Elsa Ruiz (Madrid, 35 years old) began her career as a comedian on stage and on YouTube. She became popular by explaining that she was a trans girl in a monologue loaded with irony that jumped first to Verne (The country) and then to The resistance (Movistar Plus+). She thus began a career in television, as a collaborator in the first seasons of Everything is a lie (Four) and, later, in I will Survive (MiTele Plus). But the hate messages that she regularly received on the internet, together with the anxiety and depression that she suffered from before appearing on the screen, made her suddenly leave the media in November 2021 to enter a psychiatric center. For a few months, she has gradually returned to social networks and also to the stage, with the monologue transphobia.
At the beginning of February, he published a video in which he explained how his farewell to the Risto Mejide program was, “in which he had participated since the pilots,” he recalls. It happened almost three years ago. Returning from the Mediaset set, he received a call from management saying that he would immediately stop participating in the space due to covid protocol, although he verified that the rest of the collaborators continued to come. He never received an explanation. “You think that you are worthless, that you have no talent. I don’t want to feel sorry, what I want is work, ”he comments in the video. “If you give me a choice, I prefer to be remembered for other things than as a former collaborator of Risto Mejide,” she assured this newspaper days later, sitting in the chest of drawers in a Madrid cafeteria.
Ask: Why did you now want to remember his disappearance from Everything is a lieAfter so much time?
Answer: I did not want to criticize the program and the producer, but things were not done well with me when managing my departure. Telling it is something I owed to myself. I wanted to be the one to close that stage and do it on my terms. I look at it like it’s a relationship where I got dumped on the phone. I don’t see it as revenge. Because I don’t have the musical talent to get a song out of Risto, as if I were Shakira…
P: Do you feel that television treats its professionals badly?
R: Squeeze people. I’m not saying this as a complaint, but as an observation. This works like this. When you work on it, you have to make the most of your time, because you don’t know how long it’s going to last. The Risto of the first seasons of Everything is a liethat of the character created in Triumph operation, I would never make a few chimes. He would criticize the current Risto. It is a devastating world. That Ana Morgade, someone with such an admirable career, has the program withdrawn after a single broadcast, she says a lot about how things are.
P: How do you remember your time in Everything is a lie?
R: It was my first experience on television and it was a lot of pressure for me. She was the new one among people with decades of experience. It annoyed me a lot. He wanted to measure me in his own terms when my circumstances were different. Yes, he felt solidarity from a tablemate. For others, not so much.
P: Why did you decide to stop just at the moment you were participating in I will Survive, a program in which you felt comfortable? Was it the pressure on social media?
R: Hate messages on social networks were not the reason, but the trigger. I already had anxiety and depression problems before starting on television, but in the summer of 2020 I suffered severe harassment on Twitter that was very hard for me. I had not resolved it emotionally, I was on medication and the psychologist I was seeing at that time recommended that I stop and go to psychiatry. It was hard to leave the best job of your life, realizing that it was not the right time to take advantage of that opportunity. Although I felt a lot of affection from people, even from the world of TV who had experienced similar situations. Many who no longer appear on screen.
P: Do you have a love-hate relationship with social media?
R: No. To limit ourselves to saying that the networks or television are very toxic worlds is to dehumanize the problem. It is the behaviors of people that make something toxic. Social networks are a new tool that we do not know how to manage. Not even the companies that have created them know how to do it. Protocols are missing. But, for the LGTBI+ collective, they are a window into the personal experience of people who are going through the same thing and who still do not have much of a presence in the traditional media. It is easier to share your content on them and build a community.
P: There he has naturally explained his mental health problems.
R: It’s nothing to be ashamed of. I decided to talk to my networks about my time in psychiatry and my suicide attempts because it has helped me to listen to people talking about their experiences. The clearest and most well-known example is that of Ángel Martín. Listening to someone who has been so successful professionally and seeing that this does not immunize you against mental health problems makes you see that it is not an unforgivable mistake to have weaknesses. What is not spoken of, does not exist.
P: How was your time in the psychiatric center where you were?
R: The people who were also in the hospital helped me more than the people who were supposed to help me. And not because those who worked there were not professionals. The lack of resources and the lack of personnel were noticeable. My relatives came to file complaints about some situations that I experienced there. If it already happens in the emergencies of the Community of Madrid, even more so in the area of mental health, where it costs much more for the budgets to arrive. Health workers are among those who most need to take care of their mental health, due to the conditions in which they work.
P: What was it like to live two transitions at the same time, the professional and the personal?
R: The personal transition was a liberation. Again, I managed on my own terms something that was not right and that made me uncomfortable. It was complicated, because the information that came to me did not match my needs. Society demands a series of requirements from trans people to demonstrate that we are who we say we are. It is a continuous test. With the new trans law it continues to be so. It is incomplete.
P: Sometimes, he talks about impostor syndrome.
R: When you say you’re a comedian, you’re often asked what your real job is. The same thing happens to trans people. They even ask you what your real name is. My birth genitals do not cause me dysphoria, I do not feel rejection by them. And, at the time that I announced my transition, it seemed like a prerequisite for coming out as trans. The same thing happened to me with the fact of declaring myself a woman by liking other women. Being trans doesn’t harm your mental health, it’s transphobia that does. Being trans is not difficult, society makes it difficult for us.
P: For a few months she has been working as an associate member of the Retiro district for Recupera Madrid, a mixed group of Marta Higueras. What is her job?
R: I have been mobilizing proposals so that the public centers in my district comply with the law in force in the Community of Madrid regarding affective-sexual education and gender identity. Despite having been approved for years, not all the protocols are followed, such as the training of administrative staff on this matter. Trans people depend on the good will of the people we meet when we go to do a bureaucratic procedure or when we go to a medical center or an educational center, because there are things that nobody has explained to them.
P: Do you plan to continue in politics?
R: I will leave Recupera Madrid when the legislature ends, when Marta Higueras does not continue in this project. We need more women and more LGTBI+ people in politics and she is a benchmark. Although I am open to continue being a vocal neighbor in another project. Attending the district meetings has helped me a lot to know how Spanish politics works. Things can be improved by starting with your own neighborhood.
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