In the beginning and coda to the highest grossing film to ever endorse terrorism as a virtue, V for Vendetta, narrator Evie Hammond says that ideas have power, but what really matters is the people behind them. Yet this film is strangely agnostic about truly committing to this theme; the titular protagonist, in his final martyrdom, declares that “beneath this mask there is an idea… And ideas are more than flesh. Ideas are bulletproof.”

But, as Evie Hammond asks after her friend (and torturer) V’s death, “what of the man and what he meant to me?” Today, I’m called to ask a similar question about two women who I have known only as ideas – masks, as it were. The Wachowski Sisters, once known by a slightly different name, directed and produced V and a slew of other mass market, big-budget films whose receptions ranged from the vicious – in the case of the recent Jupiter Ascending – to the rapturous, in the case of V and The Matrix. For reasons that are now eminently understandable and justifiable, the sisters have eschewed the press and contact with fandom, choosing to live intensely private lives. But the recent forced outing – the second the siblings have experienced – of Lilly Wachowski,who had chosen to identify herself to the public as Andy until this week, invite a conversation about a simple fact that should blow everyone’s mind like
Neo soaring out of that phone booth: several of the most popular cult action films of all time, including one which once held the title of “highest grossing ‘R’ rated film in history” until it was unceremoniously deposed by Mel Gibson’s sadomasochistic religious fantasy The Passion of the Christ, were directed by two transgender women.

I do not know Lilly and Lana Wachowski. I only know the art they produced and the impact it had in my life. I’m a 28 year old college professor firmly enmeshed in the Matrix of everyday conformity, except for the one fact of transgender identity that unites me and them. Unlike Evie, what I have access to is the symbol, the mask, of the Wachowskis. Yet the glimpses we’ve so reluctantly been given, often at the hands of parasitic tabloid journalists, lead me to feel that, like Valerie in V for Vendetta writing her letter to nobody and everybody, even if I don’t know the Wachowski Sisters, I love them. Another one of my reclusive artistic idols, progressive rock virtuoso Tuomas Holopainen, founder of power metal extravaganza Nightwish, wrote in a song out of frustration with fans who thought they knew him because of his often intimate lyrics, “stop saying ‘I know how you feel. How can anyone understand how another feels?” I suspect the Wachowski Sisters, if they were to read this thinkpiece, might look askance at me for similar reasons – and yet I, and I don’t hesitate to say thousands of transgender fans if not millions, have this inexorable feeling that we know quite a lot about the Wachowskis from their work, and that we share commonalities of experience that are striking.

Like the Wachowski Sisters, my road to living authentically as who I am has been interrupted by numerous socially driven constraints on my freedom to be that person, that woman. I spent a lot of time wearing a mask that wasn’t me, and even long before I and possibly Lana and Lily themselves realized who I was, I saw the consistent theme in their films of a bisected identity, split between a professional and formal role validated by the rules of society and an authentic identity a person has found or created themselves.

The first of the Sisters’ movies to which I was exposed, The Matrix, was a giddy experience for a 14 year old “boy” who had not previously been permitted to watch “R” rated films. My father made an exception because of the film’s metaphoric and philosophical depth (blunt as it may have been). I responded particularly to the way that the Christlike savior figure Neo is split between two existences. As his nemesis, Hugo Weaving’s ingeniously portrayed Agent Smith of the Machine oppressors (more on him later), puts it:
You’ve been living two lives, Mr. Anderson. In one of these lives, you’re Thomas A. Anderson, program writer for a respectable software company. You pay your bills… You do your taxes… And you help your landlady carry out her garbage. The other life is lived in computers, where you go by the hacker alias “Neo” and are guilty of virtually every computer crime we have a law for. One of these lives has a future, Mr. Anderson, and the other… Does not.

Like all of the dialogue in the early portion of The Matrix, Smith’s statement is literally true but not in the way he predicts (in the same way that Neo’s stoner friends think he needs to “unplug” with some mescaline and that he’s their “literal Jesus Christ”). But Smith is wrong about which life has a future. As I’ll discuss subsequently, all of the Wachowskis’ work – yes, even 2008’s family film Speed Racer – deals with a bisection of identity from true to authentic, from assigned by authority, to molded by the scars and traumas left by authority. Neo the hacker has a future of black leather, gunplay, karate, and literally dying – twice – for the sins of the human race. Conversely, Jupiter Jones of the much-maligned box office flop Jupiter Ascending chooses to destroy her offered life as a space empress to live as an undocumented immigrant in modern day Chicago. Admittedly, Jupiter Ascending came from the Sisters’ teenage fantasies, and I can’t help but suspect they made with the full knowledge that it would flop and they would be blamed, and that ultimately it wouldn’t matter because Hollywood wasn’t going to keep giving tr*nnies multimillion dollar budgets to make movies. But even so, what all Wachowski protagonists share is that they have someone telling them who they are, and that tale is a lie.

I don’t know how long Lilly Wachowski has been transitioned – she says it’s been some time, but thanks to her well earned, dutifully preserved, and unjustly shattered reclusiveness, I have no details. For me though it’s been three years—three years, which feel like forever. I, like Neo and like V, felt a pervasive sense of “wrongness” about the world, but still threw on suits, ties, and whatever else I could to try to make the role I was assigned feel right, until one day in 2013 I just couldn’t anymore, and the boy I was died as surely as Neo was executed by a Machine firing squad at the end of The Matrix. About six months into the process, when I, like Lilly and Lana before her, was known as my authentic self to my friends and family but as that old dead boy to the legal and financial systems of society, I felt a moment of acute dysphoria upon calling my bank and being addressed as “Mr. Lockhart,” when I was accustomed to “Ellie.” That distress turned into a sudden recognition of a parallel: Neo, throughout the Matrix trilogy, is constantly subjected to identification as his past identity, Thomas A. Anderson, the name the Machines’ system gave him. Agent Smith is keen on making sure that Neo remembers where he came from, refusing to address him as anything other than “Mr. Anderson” until the climax of to series’ finale – the moment where Smith’s capitulation to Neo’s chosen name leads to the death of both Smith and his enemy. (This ending is significantly more grim than the ones we see in Matrix and Sense8 as well as Jupiter Ascending, in which protagonists reject self-sacrifice in favor of self-validation – a message which is refreshing in the face of a popular culture which all too often seems to validate suicide, as V and the Matrix sequels appear to.)

There’s not a lot about the Wachowskis’ life that I can conclusively claim to know is represented in their work – but if there’s one thing that’s close to certain, it’s the theme of the self-destructive urge and the sense that there is no place in the world for people who are different to live as themselves. In one of her rare public speeches (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crHHycz7T_c), Lana Wachowski discusses her near-suicide attempt as a teenager. Preceding it, she wrote an extended suicide note in which she discussed the feeling that her death by her own hand was inevitable, because there was no place for her in the world. She then went to the Chicago L-train stop near the restaurant where she was writing, and prepared to step in front of the subway – and was only prevented from doing so by a stranger who made eye contact with her, preventing her from acting. That experience echoes the climactic fight between Neo and Smith in the original Matrix. Smith – who has repeatedly expressed his terror of infection with humanity (or, we might say, queerness), and who is identified in the sequels as literally being an aspect of Neo – holds Neo in front of the subway train and whispers in his ears as the train approaches “this is the sound of inevitability – it is the sound of your death.” Neo’s proclamation “my name is Neo,” echoed by the explicitly transgender Nomi Marks in the Wachowski Netflix series Sense8 when her mother refers to her by her former male name (“my name is Nomi!”), reads as a transcendent affirmation of a chosen identity – and bluntly, as a metaphor for transition.

It’s impossible to know until they offer some kind of perspective on their work – something they’ve been notoriously loath to do for, once again, quite understandable reasons – to what extent the Wachowski Sisters intentionally wrote allegories about gender transition into their films and television work, to what extent they subconsciously or semiconsciously inserted these concerns, and to what extent we’re simply reading too much into science fiction, action, and heist stories. But for transgender women the potential that two of us may have been secretly telling stories of their own lives and experiences for the better part of two decades is seductive. Transgender women are so infrequently represented in the popular media at all, and when they are given roles it is as obstacles, confusions, or threats to the normal lives of cisgender people in critically acclaimed films like Dallas Buyer’s Club and The Danish Girl —or as actively malicious monsters in horror films like Psycho, Sleepaway Camp, and Silence of the Lambs. While we do not know Lana and Lilly personally, so many of the experiences their characters – even those who appear to be cisgender males, like Neo and V – have echo with our lives.

I regret and condemn, along with many others (including Chelsea Manning, someone who has truly resisted the system and is paying a price as high as V, Neo, or any Wachowski heroine) the Daily Mail’s outing of Lilly Wachowski, as well as the previous and brutal outing of Lana during the production of the Matrix sequels. Yet I hope that like the protagonists of their films, the lives they’ve now been forced into become more fulfilling and offer them the opportunity to live in a way they have not before. If they wish to offer new perspectives on their work, I’ll be excited to hear it. If they chose to maintain their silence, thousands of trans people will still have the symbols they created and the oh-so-rare stories they gave us.