This is a semi-biographical drama from Argentina, marketed in English and available on Netflix as “Queen of Coal”
A transgender woman lands her dream job of working in a carbon mine, but after having the sex-change surgery must face a superstition that bans female workers from entering the underground galleries.
I guess this story is more or less true, or at least based on real events. But she dreams of working in a coal mine? Talking about setting your bar low. As I recall, many of my ancestors dreamt of getting out of the coal mines. They dreamt of being farmers and seeing the sun. That wasn’t much of a dream either, but it beat the shit out of a coal mine.
The story I’m about to tell you is literally true, with no exaggeration.
Back when I was a young man starting out with The Southland Corporation, I took the company’s battery of personality tests to see if I was fit to make the move into middle management. I reported dutifully for my score analysis but was losing interest as the personnel man seemed to be droning on about my obvious plusses and minuses. Then one thing caught my attention. I had scored quite high in a characteristic called “femininity.”
(There’s some subtle test craftsmanship, eh? Let’s hope that the testing company has used the last thirty years to come up with a better name for that characteristic.)
Of course I wondered what was so feminine about me. I thought I was what society generally considered to be an average guy. I read the sports pages first, then the front page.
I asked the personnel guy which questions had affected that particular characteristic. He should know about manliness, I figured, even though his name was Milton, because nobody would ever call him Milton, or even Milt. Nobody dared to call him anything but Colonel Eddy, or just plain Colonel. I mean the guy had actually been a damned colonel. You can’t get any more macho than a fuckin’ colonel, assuming that the rank wasn’t earned in the British army. His wasn’t. He was a full Marine bird. That’s even more macho than a general. In peacetime, generals have to kiss the asses of senators and higher-ranking generals, and have to attend cocktail parties and play political games to get where they want to go in their sophisticated career paths, but a Marine colonel is a real two-fisted guy. He would be a general except that he says exactly what’s on his mind, and damn the consequences if any lily-livered civilian doesn’t like what he has to say.
So Colonel Eddy showed me some of my answers to the forced choices.
Would you rather go hunting or read a book?
There was the damning evidence inscribed forever in Number 2 pencil. I had answered “read a book,” thereby condemning my psychological profile to a lifetime of limp-wristedness. Jesus, I thought, maybe I should start using the ladies’ room.
Then the personnel maven came to the single most heavily weighted question, the one which had officially set off the wimp alarm, casting my official score irretrievably out of the Uncle Scoopy side of the ledger and into the Auntie Scoopy column.
Would you rather be a coal miner or a florist?
Holy shit, what had I done? I had admitted right there in black and white that I wanted to be a florist. Apparently, this is a choice made so infrequently by real men that the burly, close-cropped ex-colonel could not help but ask me, “What could conceivably have prompted you to make that choice?” I got off what I thought was one of the best lines of my life.
“Well, Colonel”, I replied, “I don’t give a fuck about flowers, but I never heard of anyone dying of Pink Lung.”
I guess that was manly enough, because I got the management job, and a lifetime career in the fast-paced, macho, damn-the-torpedoes world of Slurpee sales.
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Lux Pascal has a very famous sibling, actor Pedro Pascal.
… assuming the rank wasn’t earned in the British army? Daaaang, Scoop!
That wasn’t a joke. In the UK, colonel is often an honorary title, and has a completely different character from the position in the US Army, in that one person may be several colonels. It’s kind of like being a Vice-President in a corporation, where you might be the Vice-President of Marketing, but have no authority over Accounting. Or you might be Vice-President of many departments, just as Prince Andrew was a colonel in several different regiments, but had no position in others!
As I recall, Princess Anne is both an Admiral in the navy and a Colonel in the army!
The British army is filled with various silly Colonels and Colonels-in-Chief. Even Kate Middleton is a Colonel of some regiment or another.
In short, the title of Colonel means less in the UK than it does in Kentucky.
I looked it up. Kate is “colonel of the Irish Guards.”
Lux is Trans, yes?
Yes. Named Lucas at birth.
Scoops,
I’d like to see the standardization data on that “personality test.” The design of psych assessment instruments is a very specialized field, and personality testing is the most specialized of all. I had to get a PhD and special training just to qualify to use them. Back at the tine you would have been given that thing, a lot of stuff was being put out by people who knew little more than some psych jargon, claiming to give scientific evidence for hiring decisions. They were maybe a cut above the stuff you see on the internet claiming that if you can answer these 15 questions you have an IQ of 140, but not by much. Fortunately, people took the matter into court and that BS got thrown out.
Re. the British Army, there are real colonels, in addition to those honorary colonels and colonels-in-chief. The real colonels often are also generals. To explain that, I’d have to go into the chaotic organizational structure of the British Army and arrangements made two or three hundred years ago.
You’re missing the point. Yes, I know there are real colonels. The point is that the title itself doesn’t mean anything. With a US Marine colonel, you can assume it is a tough, grizzled veteran. With a British colonel, you can’t assume anything. It MIGHT be a manly, two-fisted combat veteran, and it might be some princess or some pervy member of the royal family.
To your other point: some twenty years after I took that first battery, Southland had hired PhD’s to select, administer and report such instruments and evaluations, and had to prove that any standardized tests had both reliability and validity for the purposes used. The rules imposed by the EEOC also had a significant impact on which methods corporations could and could not use. It was not like that in 1972. That was Nixon’s America. Colonel Eddy had no training of any kind in such matters, and the tests themselves were presumably never correlated to any likelihood of success.
With your experience, you can probably figure out what that specific instrument was called. It consisted entirely of forced choices, and those were two actual questions. The florist / coal miner is not only an actual choice, but is the precise verbiage used. (Not sure about the exact wording of hunting/reading)
According to Robert McNamara in The Fog of War, Ford Motor used the same instrument from the late 1940s on.
He put down “coal miner,” got the job, and by 1960, had become the first president of the Ford Motor Company from outside the Ford family since 1906. I put down “florist” and became a sarcastic blogger.
So, looking back on it, I suppose companies were looking for “coal miner” guys rather than claustrophobic wimps like me.