The Wachowskis Ruined an Entire Generation of Nerds

Twenty-two years ago, the Matrix changed the face of popular sci-fi and pop-philosophy. Whether it was for the better or not isn’t much of an issue now, considering how quickly pop culture trends shift, but let’s remember the time at which the film debuted: at the tail end of the 1990s, when the End of History seemed haughtily certain, when the gay rights lobby was still only gradually edging its way into big media, and when the internet was largely in its infancy. There was no Reddit back then, no prevailing currents of transgender ideology donning billboards, and New Atheism was barely into its ascendancy.

The film did a lot of things very well, and if I can show my age for a minute, I spent my teen years rewatching it on an early-generation DVD player hooked up to analogue television sets. The fact it was the greenest film ever made wasn’t quite as obvious in RGB coloring, but what made it stand out was more than that. It had incredible special effects at a time when that was still a selling point. It featured martial arts callbacks integrated into a modern setting with a very postmodern, science fiction-based story. It had a lot of guns and explosions. It had fantastic sets. And most importantly, it presented what were, at least for popular audiences at the time, relatively complex philosophical ideas in ways that were very easy to understand, even if some of them—as Jean Baudrillard somewhat famously complained—were simplified to the point of absurdity.

What made the film such a benchmark of the culture at the time was precisely this, however. It presented a character whose entire journey was one based around a single premise: the world isn’t what it seems like it is, and more than that, the entire world he took for granted was wrong. Completely wrong. Evil, even. The world he spent his life keeping his head down in so he could go along to get along was little more than a prison designed to literally suck his life force away. To make this premise have something of a happy ending, he also happened to be in a position to do something about all of it.

Let us try to ignore the murmurings of our old edgy teenage selves as we consider that point. Intuitively, particularly back then, most people carried this gut feeling around inside them. Something about modern life was wrong. Human beings weren’t meant to live like they were, weren’t meant to work like they did, and weren’t meant to indulge in such pleasures as they had, but because of the somewhat tedious, seemingly benign veneer of modernity, it was difficult to pin down exactly what the problem was. Go back and watch films from the late 90s, back before 9/11 changed the world, and you’ll find this to be something of a common theme.

The fact that it wasn’t just some one thing that was wrong with modern life, but in fact all of it, the entire project, was mostly left to the writings of otherwise facile Marxist writers and underground reactionaries. And yet, where films like Falling Down or American Psycho expressed similar sentiments in limited ways, it was The Matrix that, through allegory, was willing to present the whole problem: yes, the whole world, the entire modern frame of life, is in error. Its directors, who we’ll certainly get to in a minute, even had to use Christlike imagery in order to present a solution.

Now, in 2021, we have another Matrix film to, well, perhaps not look forward to, but at least acknowledge. You can watch the trailer for yourself. Considering that one of the brothers is apparently uninvolved with it, it comes across as a shallow attempt at a remake in order to cash in on an established franchise. Also, it looks like garbage, so it’s not like any of us are going to see it anyway. Maybe there are twists. Maybe there are turns. Who cares? The series ended two decades ago.

It has at least it’s given us an excuse to talk about The Matrix again! But before that, in light of both the film’s timing, and the fate of its directors, we should rewind the tape a bit.

Transgender Ideology in the Late 90s

You might be forgiven for asking what does The Matrix have to do with transgenderism, if the current year was 1999 rather than 2021. Within a decade and a half of the film’s release, both directors had ‘transitioned’ into living as women, legally changing their names from Larry and Andy to Lana and Lilly. We won’t be dwelling on Andy’s story in this post, as it’s somewhat lesser researched and not nearly as notorious as his brother’s. Transitioning in 2011 was a big deal, after all, but nothing like doing so in 2004.

In order to properly put this into context, we have to scale back our view. Transgenderism did not come out of nowhere. Larry, as we shall see in the following section, did not suddenly wake up one morning and decide to change his name and sense of fashion on a whim. Not only was there a long period of psychological conditioning that he freely engaged with, the culture at the time was also lurching steadily toward what we’d now just call ‘transgender acceptance’. The LGBT acronym didn’t even exist in public consciousness yet, and the Obergefell case was still more than a decade away, but make no mistake: transgenderism wasn’t as fringe at the time as some may try to believe.

Let’s remember that throughout the late-90s and mid-00s, the largest talk show figure on television was hosting and promoting transgender ideology. Admittedly, talk shows were daytime television trash: sensationalist garbage that served to highlight the freaks and ghouls of society for the entertainment of housewives preoccupied with ironing clothes, the mildly sick trapped in doctors’ waiting rooms, and unfortunate government employees awaiting their polygraphs. Daytime TV was well-known for its supposed irrelevancy. Indeed, that was the whole point of it. It’s important to remember that today, since although “daytime television” still exists, it certainly does not hold the viewership that it held almost twenty years ago.

But let’s introduce someone: David Reimer. Maybe you know about him. Oprah Winfrey did—she even featured him on her show in 2000. In fact, at the tail end of the 90s, Reimer was doing rounds in the media to publicize his story. But before we get to Reimer, we should introduce someone else, someone you probably do recognize: Dr. John Money. David Reimer is the reason John Money is famous.

Reimer was born in 1965 and inadvertently castrated during a botched circumcision. Dr. John Money, working at John’s Hopkins University Hospital in Baltimore, offered to resolve this problem, having been informed by cutting edge sexology theories regarding the fluidity of sex. Although the child was not subjected to a full transition surgery, an attempt was made to fashion the wound he received by the incompetent genital mutilators into something resembling a vulva. It was up to Money, and his interactions with the boy’s parents, to condition him into behaving like the girl he very obviously wasn’t.

If you watch the tape and accompanying interview, Oprah’s narrative on this case is pretty clear: what happened to Reimer was a catastrophic mistake. Had Money’s theories checked out, however, she would no doubt be pushing the opposite view, were Reimer even to have been famous at all. Money published his results and considered them successful, despite evidence to the contrary, for decades, but because he was dealing with a child, Reimer’s full identity was never disclosed until he went public in 1997.

Instead, the fruits of Money’s psychotic beliefs resulted in a life of “psychological torture” for Reimer, having remarked in one interview that he’d “give just about anything to go to a hypnotist to black out my whole past. Because it’s torture. What they did to you in the body is sometimes not near as bad as what they did to you in the mind.” Four years after he gave Oprah an interview, he was found in his car, dead, after having shot himself in the head. He left behind his wife and three kids. His twin brother had died a few years earlier, consumed by drug abuse and schizophrenia—another victim of Money’s conditioning experiments. We’ll get to those.

In the mean time, let’s fast-forward from 2000, when Oprah featured David Reimer, to 2007, when she featured Angelika and Jake, “two young guests who say they were born in the wrong body [sic]”. In this article, derived from the episode that featured the guests, you can see on full display fringe ideology that has found popular platforms today: ‘transition’ conditioning applied to teenagers, rumors of toddlers being ‘born in the wrong body’, and of course, positive spins on gender transitioning on the basis of identity.

It would be easy to argue that it seems Oprah did an about-face sometime between interviewing Reimer and Angelica & Jake. But it’s easier to see how consistent she was. Reimer was subjected to ruthless physical and psychological conditioning as the result of an accident, but his true identity came through in the end. She applies the same logic to her transgendered guests in 2007, except the conditioning they underwent was purely social. Her error, of course, is that it’s impossible to be born in a wrong body; such a belief suggests that you or anyone else has a choice in the matter, and that a mistake was made. But you have no alternative, and God is incapable of making mistakes.

Accidents or evils inflicted upon you by doctors are not comparable to children who grow up believing that there’s something wrong with themselves. There could very well be social pressure that contributes to such a feeling, or psychological, or spiritual, or even physical ailments. But the body you were born with is the body you were intended to have; ignoring this foundational part of understanding identity is what spirals transgenderism into the vehicle of abuse and grooming that it is.

The Mystery of Larry Wachowski

And so we should address the Wachowskis.

I’m not “deadnaming” anyone with this section heading. I’m blatantly stealing the title of a very relevant Rolling Stone article from fifteen years ago, which Rolling Stone happily memory-holed in the interests of preserving its woke credibility. You can still find it, if you know what to look for, and it’s certainly relevant to our interests here. Because, you see, Larry rather famously goes by “Lana” today, and he played a front-and-center roll in the drama that ultimately gave us the popularization of transgender ideology.

The linked article is worth reading, but only for those not faint of heart. Like The Last Closet, there’s plenty that should be observed with your eyes wide open; if you’re of the sort that finds too much scandal in what the sexual revolution has done to both American and, more broadly, human identity, then perhaps stay away. Likewise for those unwilling to be reminded of the innate edginess of Rolling Stone’s writing circa 2006. It pulls no punches because, again, quite frankly, the story being told needs to be seen to be believed.

I encourage you to read it for yourself. The long and short of it comes down to this: the Wachowski brothers weren’t LA natives. The Matrix propelled them into stardom and financial success, allowing them the freedom and wherewithal to indulge in whatever passions they saw fit. For Larry, that meant somewhat eccentric sexual practices, BDSM dungeons, and dominatrixes. After years of what we’d refer to on the internet as “sissyfication”, he divorced his wife, shacked up with his dominatrix girlfriend—who, herself, was a staple of the LA BDSM scene and something of an underground celebrity—and debuted as transgender. He legally changed his name to Lana not long afterward—and all at around the time V for Vendetta hit the big screen.

There was only about five years in between the Wachowskis exploding out of indie film making and Larry turning into Lana. It only took about five years for an introverted, mildly confused 90s-artistic type to pour out his soul into the bottomless pit of his passions, in an area of Los Angeles no doubt infested with demonic activity. In five years, or thereabouts, Larry’s understanding of the world became ruled entirely by his disordered sexual inclinations, aided by the wanton indulgence of millions of dollars, access to LA’s seedy dungeon culture, and a dominatrix snake of a girlfriend.

Larry Wachowski was certainly no stranger to sexual eccentricities. It’s not like they just suddenly erupted after he found himself with a few extra zeroes attached to his bank account. Sexual themes about identity are fairly subdued in The Matrix, but they become a little more pronounced in the sequels. And all three films are a far cry from Bound, the Wachowski brothers’ debut effort as independent directors. Needless to say, Larry’s ‘transition’ stood at the end of a long history of ‘alternative living’, which comes across pretty obviously in their films.

What most of us didn’t really think would happen was that ‘alternative living’ would cease being ‘alternative’ after only a decade and a half. Most millennials and older zoomers are today living lives that would have been considered “alt” back in 1999, consuming media and indulging in interests that would be “alt”, and they almost certainly entertain proclivities that should be called “alt”—were it not that so much of this has been normalized. The inmates began running the asylum.

In the case of Larry, however, the lifestyle he embraced was one that had begun making waves in late-90s culture as a shocking ornament for the End of History. Sexual deviance, already well known in certain limited pockets of the country since the AIDS crisis exploded the realities of homosexual lifestyles, took on a more normalized and darker turn—but remained, at the time, nonetheless deviant. Wilkinson’s article makes it pretty clear that Larry had more or less completed his ‘transition’ well before he officially “came out” and changed his name. The only thing that stood in his way was, in all likelihood, a recognition that if he wanted to keep getting funding for movies, he’d have to wait for the culture to catch up. Unfortunately, that only took a couple of short years.

This is before Obergefell v Hodges, and not by a small margin. This is almost a decade before homosexual marriage became not merely the law of the land, but a common, expected, and popular opinion to defend in the public square. And that decision concerned (merely) the nature of marriage. It was unconcerned with the nature of the human person. And yet, in 2006, there we were. The brazenness of the sexual revolution acts continuously off of long, slow-burn tactics affecting counter-culture. This has been coming for a while.

John Money, Professional Pervert

Larry became Lana as a result of sexual conditioning, albeit with his (presumably) full consent. The way Wilkinson describes the relationship between Lana and his “dom”, Karin Winslow, leaves open-ended the question of what exactly consent means. There’s probably more going on there than meets even his investigative eye, and certainly more than is any business of ours. But, at the end of the day, Larry entered the LA BDSM scene of his own volition.

The same cannot be said for David Reimer, as briefly discussed above. But nonetheless, Reimer himself was also subjected to sexual conditioning, despite not consenting to any of it. For one thing, unlike Larry, who more or less began the primary leg of his sexual odyssey well into adulthood and at the peak of his creative career, Reimer’s conditioning would have been called severe sexual abuse were it not performed by a research “sexologist” and at John’s Hopkins University Hospital.

In the interests of both brevity and courtesy for you, dear readers, we’ll brush over the graphic and revolting details of Money’s experiments upon the Reimer twins. Suffice it to say that such experiments prove only that Money’s research was little more than depraved pedophilic fantasy, legitimized by the fact he was a doctor, of some sort, and that he worked out of an academy. Money himself, in large part because of the reports he wrote on the subject of the Reimer twins, is somewhat well-known now, but mostly because of the magnitude of his failure. The case that made his career, which he insisted was a success, resulted not only in the opposite of what he claimed, but even in the suicides of both of its subjects.

Curiously enough, John Money was platformed by another familiar figure in this post. According to John Colapinto’s book on David Reimer, Money happened to have been a guest of Oprah’s back in 1988. I can’t find any clips of that online, so we’ll have to go with how Colapinto describes it. This comes in part of the book where Colapinto explains Money’s obsession with what the doctor called “child sexual rehearsal play.” If that’s a term that sounds like a very obvious cover for pedophiles to abuse children, then you’re in good company, because frankly, there’s no other way to parse such a statement. It’s academic jargon designed with people like Money in mind.

Colapinto explains:

In a 1988 appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show, Money unexpectedly veered from the show’s main topic (intersexuality) and put in a plug for his pet theory. “I worked among aboriginal people on the north coast of Australia in the early seventies,” Money told Opera’s audience. “I was very interested in the fact that they don’t impose a sexual taboo on themselves, and they don’t punish children for doing normal sexual rehearsal play… and I was very surprised to find out that there were no bisexual or no gay people in there.” Oprah, who had clearly not been briefed on this particular aspect of Money’s research, tried to deflect the remark. “I’m almost afraid to ask what all that means, Dr. Money,” she interjected. Money, however, was not to be put off, and continued with an explicit description of the sexual rehearsal play he now claimed to have directly witnessed among the Yolngu.¹

The Yolngu incident is described a few pages earlier in the same book, in which the shoddiness of Money’s theories are made clear. In an historical repetition of Margaret Meade’s use of projecting personal fantasies upon primitive tribes, Money’s trip to Australia did indeed include a few weeks with the Yolngu. However, again, as Colapinto explains, “Money heard a second-hand report from an eight-year-old child that ‘two six-year-old relatives’”² had engaged in that sexual rehearsal play that Money referred to. The problem is, one Professor J.E. Cawte, who had studied this tribe for thirty years by that point, claimed “he has never witnesses sexual rehearsal play among the tribal children and knows of no researcher who has.”³ Worse still, the reason Money was so tied to this theory of ‘rehearsal play’, that it prevented sexual neuroses or dysfunctions later in life, was something else Cawte called into question: Cawte was a psychiatrist during his time with the Yolngu and “says he has treated many of the Yolngu adults for a wide variety of what he calls ‘sexual neuroses’ and dysfunctions of every variety.’”⁴

Oprah, perhaps, could be forgiven for Money’s disgusting remarks on her show in 1988. Maybe she didn’t see them coming. But again, shock television’s interest in bringing this to the forefront of American consciousness cannot be ignored. Even in the late 80s, it turns out, there was a conscious push toward introducing notions of sexual depravity with increasing deviance from what should be considered acceptable behavior. Consider the fact that Money, despite what he actually talked about, was appearing on the show to discuss inter-sexuality—the extraordinarily rare phenomenon of sterile hermaphroditism that undergirded conversations on transgender ideology for a couple decades.

What we see here, in addition to the propping up of sexual perverts like Money into the public eye, is the heavy emphasis on sexual behavior as a means of understanding identity. This probably isn’t news to anyone living today, nor indeed for the last hundred years, but it’s hard to ignore that it has been sexual perverts who, by and large, have shaped modern dialogue around matters of identity. People like Margaret Meade and Alfred Kinsey spring immediately to mind, as E. Michael Jones explores in his book Degenerate Moderns. Although professional researchers, the common threads that these figures have tends to be subverting their research in the interests of promoting sexual ideologies—the revolution—that they themselves probably hold to.

Money subjected the Reimer twins to sexual behavior that would have gotten anyone else arrested. He even, apparently, photographed some of it⁵. Sexual conditioning itself is at the heart of how people aligned to this sexual revolution consider identity. The behavior is the point. Questions of sexual ‘identity’ are simply ways of dealing with the passions that they wish to indulge in. And any means of promoting the behavior is, for them, a step in the right direction. We see this with Money’s interests in subjecting the Reimer twins to viewing pornography and acting out “rehearsal play”, to Larry Wachowski entering LA as a confused outsider and ending up married to its most famous dominatrix.

The Transitioning of The Matrix

If you’d asked someone what The Matrix was about in 1999—whether he was a geek or just an average moviegoer—the answer would have been more or less the same: a man leading a double life as a computer hacker and salaryman, increasingly demoralized by his seemingly meaningless life in an incongruent reality, discovers he’s living in a computer program that feeds on people’s bioelectric energy. With the help of other awoken misfits, he breaks out of the matrix in order to free mankind.

Straightforward enough.

Ask the same question today and the answer you get will depend entirely on whether you’re speaking to a geek or speaking to an average moviegoer. The latter’s response will probably be the same as it was twenty years ago. The geek’s will probably be laced with transgender ideology, illuminated by the lives of the directors, and informed by a decade and a half of transgender popularization. The Matrix, they will tell you, is in fact an allegory for a transgendered person’s understanding of the world. For the sane interpreter, it’s a clearly grasping at straws, but the position of Larry’s sexual eccentricities can’t be overlooked. Yet at the same time, the Larry of 1999 was not the same Larry who finally transitioned in 2005. One of these Larrys suffered from doubts about the world stemming from any possible number of psychological or spiritual ailments; the other had gotten accustomed to the BDSM scene and LA nightlife, to say nothing of his ruined marriage and dominatrix girlfriend. In other words, the Larry of 2005 indulged and embraced a habit of behavior that the Larry of 1999 was still alien to.

The Matrix is pretty obviously about modern alienation and the nature of a person’s identity. We know this because the question “what defines reality?” is at the heart of its narrative. For Morpheus, reality is the barren, oppressive, difficult, but tangible world of the power plant, the Nebuchadnezzar, and the oatmeal-slop nutritional feed they call meals. For Cypher, reality is a little more subjective; it’s the taste-image sensations of a rare steak at a gourmet restaurant, even when he knows, as he says, that it’s just a matter of sending false signals into his hypothalamus. Reality is whatever is feeding information to his mind; whether that information actually comes from his fingers or tongue or eyes isn’t important.

This brings us to a corollary theme: how one attempts to define reality requires one to define identity at the same time. For the context of The Matrix, this comes in the form of a body’s relationship to its mind. Morpheus considered that they had to be united in order for an authentic experience to be known. But at the same time, he recognized the virtual world as, at least for those trapped in it, also a reality worth consideration. The world of The Matrix functions according to a popularly understood notion of substance dualism, with the two clashing worldviews—that of Morpheus and that of Cypher—arguing over whether the body is relevant to a genuine experience in the first place. Cypher’s counterargument is, obviously, that it isn’t.

This here is what trans-advocates can sink their claws into when interpreting The Matrix: authentic experience as it relates to the ‘mind-body problem’. Within the context of The Matrix, the ‘mind-body problem’ serves only to explore themes about humanity’s relationship with virtual technology, how that affects understanding reality, and most especially, how it highlights the film’s overall themes of alienation. In other words, it’s appropriate for a science fiction story, and not all that much of a ‘problem’ at all. But in real life, there are alternative theories regarding what sort of relationship minds and souls have to physical bodies. In suggesting these theories, however, what space transgender ideology has to maneuver evaporates.

What has happened to the interpretation of The Matrix, this application of transgender ideology onto something otherwise benign or even beneficial to ponder, has occurred throughout the ‘geek sphere’. Every element of nerd culture has been attacked and subverted by this arm of the sexual revolution, with the sole exception being perhaps Japanese media. As Gamergate taught us, this was not coincidental.

It’s quite possible that nerd culture was expressly targeted by revolutionaries in order to better spread their ideology. It’s more likely that this occurred on a smaller scale, but in accidental conjunction to the ‘organic’ growth of transgender ideology in general. Consider the sorts of demographics commonly associated with geek media: outsiders, ‘autists’, loners—not to paint with too broad a stroke, but someone who spent his time collecting action figures and playing retro games well into his teenage years, whose dad was never present in his life, and who did at best a mediocre job at school, was far more open to the sort of coercion typified by the LGBT community than, say, the high school’s star quarterback. Most of the way transgender ideology spread back in the late-00s and 2010s was by offering a sense of community to people who considered themselves outcasts.

Granted, being considered a social outcast in the 2000s was pitched something cool, anyway. Media has for at least three generations strongly encouraged rebelliousness and moving against the grain, usually because self-obsessed loners without a strong social circle made for better consumers and, as we see now, better ideological drones. This is exactly the case with those who were preyed upon by, and later became predators themselves, the trans-positive segments of the LGBT community.

And all of this was possible only with the spread of the internet. Transgenderism reproduces in a way that’s slightly different from how homosexuality does, although the latter has taken on aspects of the former’s method now. It used to be that an uncle, a reasonably close friend of the family, a trusted coach or teacher, a mentor, or some other male figure in personal proximity played a nefarious role in a young man’s “coming out” as homosexual. Women’s experiences were a little more complicated, most of the time, but followed not dissimilar patterns.

Transgendered individuals, on the other hand, don’t tend to follow this pattern—at least from what I’ve noticed. A suspicious uncle or a poorly-disciplined aunt might play the same role as before, but more often than not, transgender ideology becomes embedded in a young person’s consciousness as a result of alienation. The vehicle for even suggesting a sexual component to this alienation is, of course, sexual conditioning. In the old days, that usually meant people had to do things to this kid. Now, while that’s certainly still a problem, there’s an easier method: the free and unlimited access to just about any form of pornography one can imagine. The porn itself is the abuse, and several generations of men and women now have grown up ‘freely’ subjecting themselves to it.

We can think here of Oprah’s consistent reaction, on the basis of consent, to the story of David Reimer versus those of Angelika & Jake. One story was horrific because the person at the center of it had no choice in what was done to him. The other stories were uplifting, because they apparently chose to revolt against their own birthrights of their own volition. And yet, would theirs not be the more tragic story? Reimer, sadly, committed suicide after heroically coming forward with what happened to him. Tragic, certainly. But again, what of those who freely destroy both their bodies and their minds with drugs or mutilation, and who are so frightened of an alternative explanation, or otherwise so indoctrinated into a sexual ideology, that they cannot bear to walk any path except the one that’s killing them?

When we see drug addicts on the street engage in the same behavior, we understandably react with shock and revulsion, and yet when we see someone conned into transgenderism, we’re supposed to believe that the exact same behavior is an expression of love. Destroying a healthy body can never be considered correcting an error. This is especially true when the ends of sexual behavior are so contorted as to lose their meaning, and the behavior itself weaponized by a ruling ideology.

Conclusion

What’s been showcased here has been a long steady action of separation. Separate the mind from the body. Separate identity from substance. Separate the behavior from the intention. Separate the man from the group. As you separate things that shouldn’t be taken apart, something has to be used to keep the system of thought from collapsing: transgender ideology is one of those components. Where a vulnerable teenager feels isolated from his single mom and his classmates, the trans community will be there to encourage him—but in exchange for his soul.

The Matrix shed light on an absolutely key component of modern living: that there is something wrong with the world, and it’s quite possible that how we use technology is part of that. But it’s deeper than mere technology. It’s alienation, isolation, desolation. There’s a reason the “desert of the real” that Morpheus shows Neo is shown inside yet another computer program: that abject poverty of spirit is exactly what the denizens of the matrix carry within themselves. It’s the very programming of the system. For as much as Baudrillard may have had his complaints, the truth is that the Wachowskis understood the hollowness of postmodern living better than he probably realized, and in fact, understood it according to his own general philosophy. Their only mistake was to try appealing to him with an action movie instead of an unreadable volume of exposition.

We can see how transgenderism wormed its way into The Matrix despite the film having, by any reasonable interpretation, effectively nothing to do with the story or themes. It wormed its way into the discussion the same way transgender ideology wormed its way into popular discourse. It preyed upon those most likely to resonate strongly with that sense of modern desolation and total alienation that The Matrix was actually about. Those that had an intuitive sense that people weren’t meant to live the way modernity required of them were gradually conditioned into being prime targets for transgender ideology. It took a lot of pornography to do it, but the results speak for themselves.

The Matrix doesn’t try to ask the question of why the modern world isn’t really quite right. It simply takes it as a given and imposes that world as a virtual experience for the sake of its plot. As it turns out, transgender ideology also doesn’t try to ask that question. Instead, transgender ideology introduces the question backwards: it’s not ultimately the world that’s wrong, but you poor alienated subject that has been born into the wrong body. What’s wrong with the world, then, is that it isn’t full of the very things that drive modern alienation. Its conditioned you to feel bad about this. The logic is a little circular, but you can see for yourself how this works as something like a cult or a drug addiction.

It’s a shame that The Matrix has been co-opted by such likes as these, however. True, it’s a little dated now, and the sheer scope of its hype when it dropped in 1999 makes it come across as slightly overrated. But at heart, it’s a solid action film with a compelling plot. Where impressionable teens in 2000 might have seen the film and resonated with its theme of alienation, however, the same sorts of teens today are funneled into a self-destructive and sexually charged lifestyle that tends to mutilate its adherents before they’re able to leave it.

Maybe that’s really the ironic twist of how transgender ideology fits into the film. In order to leave The Matrix, you wake up in an unrecognizable world, covered in scars, but get to interact with real human beings instead of machines. Semi-anonymous ‘communities’ of people online, like fellow matrix denizens, are no longer the ones providing context for your life and actions, but real human beings you live next door to or operate in a real community with. The falsified and hypercharged imagery of pornography ceases to play a central role in your life. Isn’t it fitting that Neo’s private moment with Cypher, when they’re both observing the matrix code on the screens of the Nebuchadnezzar, is Cypher pointing out blondes, brunettes, and redheads?

Cast in that light, The Matrix is less a film modeled after trans-affirming stories like Angelika & Jake, and more one modeled after the horrific crimes inflicted upon people like David Reimer. Leaving the matrix isn’t about coming out as a transsexual, it’s about seeing through the ideology imprisoning people in the dysfunctional framework of modern life. One of those ideologies is transgenderism. No wonder they look to subvert it.

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1Colapinto, John, As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised As a Girl (New York: Harper Collins, 2000), 90-91.

2Ibid, 88.

3Ibid, 89.

4Ibid.

5Ibid, 85-87.