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.

————

Lux Pascal has a very famous sibling, actor Pedro Pascal.

Videos