to – all the categories I’d been raised to see as rigid felt a little looser. In that moment, genders and sexualities were all confusingly blurred together, and actually, it made me feel pretty free.
Ruby Clyde’s debut YA novel,Jay’s Guide To Crushing It, is out now and published by Scholastic. Their double act, Shelf, will be touring theirkids’ comedy show and new standup hour with Impatient Productions in 2024.