Reckoning with Cole Sprouse and Trans Masculinity in Riverdale
Reckoning with Cole Sprouse and Trans Masculinity in Riverdale
The final episode of Riverdale has aired and I have Big Gender Feelings about it!
This essay was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Television is not possible without the writers and actors currently on strike. Learn more about the strike demands of WGA here and demands of SAG-AFTRA here.
I started watching Riverdale for one reason and one reason only: Cole Sprouse.
In 2017, Riverdale dropped on Netflix. I was ready to binge episodes on weeknights when the living room was empty. I lived with three other roommates I wasn't close with in a 100-year-old, three-story rowhouse in South Philadelphia. I also was somewhat closeted. Online, I’d started using they/them pronouns, though only a few friends acknowledged this. Without the need to explain my gender feelings, Cole acknowledged them.
Somewhere down the line, Cole became a trans masc icon. I’ve bonded with other masc of center trans and nonbinary folks, including he/him lesbians, about how much we admire his style. A former therapist also admitted they got their fashion inspiration from Cole’s Riverdale character, Jughead.
While watching Riverdale, I didn’t have to explain my gender. Jughead embodied what all of us trans masc viewers were thinking. He wasn’t just a hungry teenager ordering burger after burger at Pop’s like in Archie Comics; he was a CW-ified heartthrob who preferred his solitude to “fitting in” with his peers. His experience mimics what many of us trans folks prefer: to be left alone instead of antagonized by cis people.
. . .
Cole and I grew up together parasocially. I “met” him while he co-starred on The Suite Life of Zack and Cody with his identical twin brother, Dylan Sprouse. I was fascinated with how Cody’s (Cole) and Zach’s (Dylan) personalities as twins clashed in Suite Life. Even when they bickered and fought with each other, they still had each other. I envied this as a lonely only child. The Sprouse twins, however, could still hang out with me after school, when I didn’t have any siblings or friends.
Under patriarchy, young girls are encouraged to develop romantic connections to boys and men in media. I eventually developed crushes on both the twins, or at least I thought that was what was expected of me. On Suite Life, I was drawn towards Zach’s prepubescent bad boy, daredevil energy, but appreciated Cody being so booksmart, gentle, and obedient to the rules. Because of their exaggerated personality differences, I typically gravitated more towards Cody due to our shared interests and values.
When Netflix acquired the rights to Riverdale, I felt a different loneliness than what I felt as a young only child. I navigated a gender crisis, which left me isolated from everyone around me. In therapy, I grappled with my toxic childhood conditioning of gender roles and disassociated whenever gender thoughts came up. Earlier in my transition, I never got far enough to consider gender affirming care, changing my name, or anything like that because I rarely felt emotionally safe.
However, Riverdale was an escape from my transition stagnance. It’s normal to project ourselves onto fictitious characters; even when exaggerated, these characters impact how we interact with ourselves and the world around us. Jughead emulated the quirky boy I gravitated toward when I was younger, adjacent to Cody on Suite Life. It wasn’t until Riverdale where I realized my supposed attraction to Cody looked more like gender envy. Like Cody, I wanted so badly to be a quiet little boy overly concerned about moisturizing his skin after he got out of the shower, who wanted nothing more than to be left alone to finish his homework in silence. I didn’t have the words to process this feeling because I was confined to toxic femininity.
Since Riverdale has aired, I’ve replicated Jughead’s style in my own gender transition. Though denim sherpa-lined jackets are in style, it was Jughead who inspired me to buy one, a Levi’s blue medium Wash sherpa trucker denim jacket specifically. He too served as inspiration when I bought my first (and only) pair of suspenders. Beyond his wardrobe, he also served as an evolved, edgy Cody from Suite Life. Despite growing up on the “rough side” of town, he snagged a scholarship to Stonewall Prep, a nearby prestigious boarding school, from his writing alone.
The same year I started watching Riverdale, I created an anonymous Tumblr account to explore masculine presentation. Although I still went by my deadname IRL, the name I used for this account was Adryan. I reblogged photos of men in outfits I wanted to emulate. Admittedly, most of these photos were just of Cole from editorial photo shoots for ASOS, GQ, and Wonderland.
. . .
Years after legally changing my name to Adryan, I raced to watch Cole Sprouse’s interview on the Call Her Daddy podcast earlier this year. The podcast host, Alex Cooper, is notorious for her hard-hitting interview questions, especially for celebrity guests who aren’t so public about their private lives. This is the most raw and unfiltered I’ve ever seen Cole in an interview, expectedly because he’d just been handed the mic long enough to chain smoke cigarettes indoors.
This interview was a turning point in my transition because the gender envy I had towards him evaporated. I’m unsure whether it was his redundant, unnecessary use of SAT-worthy vocabulary words or oversharing the details of his breakup with Riverdale castmate Lili Reinhart that destroyed who I thought Cole was. Unlike Cody and Jughead, Cole is a real person who wanted to be perceived as an intellectual like Cody or Jughead. Instead, as Twitter observed, he came off as pretentious.
If I had seen this video earlier in my transition when I started watching Riverdale, I would’ve drooled in awe. The open button-down shirt paired with jeans and cigarettes was once my pinnacle of masculinity I strived for. However, with everything I now knew about Cole, the curtain dropped and the facade faded. My envy turned to disgust.
Once I reckoned with Cole Sprouse the person, rather than Cody or Jughead the character, I could finally separate myself from all three of them. Because our relationship was parasocial, I never actually knew him as a person beyond the roles he played on TV. While Cole was once pivotal in my transition, he led me into a direction to explore and eventually form my own identity. Instead of embodying Cole, I became Adryan.