#bc it felt kinda out of nowhere? after chapter 9 where he impersonates Mario I guess would be the first hint at it

[starswallowingsea]

Transphobia in Cable Girls

Or: How not to write a trans character and story. 

Source: I’m a trans man and this was just BAD. 

Now before we really get into this, I will put a disclaimer here that no, I don’t think Cable Girls is the worst show ever and it’s cancelled or whatever. I love the show to bits and historical telenovelas are one of my favorite things to watch. I will say though, that the idea for this post has been sitting in my mind for a while, pretty much since I caught up to the Final Season Part 1. 

So with that out of the way, let’s get going. The character I am talking about is Oscar Ruiz (and for anyone not caught up to I think season 2 episode 3, his dead name is Sarah Millan). 

CWs: transphobia (obviously), violence, torture, war, mentions of nudity, sexual harassment, abuse mentions, murder, blackmail, general queerphobia, and spoilers for basically the whole show 

Oscar was originally presented to us as a sapphic woman attending a feminism presentation where he meets Carlota, and this in and of itself is fine, as I considered myself both a lesbian and a bisexual woman before I realized I was trans and I know other trans men and trans masc people have similar experiences. 

However, his character is outed as trans after his partner, Carlota, gets suspicious of him and goes through his things and eventually follows him to a hotel that he checked into under his chosen name and outing him as trans. Eventually this fact gets out to the other girls who accept Oscar for who he is and use his chosen name when they can. This is great! I was super excited when I watched this episode because I’m trans and I never see trans people in historical shows! But everything just goes downhill after that though. 

Oscar willingly enters himself into a place to help what today would be people under the LGBTQ umbrella, and he thought they would help him transition (I believe synthetic hormones were just starting to become a thing used to help cis people with medical problems, but were also sometimes used for trans people who could get their hands on it). Instead, he is forcibly TORTURED to make him stop being trans. We also see into other cells of queer and trans people who are just absolutely lifeless. Oscar is not allowed to call for help and ends up having to wait for his cis friends to get him out after a desperate call when he is alone in the main office. Later it’s revealed that one of the nurses there is also a trans man who was the son of the person who ran it and his punishment was to watch as other trans and queer people were tortured in this way. 

It’s also worth mentioning that Carlota convinced him to not go to visit a trans commune in Berlin and instead start a women’s activism movement in Spain. And in Season 3 his wishes for the movement aren’t respected at all and he ends up almost dying while handcuffed to a bomb with Carlota. 

When Carlota runs for office in season 4, she is bribed to drop out of the race by her opponent (who is a huge shitstain for the record). He ends up dead in a hotel after blackmailing Carlota with photos of Oscar in casual dress, revealing that he is, in fact, not a cis man. Carlota ends up as the main suspect, with almost no evidence originally pointing to anyone else. However, Oscar turns himself in in order to protect Carlota and he is sent to a women’s only prison, sentenced to death. I get that this takes place in 1920s Spain and even in 2020 we don’t have great trans rights in much of the world, there had to have been a different way to move this plot line forward instead of “the only trans character gets sentenced to death for a crime they didn’t commit to protect their partner” even though he was able to escape with everyone else (RIP Angeles). 

Season 5 has to be the worst offender though. This takes place during the end of the Spanish Civil War and there’s a few instances that just really pissed me off as a trans person. First, after the Francoist Republicans win and take over the press hotel that Carlota and Oscar are staying at, one of the officials finds Oscar hiding in their hotel as Carlota and James (another reporter for those who haven’t watched season 5) are trying to cover for him so that they don’t find out Oscar is trans. Good for them, but the official who finds Oscar makes him take his shirt off and upon realizing that he is binding his chest and “not really a man,” he makes some sexual and transphobic comments towards Oscar. 

After this brief interaction, Oscar flies into a fit of rage, while naked, and then puts on clothes that don’t match how he sees himself. The rage scene personally ticked me off. I don’t see any reason for him to be naked during it, especially as a trans person myself. I would have preferred he wear at the very least undergarments of some sort, but that’s just my personal preference. 

Anyway, these are just the most obvious bits of transphobia that Oscar faces, but compounded with the fact that he never seems to be happy, or when he does, it’s quickly dashed (like having Carlota dash out to meet with her political opponent right before their wedding and then get framed for murder) is just. Disheartening. He hardly gets any genuinely happy moments, and even though most of the show is just tragedy after tragedy, Marga still gets Pablo in the end, Lidia moves to America with Francisco, her daughter, and Angeles’ daughter, Angeles had someone who really, truly loved her right before she was shot helping Oscar escape prison (and also her abusive husband was murdered a few years ago). Yeah, Oscar moved to France with Carlota and they came back as conflict journalists to Spain during the Spanish Civil War, but it didn’t really feel satisfying to me. 

Like I said at the top, I don’t dislike the show and obviously transphobia has always existed in modern history, but that doesn’t need to be the defining thing about your only trans character. Give him a life outside of being trans, especially since I don’t believe any of the show runners are trans themselves. You could also argue that a lot of this is biphobia on behalf of Carlota, as both of their stories are heavily intertwined, although Carlota is the perpetrator of some of the subtle transphobia Oscar faces in the series.