Andy Wachowski Transgender

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All of the love to “The Matrix” co-director Lilly Wachowski, who just came out as transgender - All of the love to “The Matrix” co-director Lilly Wachowski, who just came out as transgender.

Lilly Wachowski, who co-directed The Matrix under the name Andy Wachowski, has come out as a transgender woman in a beautiful and eloquent statement penned in the Windy City Times, a Chicago LGBTQ publication.

Lilly, 48, explained that she was in danger of being outed by tabloids — including the UK’s Daily Mail — before she was able to come out herself. As she noted, the stress from being publicly outed in the press can lead some trans folks to commit suicide:

“The ‘news’ has almost come out a couple of times. Each was preceded by an ominous email from my agent—reporters have been asking for statements regarding the ‘Andy Wachowski gender transition’ story they were about to publish. In response to this threatened public outing against my will, I had a prepared a statement that was one part piss, one part vinegar and 12 parts gasoline. . . But it didn’t happen. The editors of these publications didn’t print a story that was only salacious in substance and could possibly have a potentially fatal effect. And being the optimist that I am, I was happy to chalk it up to progress.”

However, a man claiming to be a journalist with the Daily Mail showed up at her doorstep, which prompted Lilly Wachowski to go public with her personal journey — especially since that publication had outed UK elementary school teacher and trans woman Lucy Meadows, who later took her own life. “And now here they were, at my front door, almost as if to say — ‘There’s another one! Let’s drag ’em out in the open so we can all have a look!'” she wrote.

Lilly’s sister is Lana Wachowski, her co-director on The Matrix. Lana previously went by the name Larry Wachowski and publicly came out as trans in 2012. Lilly pictured  headlines about the “Wachowski brothers now sisters,” and she refused to be dragged by a tabloid. “So yeah, I’m transgender. And yeah, I’ve transitioned,” she wrote. “I’m out to my friends and family. Most people at work know too. Everyone is cool with it. Yes, thanks to my fabulous sister they’ve done it before, but also because they’re fantastic people. Without the love and support of my wife and friends and family I would not be where I am today.”

Matrix director Lilly Wachowski comes out as trans https://t.co/sKDlE4poA2 pic.twitter.com/HmM9jDz5O9
— BBC Newsbeat (@BBCNewsbeat) March 9, 2016

Lilly and Lana Wachowski have worked together on the films The Matrix, Bound, and Cloud Atlas — and to have two unbelievably legendary writers come out into the public eye is groundbreaking for transgender acceptance in our society.

“[T]hough we have come a long way since Silence of the Lambs, we continue to be demonized and vilified in the media where attack ads portray us as potential predators to keep us from even using the goddamn bathroom,” Lilly wrote. “. . . We are not predators, we are prey.”

Lilly also used this opportunity to highlight the societal construct of gender binary — and that it’s a “false idol”:

“[T]o ‘transition’ imparts a sense of immediacy, a before and after from one terminus to another. But the reality, my reality is that I’ve been transitioning and will continue to transition all of my life, through the infinite that exists between male and female as it does in the infinite between the binary of zero and one. We need to elevate the dialogue beyond the simplicity of binary. Binary is a false idol.”

We congratulate Lilly for publicly sharing this news about her gender identity and thank her for calling attention to the important issues around transitioning.