An Open Letter to the Wachowski Sisters — A Letter of Thanks

Dear Lilly and Lana,

I know you are reclusive, avoid press, and would rather that this brutal invasion of your private lives that has forced the two of you out of the closet over a decade had simply never happened. I wish it hadn’t, and that you had had the ability to proclaim your identities on your own terms and not tabloids. I don’t know if you’ll read this, but I need to say the words within.

My name is Eleanor. I’m a transgender woman, coming up on my third year of being out. Unlike what I’ve heard about your transitions, I had no intermediate phases where I was out to some people and not others. My extrication from manhood was much like your character Neo’s — sudden, traumatic, and driven by the knowledge that I couldn’t go on living the way I had been. But let me go back a decade, to my teenage years spent desperately casting about for a way to make being a man work for me. When I was 14, my rather strict father said he would let me watch the forbidden yet much hyped film The Matrix. We watched it together and he pointed out the various well documented ways in which the film contained subtext about religion and philosophy. I adored the film, and I liked the sequels too and didn’t get the criticisms.

You see, my experience of what it’s like to be told you have to be a man is you have to find ab kind of man it doesn’t suck to be. I tried, like so hard, to embody various role models in media. As a person aware of feminist issues I wanted someone who was respectful, and ultimately genuine — the character of Neo sort of became my internal self image. It didn’t fit, because I’m not a man. But there was something about it that fit more than any of the other false masks I donned.

I spent 10 years in a drinking and MMO-induced stupor, woke up one day, and transitioned. I wish I could say that the impetus was related to your films; but in fact it came from my frustration at The Last of Us, a game whose surrogate father/daughter themes made me realize uncomfortable truth. I was denying part of myself out of fear of losing my father.

A few months into transition I started to really face the question of how to react when others misgender me. Usually it was so minor — ”sir” on the phone or at the drive thru — that it could easily be shaken off. Banking was another matter. My name, on paper, was Luke Emory Armstrong Lockhart. I paid my taxes and helped my landlady carry out her garbage (no, really I did). All my friends called me Ellie by then. I guess I wasn’t prepared for that sucker punch when I heard

“Mr. Lockhart, how may I assist you today?” Something suddenly clicked in my head and everything in the Matrix movies made so much more sense. I recovered from the gut punch — and I pictured the banker as Agent Smith.

Not too long after that I went up for a name change petition in Texas family court. The deal was, I approach the docket and read a petition, which has to be perfect, swear I’ll tell all my creditors, and get my new name. But the judge was _*dedicated*_ to making sure I understood my place.

“Approach the bench, Mr. Lockhart,” she said. The gendered honorific, sadly, was probably required by procedure; I had marked my legal gender as male on the form. But this judge’s contempt for me was palpable, and I could feel that even the cowboy hatted bailiff was uncomfortable with it.

“Your name change is granted, son,” the Judgr reluctantly stated as she stamped the paper. She liked calling me “son.”

I have clinical panic which at that time was undiagnosed. There was only one thing that kept me together in that courtroom, and that was Neo and Smith at the subway.

“My name is Neo. My name is Eleanor Amaranth Lockhart.” I felt the Matrix narrative boosting me — I wasn’t alone.

I want to say something about what the Wachowski Sisters mean to me, versus what they mean to the world. I don’t know them. I’ve walked many of the Chicago streets they love, and rode many El-tracks all around town. Pop culture has been absolutely inundated with influences from the Wachowski Sisters for two decades. You’re getting mocked for making a fun space opera, while countless directors are redoing and redoing the Matrix lobby massacre. Concepts like “red pill” and the Guy Fawkes symbolism of V have been cooped for troubling political purposes. But the fact is that there aren’t a lot of movies you haven’t touched or influenced in some way.

And that’s the fear, best expressed by Agent Smith, that he has become contaminated by humanity through his work in the Matrix. Smith’s worst nightmares are true. He is Neo. All that he opposes he contains within him.

Wendy Carlos, transgender woman, basically created electronic music. Lynn Conway designed the circuits that make your smartphone work. The Wachowskis made massive advances in filmmaking. We are here and we are in your popular culture. The growth not only of bathroom bills and other anti-trans legislation, but also movements like GamerGate which are based in the idea that no *real* woman would ever like something as manly as a Wachowski film is driven by the realization that we’re here. We’ve always been here, you just know how to target us now.

Geek/popular culture has a trans problem, and will continue to do so until people realize — you, like Smith, have always been infected. When you saw the Matrix in 1999, you were watching an obvious Christ parable and philosophy lesson, but you were seeing it through a transgender camera.

The Wachowskis probably saved my life by giving me a narrative to manage the stress of life as a trans woman. If you do read this — thank you from the deepest depths of my heart for giving me the stories that have sustained me and kept me going. I know in almost all your stories, the subway appears as a harbinger of death, and i know at least one trans girl who came close to making the decision Lana didn’t. She’s okay now, because I helped her like than man across the way from Lana did. But I know it must feel like there’s a subway coming for us all.

If I may — I love you, Lilly and Lana Wachowski. Obviously not in any way that people who have met in person love. It’s more that I have fifteen years of trauma, and Lily and Lana’s stories have always been there. I felt like they might not know me — but they cared.

Thank you, Lana and Lilly.