M Y N A M E I S N E O
Gender-identity ideology 101
‘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, that 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.’
With these words the mysterious Morpheus tells Thomas Anderson, aka Neo, the hero of The Matrix, that his life is a sham. The film, released in 1999, has been interpreted in many ways, including as religious allegory, a vision of an online future and an expression of teenage alienation. But many trans people regard it as expressing their experiences. Some gender therapists even prescribe it as viewing for their clients’ families. It was written, produced and directed by the Wachowski siblings, both of whom were born male and came out as transwomen after its release. In 2020, Lilly, the younger and second to transition, confirmed that it was a ‘trans metaphor’. This chapter will use the film to explain gender-identity ideology. Its characters represent the figures that stalk transactivists’ discourse, from transphobes to detransitioners, and its premise and plot illuminate their worldview.
For those who have not seen it, a one-paragraph plot summary. Anderson, a computer programmer by day and hacker who goes by the name Neo at night, is intrigued by online references to something called ‘the Matrix’. The sinister Agent Smith warns him оff investigating further, but when Morpheus оffers him the choice between a red pill that will reveal the truth and a blue pill that will leave his life unchanged, Anderson chooses the red pill. The world fractures and melts away. He comes round in a womb-like pod plugged into a grid with countless other humans, and is rescued by the Nebuchadnezzar, Morpheus’s ship. Morpheus explains that Anderson’s life has been a simulation in the Matrix, a program devised by sentient machines after they defeated humans in a war that blotted out the sun. Since that deprived the machines of their power source, they created the Matrix to keep humans passive while their bio-energy was harvested. Morpheus thinks Neo is ‘The One’, a prophesied leader who will lead a fightback against the machines.
In the trans-allegorical reading, the Matrix is ‘cisnormative’ society, and people unplugged from it are trans. (The prefix ‘trans’ means ‘on the other side of’ in Latin; ‘cis’, meaning ‘on the same side of’, is a recent coinage for non-trans.) The red pill represents cross-sex hormones. Anderson’s exit from the pod where his body has been imprisoned represents the experience of transition: a second birth. Slimy, gasping and helpless, detached from the tubes that have sustained him, he is ejected from a dream state into the real world.
The Agents, terrifying programs that patrol the Matrix and destroy anyone who recognises it as illusory, represent transphobia. They are self-doubt, hatred of authenticity and acceptance of a vicious system. Morpheus, their chief enemy, represents the power of acceptance and self-actualisation. The Oracle, whom Morpheus brings Neo to visit, represents an older, wiser trans person, or a gender therapist. She tells Neo he is not The One, but only because that is what he must believe in order to do the right thing; later, she tells him he must discover his identity for himself.
Trinity, the toughest and coolest of the Nebuchadnezzar’s crew, plays the role allotted in action films to even the most kick-ass woman: she stands by her man. Her belief in Neo revives him after he is killed by Agent Smith. Before she administers the life-giving kiss, she whispers that he cannot be dead because the Oracle told her that she would fall in love with The One. She represents the importance of having one’s trans identity validated by others.
The moment when Neo starts to believe in himself оffers two trans-allegorical readings. As Agent Smith pummels Neo, he repeatedly refers to him as Mr Anderson – ‘deadnaming’ him, in the activists’ lexicon. Like ‘misgendering’ – referring to someone by pronouns matching their sex rather than their gender identity – this is deeply wounding. When Neo fights back, he asserts his true identity with the words ‘My name is Neo.’ (It sounds more dramatic than it looks on the page.) The scene is set in a subway station, and Smith, the avatar of transphobia, almost kills Neo by pushing him under a train.
That can be taken to represent campaigners’ oft-repeated claim that someone struggling with their gender identity faces a choice between transition and suicide. Lana, the older Wachowski, has spoken of contemplating suicide in a subway station pre-transition.
Cypher is a crew member who has tired of the grim conditions on the Nebuchadnezzar. He betrays the ship to an Agent in return for a promise that he will be plugged back into the Matrix (he dies before this can happen). A creepy character who desires Trinity and resents Neo, he is occasionally seen as symbolising ‘chasers’ – men who desire (genitally intact) transwomen. This is a relatively common male sexual taste (as evident from the number of ‘shemales’ on Pornhub, and tourists visiting Thailand for the ‘ladyboys’). But since it distinguishes between transwomen and natal women, many transwomen reject it as a perversion. Cypher is better understood as representing detransitioners as they are regarded from within gender-identity ideology. Taking the red pill did not work out for him, and he seeks to blame and take revenge on others. Self-hating and filled with regret, he collaborates with and is used by the forces of transphobia.
Switch, another crew member, is the only character written as explicitly trans. The Wachowskis planned for the part to be played by two actors, male in the real world and female in the Matrix, to represent a programming glitch. Though the studio vetoed the idea, the script and direction were left unaltered – which explains some puzzling details. Alone of all the Nebuchadnezzar’s crew, Switch wears white; this was intended as a visual cue that the two actors were the same character. Switch’s final words before dying inside the Matrix, in the ‘wrong’ body, are: ‘Not like this. Not like this.’ They are a lament for ‘trans erasure’ in death – the way a trans person is sometimes buried and mourned under their pre-transition identity.
Kid, who appears in the sequels and whose back-story is told in The Animatrix, a series of nine shorts, somehow manages to wake up from the Matrix without the aid of a pill. He represents the logical end-point of gender-identity ideology’s premise: the non-hormone, non-op trans person, who undergoes no medical or surgical treatment, but identifies out of their sex by nothing more than self-declaration.
The sequels subvert the first film to some extent (they are also heavy going). It turns out that the Matrix has been through many iterations, and that Neo is a program written to bring about each one’s destruction and replacement. But this time he rejects his allotted role, and peace is achieved by a synthesis between humans and machines. ‘The first movie is sort of classical in its approach,’ Lana Wachowski said in 2012. ‘The second movie is deconstructionist, and an assault on all of the things you thought to be true in the first movie . . .
The third movie is the most ambiguous, because it asks you to participate in the construction of meaning.’
