I had a feeling my partner was lying when he promised he’d find me just as attractive if I had a beard. It might be the time I was least happy to be right. My one saving grace was it was a long distance relationship so I didn’t have to see his face when he lied to me. After spending nearly an hour carefully painting on an absolute fantastic beard to go dancing, his only response to my photo was two words:
“Nice jacket!”
We broke up a few months later.
Dating as a nonbinary person is difficult. I try to be as forewarning as I can before anything gets started: I am not a woman. I am not your girlfriend. But inevitably something happens—doesn’t matter if my partner is a woman or a man—I do something not quite to the specification of my birth gender and suddenly my partner is uncomfortable. The me that I am doesn’t line up with the me in their head, and suddenly we have an issue.
Recently I was sick for a few days, stuck at home, and had a lot of time to watch a lot of movies. For some reason I gravitated to older stage show films like Singin’ in the Rain, Some Like it Hot, and the one that caught my attention the most, Victor/Victoria. Most of the draw of these films is the costumes and music sequences, but Victor/Victoria struck a very deep cord in me, much deeper than I thought it would.
Julie Andrews plays the titular Victor/Victoria as an out of work soprano in France struggling to find work. She befriends a gay lounge singer (Toddy) and the two come up with a scheme for Victoria to pretend to be a gay man named Victor who himself pretends to be a woman named Victoria on stage as a female impersonator. It’s a little convoluted, sure, but frankly delightful. Victoria becomes a stage sensation, ending every performance with a dramatic wig pull reveal of “it was a man all along!”
The complication of the story arises when a ‘businessman’ who works with the mob, King Marchand, attends the show and finds Victoria quite attractive, only to have the reveal of “surprise, it’s a man,” pull the rug out from under him. When he meets Victor later at a party he soothes his ego by saying Victor is clearly a woman and he couldn’t possibly find another man attractive. Victor very calmly drinks a glass of champagne saying “there’s a first time for everything.” This response doesn’t make King very happy. In fact, King says if Victor was a man, he’d beat him.
King becomes obsessed with Victor, ignoring the woman he’d brought with him in favor of sneaking into Victor’s apartment in order to watch him undress so that he might have proof that Victor isn’t a real man. It’s only once he has his proof that he’s able to give himself permission to be in love, even going as far to say “I don’t care if you’re a man” in the scene where the two finally get together.
However.
King’s insecurities of being perceived as gay and straight up homophobia do not go anywhere. He’s able to soothe himself by saying Victor’s not really a man, but he can’t go around telling everyone else because 1) it would ruin Victoria’s life, and 2) he would look absolutely insane. Not that that really stops him of course. As soon as the two of them are caught in bed together by his bodyguard, he rushes after to assure that it’s not what it looks like. However, before he can, his bodyguard turns around and says “If a guy like you’s got the guts to admit he’s gay, then so can I.” The look on King’s face is one of disgust and surprise. It’s the same face he had when ‘Victoria’ takes off the wig to reveal Victor. He’s been tricked.
This moment is quickly followed by a conversation where King tells Victoria she can “stop pretending,” meaning she can stop being Victor. To which she says, “I don’t think I want to.” She explains that yes, she’s a big star, but also…she likes it. She doesn’t want to give up. She shouldn’t have to simply because King says she’s “really a woman.”
The conversation that unfolds is one that is altogether too familiar to me. The two can’t seem to get on even footing, even when Victoria points out that the kind of “pretending” she does isn’t that dissimilar from the way King pretends to be not a gangster. He doesn’t understand her understanding of herself because it doesn’t fit his idea of what a woman should be. It’s not until his masculine bravado gets him with a gay boxing champion that he realizes gendered stereotypes aren’t facts. Only then does he actually try to commit to a relationship, his black eye still fresh. This man’s reliance on violence only doubles down when he ends a date night with Victor early to go pick a fight in a French dive bar, because dancing in public with another man made him far too uncomfortable. He cannot address his insecurities because to do so would change his relationship to gender, and he won’t do it.
Frankly, I don’t like these two as a couple. It doesn’t seem like they actually get along. In the comfort of their suites things are mostly fine, but as soon as they’re in public, things go awry. King takes Victor to a bare knuckle boxing club where Victor faints at the gruesome violence. They go to an opera together and King is uncomfortable when Victor openly weeps. Victor will not fit into King’s understanding of a man and so to him, Victor is only the facade of Victoria pretending to be a man.
Unfortunately, that’s how the movie eventually sees it too! The grand finale is Victoria wearing a dress and joining King in the audience where they watch Toddy wear Victoria’s gown in a comedic show of “look at the old man in a dress.” It’s so disappointing because this movie is so close to something so good, but unfortunately, due to the attitude of the era, it could only go so far.
As a nonbinary person, specifically one who presents rather femininely, this movie hits so many of my buttons. Partners, male or female, well meaning though they may be, often fail to understand my identity. They see me not as a person who is not bound by a gender, but as a person just playfully reaching outside of my gender. Maybe I’m not a woman, but I’m basically a woman. I’m Woman LiteTM. Woman+. Woman with some Man on the side. To a degree I get it—I present myself femininely more often than not. The makeup and fancy clothes I have are mostly feminine. My figure is feminine. But I as a conscious human being in this insane and beautiful world am so much more than my clothes or my makeup. I’ve certainly tried to present in that middle ground, but I shouldn’t have to achieve some kind of perfect androgyny in order to have my identity respected. The label of woman doesn’t fit me, and neither does the label of man. I don’t feel bound to any binary identity and instead would like to live a life as myself in the strange in between. I want to just be who I am and live it to the fullest. Identities like “Woman” and “Man” are just as created as any—these are just ones the society at large has loosely agreed upon so that we can better sort people into those preordained categories.
Gender is a performance and I am raiding the costume closet.
I think the real thesis of Victor/Victoria lives in that first meeting between King and Victor, where Victor says, “I think it’s as simple as you’re one kind of man [and] I’m another…One that doesn’t have to prove it to myself or anyone.” I wish the film hadn’t shied away from that with its ending. I wish it landed better on the idea that a person can comfortably live outside of preordained ideas of “gender,” ideally with a person who wasn’t ashamed to be perceived with them to support them.
It would certainly be better than a text simply saying “Nice Jacket!”

Sam is unsure what exact words describe them best: Lunatic has been used, Gothic Romantic is apt, and Big ol’ Nerd is reductive but true. Mostly they just like stories in whatever form stories can be found. Sam specializes in Frankenstein, running “The Uncanny Productions” on YouTube, but they also dabble with podcasts, singing, and theatre as well. They have a DVD collection that’s long outgrown its shelf, a coffin they use as a desk, and an unrelenting joy for things that are spooky, ridiculous, or magical.
“Gender is a performance and I am raiding the costume closet.” Hell yeah.