The Matrix is about transgender depersonalization, a dissociative “feeling of unreality” that can be treated by transitioning

An unofficial transgender depersonalization companion guide to The Matrix.

Hi, I’m Zinnia. I’ll be your operator.

Warning: Exposure to information on transgender depersonalization may cause the realization that you are transgender.

MORPHEUS: Let me tell you why you’re here. You’re here because you know something. What you know you can’t explain, but you feel it. You’ve felt it your entire life. There’s something wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is, but it’s there. Like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad. It is this feeling that has brought you to me. Do you know what I’m talking about?

NEO: The Matrix?

MORPHEUS: Do you want to know what it is? The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now, in this very room.

There are some people in our world who feel this way all the time. It’s called depersonalization, a pervasive feeling of detachment from yourself and your feelings and perceptions as you experience the world. As a chronic condition, it’s somewhat uncommon in the general population and notably more frequent among transgender people – and there’s evidence that transitioning itself can treat those of us who are affected, eliminating that sensation of disconnect.

The Matrix is a film about messiahs and prophecies, industrial music and leather clubs, groundbreaking special effects and action sequences that redefined the genre. It’s about rebelling against systemic control by overwhelming institutions, it’s about humanity’s future war against intelligent machines, and it’s about philosophy of the nature of mind and experience. Crucially, The Matrix is about seeing one’s world as fake and discovering what it’s like to be in the real world for the first time.

The Matrix is also about being transgender, a parallel to our experience that was already noticed by many in the community even before both directors had come out as trans women and confirmed this was its message. The phenomenon of depersonalization among trans people unifies these themes, and this intersection is depicted so extensively and specifically in The Matrix, there is reason to believe it was deliberately included by the directors based on their own experiences. I’ve loved The Matrix since I was a child and I’ve come to appreciate it even more as a trans woman who has experienced the dream world of depersonalization. After all, The Matrix was never about the matrix working just fine – it’s about those who can sense there is something terribly wrong.

Defining depersonalization-derealization disorder

PROXIMITY ALERT: For affected individuals, prolonged or excessive self-focus on distressing depersonalization symptoms may cause temporary worsening of these symptoms.

NEO: You ever have that feeling where you’re not sure if you’re awake or still dreaming?

Depersonalization-derealization disorder (DP/DR) is a highly distressing dissociative condition, ever-present and unremitting, causing a painfully heightened awareness of one’s own thoughts accompanied by a suffocating numbness and loss of the ability to truly feel one’s feelings. Sufferers experience themselves as living in two parts, one moving about in the world while the other watches internally at a remove, an observer providing unceasing commentary on their every moment. Something essential is lost from the quality of their thoughts and feelings, which no longer resonate as real or possessing any meaning, and they may feel they have no “self”. It can take on a physical sensation like that of having a head full of cotton, and mental fogginess can accompany these distracting and disconcerting symptoms.

Those with depersonalization can lack spontaneity or a sense of agency, feeling that they are “robotic” or a “zombie” and simply going through the motions of life automatically, without the initiative or motivation to choose to act independently or out of personal desires. Our own impulses, Mouse says, are “the very thing that makes us human”, and their inaccessibility means the loss of something essential to that humanity. Frequently, this numbed sense of oneself as a void extends to the rest of the world. Derealization can be felt as reality seeming pale and gray, lifeless, dreamlike, flat, and simply unreal rather than fully dimensional and fleshed out. It can seem there is a veil or distorted glass or fog between oneself and the world, or that reality is being projected on a screen that you watch from within.

NONAKA: They can’t tell the difference. To an artificial mind, all reality is virtual. How do they know that the real world isn’t just another simulation? (“Matriculated”)

Like their own feelings, everything in the real world is drained of meaning. This is not a form of psychotic experience or loss of touch with reality as it actually is; these objective perceptions are undistorted, but it is the subjective feelings about those perceptions that have become detached and lost. “It is not the spoon that bends – it is only yourself.”

Depersonalization can be a temporary feeling brought on by severe stress, experience of a traumatic event, sleep deprivation, or recreational drug use. It can be a secondary aspect of another condition such as panic attack, depression, or PTSD, disappearing when this condition is treated. In other cases, depersonalization disorder is the primary condition with no apparent cause, first appearing either in adolescence or from one’s earliest memories and typically continuing indefinitely without a moment’s respite: the splinter you dig and dig at and can’t get out. It is an unspeakably distressing, cursed life. It is hell to live when all you feel is dead, it’s like being buried alive and scratching at the inside of a coffin forever. There is no generally accepted treatment beyond psychotherapeutic approaches to manage and reduce this distress, with experimental treatments involving antidepressants, mood stabilizers, anti-anxiety benzodiazepines, and anti-opioids similar to Narcan.

But for transgender people with depersonalization, there can be another choice.

Depersonalization in gender dysphoria

In the general population, only an estimated 0.8–3.4% of people will experience depersonalization disorder as a chronic condition, while the few studies focusing on transgender samples have shown clinical depersonalization occurring among 10.2–14.6% of us. Not all trans people have chronic depersonalization and certainly not all people with depersonalization are trans, so its presence or absence does not categorically rule anyone in or out as trans. But it is common enough to trip over it in our community and if we don’t experience it ourselves, we definitely know at least one other who does.

What explains this? It could be that the gender-dysphoric disconnectedness from our sense of our bodies, and from the sense of our gendered selves as we navigate the social world, pushes us into a state of feeling at constant remove from whoever and whatever we are. Emotional neglect in childhood is a risk factor for depersonalization disorder in the general population, and we’ve often had a whole childhood spent closeted from others and even from ourselves, not knowing how to talk about feelings that the world tells you are not allowed to be real. This can mean that others are unavailable to us in a very important area of our feelings, and it becomes something that goes unacknowledged for decades. Depersonalization disorder’s common onset at puberty could have some common origin or relationship with the experience of gender dysphoria commonly, but not always, becoming most prominent and unavoidably noticeable at puberty. It could be any or all of these things, and it could just be more prevalent among us for some of the same reasons that depression and anxiety are more prevalent among us.

No matter the cause, we do know the cure: taking the red pill – literally. Medically transitioning, particularly starting cross-sex hormone therapy, is found to reduce trans people’s depersonalization symptoms to the level of healthy populations. Others have noted that certain estrogen pills produced in the late 1990s were red, although this parallel extends far beyond the possible colors of a possible pill. Trans woman Andrea Long Chu writes: “Neo has dysphoria. The Matrix is the gender binary. The agents are transphobia.” But while many symptoms of gender dysphoria are fairly obvious and straightforwardly related to sex and gender, such as acute distress over one’s sex characteristics and pervasive discomfort enacting or being seen in the role of one’s assigned sex, the symptoms and experiences that define depersonalization disorder may not seem to have anything to do with gender or transness. Sufferers may struggle to recognize depersonalization in themselves or even describe these experiences as a distinct phenomenon – in part because the feeling of chronic depersonalization is just so strange.

Preconscious sensation, preverbal knowledge

THE INSTRUCTOR: Only the most exceptional people become aware of the Matrix. Those that learn it exists must possess a rare degree of intuition, sensitivity, and a questioning nature. However, very rarely, some gain this wisdom through wholly different means. (“World Record”)

A clinical questionnaire of depersonalization disorder symptoms introduces itself: “Some people have had experiences that feel very real to them but are very hard to explain to other people.” A book on the condition terms these attempts “expressions of the inexpressible”. How can we feel out the shape of that experience, make a mold of it in words to show others, and describe the essential sense of wrongness ever-looming over our self – let alone identify the connection between this and our gender?

As a child, I would focus in tightly on the peculiar feeling of existence itself, how overwhelming it was simply to confront the reality that the world was real and I was really a conscious being somehow experiencing everything that was actually happening right now… until I recursed so far I blanked out for a moment as I became acutely aware of having collapsed into some pinpoint void. What hope did I have of understanding what that was? Why did every moment slow and stretch, disintegrating into such a density of unbearable detail and a profuse, unending hyper-conscious internal commentary of fragments and tangents? Why did my emotions suddenly fade into total absence when I was 13, leaving me and the world around me so deadened, I couldn’t bring myself to care about anything in this fake and plastic place that felt like a meaningless video game of crude toy models?

KID: Somebody tell me. Why it feels more real when I dream than when I am awake. How can I know if my senses are lying? (“Kid’s Story”)

Inside the matrix, the lines of Kid’s skin are unclear and jittery, fluctuating ever more violently as he makes an impossibly deft escape; Agents move so fast they seemingly phase around bullets; Neo moves like they do. Why did it seem like my skin was so uncertain and lacking in real solidity, as if it was flickering in instability and expanding and contracting around its boundary? I could practically feel the impossibly thin virtual membrane wrapped skin-tight around me at all times and keeping me from ever truly touching or feeling the real world. I could move around in the world but never actually come in contact with it – and just moving around felt like space was perfectly filled and molded around me, an exact inverse of my form, like trudging through solid concrete that moved with me and encased me, suffocating and drowning me at every moment.

Why was there this inexplicable pressure and physical numbness in my head after those rare occasions when I was overcome with wrenching sobs, every one of them nevertheless feeling completely lacking in any real substance? How could I bring myself to experience the straightforward occurrence of normal emotional response, rather than feeling forced and deliberate and self-consciously orchestrated in all of my actions and expressions of feeling? And how was it that others seemed to be able to live normal lives effortlessly, as if they didn’t feel that something was terribly, terribly wrong with it all?

MORPHEUS: Have you ever had a dream, Neo, that you were so sure was real? What if you were unable to wake from that dream? How would you know the difference between the dream world and the real world?

How many people have any familiarity with this very specific set of experiences, and access to the information needed to understand it in the necessary context? When this is a sensation that has forced itself upon you for your entire life, it seems like nothing more than a bizarre and eclectic cluster of personal nervous tendencies. How can you get others to understand what this baffling disconnection is really like, and how utterly disturbing and unbearable it feels? I didn’t know if this was even a specific condition, or something that everyone felt to some degree, or whether this was simply the normal of what it was like to be me, something that could only be managed and mitigated in its effects.

In my preoccupation with coping with an existence haunted by this starvation of feeling and meaning and life itself, I became fixated on the possibilities of transhumanism and the Singularity, my desperate hail-Mary out of all this. A limitless intelligence would be able to figure out what made me this way; an uploaded digital self could be tweaked until I didn’t have to feel like this. This is how hopeless depersonalization disorder can render us: I thought it would take a simulated utopia of perfect genius and immortality to do something about it. Unable to stand the way the world felt outside of the matrix, I believed my only chance was escaping into it.

As it turns out, I didn’t need a Second Renaissance and I didn’t need a neural-interactive simulation. I needed a human revolution against this state of machinehood. To exist as my self, to have genuine life as a full person finally belonging as part of the real world, I needed to exist as a woman.

Taking the red pill literally

MORPHEUS: Like everyone else you were born into bondage, born into a prison that you cannot smell or taste or touch. A prison for your mind…. Unfortunately, no one can be told what the Matrix is. You have to see it for yourself.

When Neo is removed from the matrix, the experience is sudden, violent, and completely unexpected. He takes an unknown pill from a group of pseudonymous wanted hackers, who immediately attach him to a series of machines as their reality-bending cold liquid mirror binds to him and begins to engulf and fully enclose his skin. After a brush with cardiac arrest, his consciousness is wrenched free of its previous location and he awakens in his real body, coming to awareness immersed in a thick sludge where he sees that his bodily functions – and mind functions – had been fully automated. One early idea for the first film, in which the character Switch would have a female or male body based on whether they were in the matrix, explicitly maps the transition of sex/gender to this total disjunction in one’s experienced reality.

But the rabbit hole goes deeper than that:

MORPHEUS: The pill you took is part of a trace program. It’s designed to disrupt your input/output carrier signal so we can pinpoint your location.

My decision to transition and start taking HRT was motivated by what seemed to be a standard and uncomplicated experience of dysphoria, clearly related to feelings about my gender. I was ready to live my life as a woman and no part of me wanted to live as a man any longer. I wanted breasts and softer skin and some curves and less facial and body hair, I wanted to stop everything about my body from further masculinizing in the years ahead, and I was already 23 and wanted to get on the right track with this as soon as possible. These were things I knew HRT could do.

And then I discovered the other things it did: On the third day, I spontaneously cried at an emotionally stirring scene in a movie and the crying felt right, felt like the simplicity of a normal emotion. In that first week, my feelings and moods came into focus and moved with me as a part of me, finally happening naturally and integrated into one cohesive whole. Without even trying I began to see the goodness and brightness and purpose and meaning in the world, and it was more than a mood: the true color and shape and detail in everything made itself known to me, became fleshed out with a real presence that no longer receded from my senses.

The overwhelming noise and static of every moment in the world finally fell silent, resolving into something that made sense. I could touch it, I could feel it, and such fundamental experiences meant everything when they had always been so achingly absent before. I was elated in a way I couldn’t remember ever having felt in my life – because I hadn’t. I could care about myself and the world. I could love myself and the world.

HRT showed me that I had depersonalization by setting me free from it, and revealed that my untreated gender dysphoria and my suffocating sense of unreality were directly linked – I had to see this for myself. The chemical effect easily preceded any physical changes; all of this started long before the 11th day when I began to feel the incipient womanhood stirring as a sensitivity and itchiness in the breast. When it happens, it happens fast: other trans people have described this pivotal moment as “like the sky opened up”, “like my brain snapped into place, finally”, “like the sun had burned through the thickest fog in my head”, “a maelstrom in my mind that turned to still water”, “the shift was immediate”, “a sense of clarity and alertness I had never felt before”, “I started feeling myself properly for the first time ever”, “breathing fresh air finally”, “like my body suddenly started working”, “I felt my skin for the first time”, “the feeling like something had finally been plugged in”, “suddenly everything was in color”, “it felt like waking up”, “It felt like I sank into the earth and was grounded…. I felt it hit”.

I knew this wasn’t just the transient joy of getting started because after nine years, the joy has never left. We don’t know exactly how HRT does this for those of us whose gender dysphoria includes DP/DR, but there are clues to what’s going on. Pharmacological treatment for depersonalization disorder in the general population typically consists of a combination of medications targeting serotonin and glutamate. Testosterone can modulate serotonin in trans men and transmasculine people (Kranz et al., 2021), while estradiol can boost or inhibit activity at NMDA glutamate receptors (Tanaka & Sokabe, 2013). Those same receptors are targeted by NMDA antagonist dissociative drugs like DXM, PCP, and ketamine that produce intense depersonalization and derealization symptoms.

Depersonalization disorder isn’t just a set of psychological experiences, but something with real materiality: physically, we do have an anomalous input/output carrier signal. Measurements of emotional intensity based on skin electrical conductance show that the depersonalized have a distinct pattern showing an unusual hyperalert state as well as a blunting of response to emotional stimuli, “an excitatory mechanism inducing a state of heightened alertness together with an inhibitory mechanism reducing emotional reactivity” (Horn et al., 2020). Compared to those without depersonalization, we respond to neutral materials more rapidly and respond to unpleasant materials at a delay (Sierra et al., 2002). We are dissociated in time, split and pulled both forward and backward away from a unified experience of consciousness.

Even at rest with no stimuli, we show unusual fluctuations in electrodermal measurements (Michal et al., 2013). Our levels of noradrenaline are suppressed (Simeon et al., 2003), and our heart rate and blood pressure take on unusual patterns of responses (Owens et al., 2015). Morpheus challenges Neo:

MORPHEUS: What is real? How do you define real? If you’re talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then real is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain.

Activity in certain areas of the brain is directly associated with severity of DP/DR symptoms (Medford et al., 2016), and magnetic fields targeting specific regions can both treat the feeling of disembodiment in those with DP/DR and induce this sensation in those without it (Orrù et al., 2021). Is it any wonder that transitioning can bring our entire existence into focus, filter that sensory static and and make us, literally, comfortable in our own skin? A not-insignificant number of trans people even report that their reflexes, coordination and reaction time noticeably improve on hormones. Of course the red pill is an allegory for HRT, but it may also just be HRT. You want a pill that can disrupt your bioelectric signature, wake you up and bring you into the real world for the first time? Buckle your seat belt.

Through the looking glass, darkly

The unreality that characterizes the world of the matrix is visually highlighted throughout the films, depicted using approaches that are strikingly similar to experiences of depersonalization disorder. Desaturated tones layer a sheen of gray over scenes in the matrix, draining them of vividness and life, and the choice of a green-tinted fluorescent pall within the matrix holds a deeper resonance for us: those experiencing DP/DR typically find that being around common fluorescent tube lighting makes their symptoms noticeably worse and more difficult to bear. Whether it’s the frequency of the flickering, the seeming skew of its colors, or the exaggeration of this effect layered atop a world that already looks so unnatural to us all the time, something about it interacts especially poorly with our struggle to keep our senses integrated. For me, the depths of my worst depersonalization felt like nothing more than the dim and sickening green-white tint of a drop-ceiling windowless “backrooms” office. This was the life being lived by Thomas Anderson before he became Neo.

After Neo is freed and learns the nature of the matrix, his first time back inside to see the Oracle is now contextualized by an experience of reality that serves as contrast. “Unbelievable, isn’t it?”, remarks Morpheus as they watch this fake world pass by from behind the pane of a car window. Neo can see it differently now, and this uncanny difference is familiar to fellow redpills. It turns out that these street scenes were designed to evoke a sense that the world around them is only a flat and lifeless projection. The making-of feature The Matrix Revisited explains that the trio were filmed in a stationary car as prerecorded scenes of pedestrians scrolled past on screens at the front and sides:

Bill Pope (director of photography): This is Keanu once the veil’s been lifted from his eyes. This is his first time back in the matrix. That’s his trip in that car through Chinatown. The thing that used to convince him, before he was told the truth, it now looks remarkably fake. So green screen is too sophisticated a technique – we could make it look real. So I wanted to use something as fake as Hitchcock’s old rear screen projection, the same way Cary Grant looks fake driving down the street in North by Northwest.

John Gaeta (visual effects supervisor): They got a pretty cool quality out of it. It’s an unusual thing to do these days, true, but the colors were nice and saturated, and the defocused nature of it made it very dreamy. (“The Matrix Revisited / Car Ride to the Oracle”)

Even in The Matrix Revolutions, which features a near-identical ride with the three to see the Oracle, the quality of light within the matrix becomes more dim and pale throughout the movie as the Smith virus spreads throughout the system, smothering the world. The Oracle, herself having moved her consciousness between bodies, describes Smith as Neo’s equivalent: “He is you, your opposite, your negative.” Agent Smith, before he was “set free” by Neo, expresses barely-restrained desperation as he interrogates Morpheus:

AGENT SMITH: Can you hear me, Morpheus? I’m going to be honest with you. I hate this place, this zoo, this prison, this reality, whatever you want to call it. I can’t stand it any longer. It’s the smell, if there is such a thing. I feel saturated by it. I can taste your stink. And every time I do I feel I have somehow been infected by it. It’s repulsive, isn’t it? I must get out of here. I must get free and in this mind is the key, my key. Once Zion is destroyed there is no need for me to be here, don’t you understand?

Like Neo’s own path, Smith has become acutely aware of his own nature and his inescapable surroundings and is prone to this obsessive existential rumination, unlike other agents who appear confused or taken aback by his private behavior. He feels so trapped by the experience of unbearable sensation in this “prison”, there is nothing he wants more than for it to come to an end. That same splinter is driving him mad. And many trans people will find a dysphoric parallel in the sickening otherworldliness of our own pretransition bodies saturating us with their unwanted scent and sweat, as visceral for us as it is for Smith. The reality of that smell being a part of us feels almost impossible to accept; many of us will indeed hormonally reject it, getting free from it in the same stroke as freeing our minds.

The very origin of Smith’s voice as he speaks these words is also explained in the making-of:

Hugo Weaving: We tried to just go for a very neutral accent, but a more specific character. And the character kind of evolved, that I kind of, I wanted him to be not robotic but not really human, and more like – I kept thinking about a ‘50s newsreader or someone like that. And also, the more I hung out with [Lana] and [Lilly], the more I think I picked up on their rhythms. [Lana] and [Lilly] both have an incredibly deep voice and I think that kind of, Agent Smith started to kind of talk a little like that as well.

Lana Wachowski: Somebody said he was imitating us at one point. (“The Matrix Revisited / Interrogation Room”)

Smith’s voice, the voice of the impersonal announcement of someone else’s words, the voice of that which is not quite human yet, is the voice of pretransition trans women.

Whose voice does Lana find harmony with now? In 2015, she was reported to have recommended several books by trans people for Eddie Redmayne to read in preparation for his role as pioneering trans woman Lili Elbe:

And as Redmayne, the best actor Oscar winner for his performance as Stephen Hawking in last year’s The Theory of Everything, explains it, Lana helped him kick-start his research for his latest role.

“She pointed me to where to start reading: Jan Morris’ book Conundrum, Kate Bornstein’s Gender Outlaw and Niels Hoyer’s book about Lili, Man Into Woman,” says Redmayne, adding, “I absolutely adore Lana. She’s such a generous human being.”

Conundrum, a 1974 memoir by travel writer Jan Morris, extensively features descriptions of the author’s peculiar inner experiences of the outer world before transition and how they evolved throughout her life. Morris recounts the “intensely self-conscious” sense of watching herself from a distance, having indistinct emotion that was difficult to define, and seeing her childhood as if in a dream or through “a gauze curtain”. She felt that life itself, “the grand constants of the human cycle, birth to death”, was something she could view “only from a distance, or through glass”. “The lives of other people seemed more real because they were closer to those great fundamentals”, Morris writes, and describes herself as “utterly detached” in an “observer’s role” as someone who “may come to feel that reality itself is an illusion”. She finds herself in a “remote and eerie capsule” or “silent chamber of my own”, subjected to “a detachment so involuntary that I often felt I really wasn’t there”:

If I could not be myself, my subconscious seemed to be saying, then I would not be.

For her, beginning to live as a woman “was like stepping from cheap theatre into reality”, “where women were to be found doing real things”. Morris attaches a significance to transition beyond the close focus on gender alone: “I equate it with the idea of soul, or self, and I think of it not just as a sexual enigma, but as a quest for unity.” “Every aspect of my life is relevant to that quest”, she writes, and emphasizes a view of gender that is essentially about experiencing the feeling of being alive:

To me gender is not physical at all, but is altogether insubstantial. It is soul, perhaps, it is talent, it is taste, it is environment, it is how one feels, it is light and shade, it is inner music, it is a spring in one’s step or an exchange of glances, it is more truly life and love than any combination of genitals, ovaries, and hormones. It is the essentialness of oneself, the psyche, the fragment of unity.

It is one of the most depersonalization-dense accounts of being trans that I have read, and trans woman Lana Wachowski recommended this as a meaningful account of transgender experience. Lana herself described the onset in adolescence of an “intense anxious isolation coupled with constant insomnia” in her 2012 HRC speech:

As I grew older an intense anxious isolation coupled with constant insomnia began to inculcate an inescapable depression. I have never slept much but during my sophomore year in high school, while I watched many of my male friends start to develop facial hair, I kept this strange relentless vigil staring in the mirror for hours, afraid of what one day I might see. Here in the absence of words to defend myself, without examples, without models, I began to believe voices in my head — that I was a freak, that I am broken, that there is something wrong with me, that I will never be lovable.

It’s not tenable to declare from a distance, based only on a certain interpretation of public statements and works of art, that a celebrity is experiencing symptoms of a certain condition. But what I can state about myself is that I would also have described my self-critical isolation as a suicidally depersonalized, dysphoric adolescent in terms much like these. In one way or another, however it may have come about, these are the words and works of someone who possesses intimate knowledge on these same experiences.

Know Thyself

I love The Matrix – that’s just a fact about who I am. I could call it a favorite, but that doesn’t capture the reality that I relate to this movie in a way that’s beyond how I relate to any other media. It’s come to mean so much more to me: as I’ve grown, this series has grown with me, from a strangely familiar recognition of uncanny sensation, into an unflinching expression of experiences – with gender, reality, or both – that I share with its creators.

The Matrix Resurrections is the first time I’ll get to see a new Matrix by an out trans person, as an out trans person, in a world where The Matrix’s trans creators have made it clear that The Matrix is about being trans, and everyone is really leaning into the Matrix-ness of it all. On the green carpet at the premiere, Lana’s slick black vinyl dress is covered in pills. She’s directing a Matrix-themed technical demo of Epic’s Unreal Engine 5; their CTO Kim Libreri was the sequels’ visual effects supervisor, and Lana is talking about this technology ushering in “an actual Matrix – a fully immersive, persistent world”. The Megacity they designed, spanning kilometers on a side, is being released for free use in new or shared realities.

This has the feeling of a wild and magical energy. I couldn’t begin to imagine what this movie will look like or be about, just as I couldn’t have imagined what the first Matrix would introduce into my life and how it would one day mean the blossoming of life itself. What I do know is I have no hesitation about getting unspeakably excited for another Matrix sequel. I’m ready to feel. ■

Further reading

• Lana Wachowski’s HRC Visibility Award Acceptance Speech (Transcript)
• “Why The Matrix Is a Trans Story According to Lilly Wachowski”
• “I was a teenage transgender supersoldier” by Nat Steele
• “Call Trans Opt: Transgender Themes in The Matrix” by Chelsea L. Shephard
• “On Why The Matrix and Its Meaning Matter to Transgender Politics Today” by Dr. Eleanor Lockhart
• “How The Matrix is a trans allegory” by Laura Kate
• “The Matrix As Trans Allegory” by @supership79
• “‘My Name Is Neo!’: The Matrix As Trans Allegory” by Charley Archer
• “Lana and Lilly Wachowski” by Cáel M. Keegan
• Depersonalization in Gender Dysphoria: The Transgender Depersonalization Project
• That’s Gender Dysphoria, FYI