It’s been a wild ride since Karla Sofía Gascón became the first trans woman nominated for Best Actress at the Oscars.
People celebrated her success with Emilia Pérez, celebrated her as a trans role model, and then it all came crashing now. Journalist Sarah Hagi unearthed some old tweets of hers, and they were pretty nasty stuff. Translations revealed the tweets to be racist, ableist, and just plain unpleasant. Variety reported that one tweet described Islam as “deeply disgusting” and another described George Floyd as a “drug addict swindler.” Gascón slammed a past Oscars ceremony as well, saying, “I didn’t know if I was watching an Afro-Korean festival, a Black Lives Matter demonstration or the 8M [International Women’s Day].”
Gascón attended the Oscars despite all the backlash, but she didn’t win. Now, she’s desperately doing damage control. Her mental health was damaged as a result of what happened, she said in a statement, declaring, “Amid this unexpected, devastating storm, there have been moments when the pain has been so overwhelming that I contemplated the unthinkable.”
It’s understandable that people would feel sympathy for Gascón after hearing that, but she just keeps digging herself further and further into the hole with tone-deaf statements. Yesterday, she held a press conference to promote her autobiography, Lo que queda de mi (What’s Left of Me), and it was a mess.
“No one has to forgive me for anything. If anyone feels offended by things I may have done in my life, let them come and tell me,” she said before indicating that she was the victim of a deliberate smear campaign.
“They’ve said that I’m far-right or racist or whatever,” she said, as per The Guardian. “But if there’s one thing I’ve done all my life, it’s that I’ve been against all this. When I was young, I used to fight with skinheads.” She then declared she was “less racist than Gandhi.”
Unfortunately, that comment just comes off as laughable, and indeed the internet isn’t having it. They especially don’t appreciate her writing off the concerns of Hagi, a Muslim woman, as a smear campaign. “So Karla Sofia Gascon is now arguing that the real problem here is ACTUALLY the Black Muslim journalist who discovered those old posts about her dislike for Asian, Black and/or Muslim people lmao,” wrote one X user.
“Anyone using “less racist” or “least racist” is definitely a racist,” said a user on Bluesky. And that’s the trouble: Gascón has done absolutely nothing to prove she isn’t. She hasn’t contributed to the well-being of the groups she attacked on social media to try and make up for her comments. Instead, she just keeps playing the pity card.
She claimed at the press conference that she had, “enormous respect for Muslim people,” but that certainly has never come across. She also said, when asked if she had regrets, “Life always puts us into difficult places so that we can learn. And you always learn from mistakes.” But she didn’t make a mistake – she was malicious.
It really doesn’t sound like she’s sorry for the tweets, just sorry she was caught. Many people are now hoping she will simply fade back into obscurity.
Published: Mar 21, 2025 9:49 PM UTC