Elsa Ruiz (Madrid, 35 years old) started her career as a comedian on stage and YouTube. She became popular by declaring in a tongue-in-cheek monologue that she was a trans girl who first progressed to Verne (El País) and then to La resistencia (Movistar Plus+). So began a television career as a staff member in the first seasons of “Everything is a Lie” (Cuatro) and later in “Sobreviviré” (MiTele Plus). But the hate messages he regularly received online, along with the anxiety and depression he suffered from before appearing on screen, prompted him to suddenly leave the media in November 2021 to enter a psychiatric facility. For a few months he has been gradually returning to social networks and also to the stage with the monologue Transphobia.
In early February, he released a video explaining what it was like to say goodbye to the Risto Mejide program “which he had been part of since the pilots,” he recalls. It happened almost three years ago. Returning from the Mediaset set, he received a call from management telling him that due to Covid protocol he would stop attending the room immediately, although he confirmed the rest of the staff were continuing to come. He never received an explanation. “You think that you are worthless, that you have no talent. I don’t want pity, what I want is work,” he comments in the video. “If you give me the choice, I’d rather be remembered for other things than as a former Risto Mejide employee,” she assured this newspaper days later while sitting in the dresser of a Madrid cafeteria.
Questions: After such a long time, why did you want to remember his disappearance from Everything is a Lie?
Answer: I didn’t want to criticize the show or the producer, but I didn’t feel good about coping with my departure. Saying it is something I owe myself. I wanted to be the one to complete this phase and do it on my terms. I see it like it’s a relationship where I’ve been dumped on the phone. I don’t see it as revenge. Because I don’t have the musical talent to tease a song out of Risto like I’m Shakira…
Q: Do you feel like TV treats its pros badly?
A: squeezing people. I’m not saying that as a complaint, but as a statement of fact. It works like this. If you work on it, you have to make the most of your time because you don’t know how long it will take. The Risto of the first seasons of Everything is a lie, that of the character created in Operación Triunfo would never make a few bells. I would criticize the current risto. It’s a devastating world. For Ana Morgade, someone with such an admirable career, to be pulled from the program after a single show says a lot about the way things stand.
Q: How do you remember your time in Everything is a lie?
A: It was my first experience in television and it was a lot of pressure for me. She was the newcomer among people with decades of experience. It annoyed me a lot. He wanted to measure me by his own standards when my circumstances were different. Yes, he felt solidarity from a table companion. For others not so much.
Q: Why did you stop just the moment you participated in Sobreviviré, a program you felt comfortable with? Was it the pressure on social media?
A: Hate messages on social networks were not the reason, but the trigger. I already had anxiety and depression issues before I started watching TV, but in the summer of 2020 I was being bullied on Twitter, which was very hard on me. I hadn’t resolved it emotionally, I was taking medication and the psychologist I was seeing at the time recommended I stop and go to a psychiatrist. It was hard to leave the best job of your life and realize it wasn’t the right time to take this opportunity. Although I’ve felt a lot of affection from people, even from the television world, who have been through similar situations. Many that no longer appear on the screen.
Q: Do you have a love-hate relationship with social media?
A: No. To limit oneself to saying that the networks or television are very toxic worlds is to dehumanize the problem. It’s the behavior of people that makes something toxic. Social networks are a new tool that we don’t know how to use. Not even the companies that created them know how to do it. Logs 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 are not yet very present in traditional media. It’s easier to share your content on them and build a community.
Q: There, of course, he explained his psychological problems.
A: It’s nothing to be ashamed of. I have chosen to speak to my networks about my time in psychiatry and my suicide attempts because it has helped me to listen to people speaking about their experiences. The clearest and best-known example is that of Ángel Martín. Listening to someone who has had such a successful career and seeing that it doesn’t make you immune to mental health issues makes you realize that having weaknesses is not an unforgivable mistake. What is not spoken about does not exist.
Q: How was your time in the psychiatric ward you were in?
A: 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 weren’t professionals. The lack of resources and lack of staff were palpable. My relatives came to file complaints about some situations I experienced there. If it is already happening in the emergencies of the Community of Madrid, even more so in the field of mental health, where it takes much more for the budgets to arrive. Health workers are among those most in need of mental health care due to the conditions in which they work.
Elsa Ruiz uses social networks and her humorous monologues to address issues such as mental health and LGTBI+ rights. Claudio Alvarez
Q: What was it like to experience two transitions at the same time, professional and personal?
A: The personal transition was a liberation. Again, I was doing something on my own terms that wasn’t right and made me uncomfortable. It was complicated because the information I received didn’t meet my needs. Society places a number of requirements on trans people to show that we are who we say we are. It’s an endurance test. With the new trans law it stays that way. It’s incomplete.
Q: Sometimes he talks about impostor syndrome.
A: When you say you’re a comedian, you’re often asked what your actual job is. The same happens with trans people. They even ask you for your real name. My birth genitals don’t cause me dysphoria, I don’t feel rejected by them. And when I announced my transition, coming out as trans seemed like a requirement. The same thing happened to me when I declared myself a woman by liking other women. Being trans isn’t bad for your mental health, it is transphobia. Being trans is not difficult, society makes it difficult for us.
Q: For several months she has been working as an associate member of the Retiro District for Recupera Madrid, a mixed group of Marta Higueras. What is your job?
A: I mobilized proposals so that the public centers in my district comply with the law in force in the Autonomous Community of Madrid regarding affective sex education and gender identity. Although it has been approved for years, not all protocols are followed, such as: B. the training of administrative staff on this matter. Trans people depend on the goodwill of the people we meet when we go to 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.
Q: Do you plan to continue in politics?
A: I will leave Recupera Madrid when the legislature ends, if Marta Higueras does not continue this project. We need more women and more LGTBI+ people in politics and it is a benchmark. Although I’m open to continuing to be a vocal neighbor on another project. Attending the district meetings helped me a lot to understand how Spanish politics works. Things can be improved by starting with your own neighborhood.
You can follow EL PAÍS TELEVISIÓN on Twitter or sign up here to receive our weekly newsletter.
Receive the TV newsletter
All the news from channels and platforms, with interviews, news and analysis, as well as recommendations and criticism from our journalists
REGISTRATION
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits