On being mistaken for a lesbian and her affinity with LGBT people:
“I get mistaken for a lesbian all the time—but I guess I do have the most lesbian haircut of any of the girls in my field,” she laughs, referring to her signature blonde bowl cut. “And when I was growing up and I introduced myself to people I’d say, ‘Hi, my name is Robyn and I’m a girl,’ because in Sweden, Robyn is a boy’s name and I had such short hair. My handicrafts teacher thought I was a boy for three years. I tried to tell her I was a girl, but she’d just say, ‘My little boy wanted to be a girl when he was a kid, too.’ Finally my mom had to write her a note that said, ‘Please don’t assume that Robyn is a boy anymore because she’s a girl.’ Having that experience where I was confronted by people’s reactions to what I looked like or what I was supposed to look like made me identify with queerness. It still happens to me all the time, and a lot of the time it happens to me in America because even though what I consider butch is still very feminine in Europe, here you can shock people very easily just by looking a little queer.”
