Review of 'Bad Girls' on 'Storygraph'
5 stars
In a park in Córdoba, Argentina, a group of travesti sex workers under the leadership of 178-year-old Auntie Encara, discovers an abandoned child left amongst the bushes. The group of travesti begin to care for the child together, offering a reprieve from their lives of violent customers, transphobic cops, poverty and AIDS. Woven into their tales of friendship, romance and squabbles are fantastical elements such as a mute girl’s transformation into a bird, a girl who is a werewolf, and the headless men fleeing the wars in the east.
This is a very moving and painful portrait of trans community for better and worse. It’s quite bleak in many ways with how much trans sex workers are dehumanised; but there is a thread of togetherness and solidarity between the characters even when they are at odds.