Let’s talk about Cho Hyun-ju, the ‘Squid Game’ fan favorite at the center of an exhausting controversy

The second season of Squid Game continues to make its rounds on the Netflix charts, and Hwang Dong-hyuk has quite definitively proven that his show’s success was no matter of luck. Indeed, with the show’s anti-capitalist thesis continuing to fire on old and new cylinders, it seems like only a matter of time until the third and final season completes a near-perfect trifecta of dystopian storytelling.

One of these aforementioned new cylinders is the character of Cho Hyun-ju, the 120th designated player of these Squid Games, and a transgender woman who’s hoping to use the money to fund her gender-affirming surgery, having lost her entire professional and personal network after coming out.

As with most every fictional trans character, though, it didn’t take long for Hyun-ju to become the center of an internet firestorm. Key to this debate (for lack of a better word) was the fact that the character is played by Park Sung-hoon, a cisgender male actor who was reportedly cast because the production team was unable to find a South Korean actress who was also a trans woman.

As a trans person, I have a number of thoughts on this, the majority of which stem from one, single, extremely cultivated sentiment: “I am exhausted.”

From a purely utilitarian perspective, you’re doing yourself a disservice by not casting trans actors in trans roles. The specific strain of dissonance with which gender dysphoria can ravage someone is near impossible to embody for even the sharpest actors, and it’s senseless for a show or film to deprive itself of that depth of insight by casting a cis actor in trans roles. Beyond that, narrative media is in a unique position in that it can readily make trans bodies and actors more visible to thousands upon millions of people, thereby demystifying a demographic that such audiences have little to no experience engaging with.

But Hwang, on some level, already knows all of this, as he did seek out a trans woman for the role, and only opted for Park when he could not find a trans actress. This has nevertheless drawn a lot of ire, as casting a man in the role of a trans woman can reinforce the idea that trans women occupy the exact same social space as cis men, which is incredibly harmful.

And as I was watching, I noticed several scenes in the season that could very easily be read as feeding into harmful stereotypes; Hyun-ju threatening to kill Seon-nyeo during the six-legged race, and her violent anger towards Myung-gi after he ostensibly causes the death of Young-mi both run the risk of affirming the notion that trans women are just violent men looking for new ways to be violent.

And yet, I fell in love with the way that Hyun-ju was written and performed, as did so many other people. Why should her violent anger define her to a greater degree than her compassion, which is much more prominent, especially in a space full of violent anger from men and women alike? Why should we chalk up her aforementioned threat towards Seon-nyeo as a decidedly male impulse, rather than the action of a lucid leader of any gender who has the guts to take control of a horrible situation? Why should Park being cisgender overshadow Hyun-ju as an absolutely fantastic trans character, one who has, at least partly, disrupted cultural boundaries that need to be disrupted?

That’s why I’m exhausted. I’m sick of the onus being placed on storytellers to tick all of these delicate boxes to make up for the irresponsibility and intolerance of those who demand proof of trans people’s humanity. I’m sick of a world where my acknowledgment (and dare I say love) for my pre-transition form (much like Hyun-ju’s AMAB body that looks a lot like Park Sung-hoon’s) is such a precarious, politicized nuance that it could make or break someone’s acceptance of trans people.

I’m sick of a casting controversy — which exists only because the cultural vocabulary surrounding trans people is so thin — staining the celebration-worthy occasion of having such a wonderfully nuanced trans character lighting up Netflix queues all over the world. And I’m sick of how the scarcity of trans acceptance has made life so difficult for the existing and would-be trans actresses that, in some alternate dimension, could have lined up for the role of Hyun-ju.

I for one will be eagerly awaiting season three to see how the rest of Hyun-ju’s arc plays out in Hwang’s sensational mythos, and I’ve no doubt that Park is going to do a damn fine job of bringing it to life. Now if only the world could do a damn fine job of normalizing the existence of trans people.