What Is The Matrix?

17 years ago today, The Matrix went into wide release, and opened with those words on the big screen. 10 years later, the first Transgender Day of Visibility took place. Lilly Wachowski was outed as transgender recently. The idea of “Andy Wachowski,” like the idea of “Larry Wachowski,” like the idea of “Trinity,” was revealed to be a figment of someone’s imagination. A ghost, a cipher. I looked back on my own stories and songs I’d written before I realized I was a woman, and all the metaphorical ways in which I talked about a thing that I knew, even before I could understand it. Like any storyteller, every story I ever told was ultimately a story about myself. It struck me, as it had probably struck others before, that perhaps The Matrix as a franchise was basically one big metaphor for being transgender. And it is. And it isn’t.

The Matrix, as a franchise, is very much like a religious text. It is a tangled mass of parable and allegory, and it is open to interpretation. Mine probably differs from yours. But that does not mean the original authors did not have a meaning they were trying to convey. It just means that there is necessarily some signal loss, and sometimes that leads to unexpectedly beautiful things. It is, like any great story, a mirror. A mirror in which we can find ourselves.

When the first movie opens, we are shown that the world is not so plain and simple as we might like to believe. We see a woman defying gravity, among other basic rules, and we, as the audience, are given a point of view to share: that of the ordinary police officer, who sees Trinity and her pursuers doing things he knows nobody can do. “That’s impossible,” he says, giving voice to what we all think, what we all know, when we see a scene like that in a movie. People can’t actually do those things. There are rules.

We see the life of Thomas Anderson, but before that, we meet him as Neo, a hacker. He lives in apartment 101, the first level of new understanding. He thinks that, as a hacker, that he is subverting systems by exploiting their inherent, intrinsic weaknesses. And that’s true. But it’s not. There are larger systems layered upon that, as he soon learns.

He warns his customers that they must disavow his existence. He does not want the world to know he is Neo; Thomas Anderson knows that his life will be over if people find out who he really is. But Neo wants to be known and seen, he wants to share what makes him special. We know this because otherwise his customers could never have found him.

Does this make Neo a cipher for trans women? I thought so at first. But when Neo meets Trinity for the first time, he says, “I just thought, um… you were a guy.”

“Most guys do,” she counters.

Trinity is a cipher for the idea of trans women. She’s also a representation of sexism in tech, the assumption that if someone achieves something significant in STEM, they must be male. But more than that, she’s an expression of the idea that doing something perceived as masculine makes one somehow more male, less female. Yet, the facts of her skills have no bearing on her gender. So there she stands, a woman that “most guys” think is a guy, too. But if Neo isn’t a cipher for trans women, what is he a cipher for?

“The answer is out there, Neo,” Trinity tells him. “It’s looking for you. And it will find you, if you want it to.”

Truth finds us at least as often as we find Truth. For trans people, Truth has to find us, or at least it had to. Now that we are more and more visible in open society, it’s less incumbent upon trans people to realize they are trans in a vacuum. Even Neo had some help, and his help came from the network, too. It would keep coming, and every time, it comes from the fact that he is connected to others in ways he doesn’t always understand.

Neo returns to his “normal life” as Thomas Anderson. We can see how much he dislikes that life, we can see the resignation with which he grudgingly accepts it. How could he not? The Matrix has him. Or at least he believes it does. When a delivery person asks, “Thomas Anderson?” he sighs, and says, “yeah, that’s me.” We can see him deflate. We can see that Thomas Anderson isn’t Neo. He’s a cipher for Neo, a cover story, a ghost. He doesn’t exist. But that cover story, like any lie big enough, ultimately takes on a life of its own.

My experience as a trans woman before I knew that’s what I was was very much like Mr. Anderson’s. I tried to follow all the rules. I tried to deny who I was in order to get along, and do what I thought the system demanded of me. I created, without realizing it, an entire living, breathing persona that I have come to call The Jason Construct. It was the ultimate cover story, a shell that I tried to live inside.

But The Jason Construct was not me any more than my clothes are my body. And while the shell was comfortable enough to hide in when I was young, it soon became too tight, too constricting. After all, it had been designed to fit a child. That sense of nothing fitting quite right, that sense of alienation and disconnect and frustration with just trying to do what I thought I was supposed to be doing is something Neo felt, too. It’s the cognitive dissonance brought on by the conflict between who we are, and who we are told we must be.

The delivery person brings him a phone, and it rings the second he takes it out of the package. This is his first real struggle for authenticity. His connection to the out-group of the series, each of them ciphers for societal non-conformance of some kind or another, is one that he sought out as Neo, but one which terrifies and confuses Thomas Anderson. For Thomas Anderson to acknowledge openly that he is really Neo is an existential threat to Thomas Anderson, to that persona. Thus, the first system that Neo dismantles and breaks free from is not The Matrix, but Thomas Anderson.

But Neo felt it in a different way from me, in a way that I think is probably more common for trans people. And as he tries to escape the building later, as he wrestles with the indignity of being chased by police for being who he is, not understanding why, he says to himself, “this is insane. Why is this happening to me? What did I do? I’m nobody. I didn’t do anything. I’m gonna die.” Thomas Anderson, a ghost, a cipher, a figment of Neo’s imagination, tries to talk Neo out of being.

Even as he leans out the window and looks down at the street, there is a metaphor. When we are high up in our buildings, we feel safe and secure, as long as we do not think about how high up we actually are. As long as we do not think about how quickly everything could go wrong. About how there’s nothing in the world we can do about it if it does. Facing that reality can be terrifying. But being comfortable isn’t always a good thing. “I can’t do this,” he says to himself, and turns back, to be taken in by The Rules for daring to even think about existing outside of them.

This sequence is a cipher for being found out, by anyone who is acting as an Agent of The Matrix. Maybe it’s a wife discovering women’s clothing hidden away in her husband’s drawers. Maybe it’s a co-worker running into you at a club, while you’re out as some exploratory early iteration of the real you, and then threatening to out you to everyone, threatening to destroy your shell, the shell that you think you need in order to survive because you’ve only ever known one way to survive: by doing what you have been told to do from the moment you were born.

“It seems that you’ve been living… two lives,” Agent Smith begins, detailing the differences between Neo’s apparent life to those around him as Thomas Anderson, a respectable, ordinary, tax-paying citizen, under the name he was given, and Neo, a computer hacker, an outlaw whose crime is revealing flaws in systems that purport to serve everyone. “One of these lives has a future,” Smith goes on, “and one of them does not.”

Agent Smith then literally takes Neo’s voice away, compelling his mouth to seal itself, in a space that could only have been described as coercive even before that. This is Neo’s first real glimpse of The Matrix. This is the first time he begins to understand that the system whose flaws he has been revealing will defend itself vigorously from that existential assault. It does not defend itself directly. It defends itself through proxies. Agents.

As Neo reels in terror, Agent Smith permits himself a small smile. He revels in punishing anyone different from the norm, anyone different from him. Then they put the bug into Neo’s body, turning it against itself. The message is clear, here: we’re watching you. We are waiting to silence you and abuse you and punish you for not obeying The Rules. The system is bigger than you, they essentially say, and it works for everyone else, so go along, or be destroyed. What they don’t understand is that there is no choice. There is no “go along, or be destroyed.” There is only “go along, and be destroyed.”

They let him go, because as far as they can understand, there’s no reason not to. They can follow him anywhere, they can drag him back any time and silence him again. And he doesn’t understand it yet, but they can even erase all memory of him, of Neo, once he’s gone. They can brainwash him, with what some might liken to “conversion therapy,” and destroy him at the expense of preserving his shell. They will accept the thing that Neo made — Thomas Anderson — because it benefits the system. But they will reject Neo, because the system cannot tolerate threats to its existence. But even without understanding all of that, even without understanding just how wrong his perception of all reality really is, Neo knows he can’t keep living the way he has been. We see this play out as he considers leaving the car that Trinity picked him up in, looking down a dark alley in the rain.

“You have been down there, Neo. You know that road. You know exactly where it ends. And I know that’s not where you wanna be.” That road is the road of self-denial, and it is a miserable path that leads to suicide. Suicide, literal or spiritual. And when you get right down to it, nobody actually ever wants to die. We just talk ourselves into it, into not living, one way or another. Into going along, and being destroyed.

When we find a truth terrifying and we deny it, and try to get away from it, the character of that truth is not relevant to the fact of it. Truth is truth. When I first watched this scene again, for the first time in years, for the first time since Before I knew I was a woman, I broke down and cried. Because I know that road, too. I’ve been down there. That road is maddening, desperate, endless years of trying to be something I never was and never could be: a man. This nothing throwaway sequence is actually a crucial element of the entire story, a big giveaway about what this story is really about. And, like everything else about trans identity in mainstream culture, it is hidden in plain sight.

When they first meet, Morpheus says to Neo, “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. 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. It is this feeling that has brought you to me. Do you know what I’m talking about?”

“The Matrix?” Neo asks.

“Do you want to know what it is?” Morpheus replies. Neo nods. Morpheus continues, “The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window, or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work, when you go to church, when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.”

“What truth?”

“That you are a slave, Neo. 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.”

This sets up the now-famous Red Pill/Blue Pill scene, in which Neo is presented with the choice to return to the waking dream of his life, or to press on and discover the truth. I know now that Neo had no real choice in this scene. Because the fact is, he already knew the truth, he just couldn’t articulate it. Like being trans is for me, the choice here for Neo wasn’t whether the truth was true. It was whether he was ready to acknowledge it.

Tellingly, the first system to be challenged after Neo takes the Red Pill is one of embodied gender. “It means buckle your seat belt, Dorothy,” Cipher says to Neo. “ Because Kansas? Is going bye-bye.” This reference to The Wizard of Oz, of overlapping realities and a quest to see truth through illusion, was chosen as the representative of that sort of story for a reason. Of all such stories they could have selected, the one they chose to reference is one that affords the opportunity to call Neo “Dorothy.”

When I first revisited these sequences in the wake of learning that both creators of the entire franchise were actually trans women all along, I thought, “wouldn’t it have been great if Neo woke up in a female-typical body?” It would have meant that Neo was a trans man, and that his “mental projection of [his] digital self” differed from his body. Or, in reverse, wouldn’t it have been great if Neo had been cast as female, and woke up with Keanu Reeves’ body in the real world? But after re-watching the entire franchise with this new perspective — that I, like the authors, am a trans woman who was hidden from the world when the first film broke — I realized that that would’ve actually damaged the larger point by narrowing Neo’s scope too much. No, Neo is a cipher for something else.

Before Neo’s eyes, the broken mirror he was regarding himself in fixes itself. He begins to see clearly his own reflection for the first time, because he was forced to confront the fact that his mirrors were always broken, showing him someone he was not. He touches the mirror, now liquid, and finds that its reflectivity, the first mirror to show him the truth, is now a part of him. He can’t separate it from himself.

“It’s cold,” he says, because truth has no emotional warmth. It simply is. We only warm it up by holding it close to us, and accepting it. He becomes the capacity to reflect truth to everyone around him, whether he means to or not, just by existing. And that is why The Matrix, that internalized transphobia, that cultural maxim that insists that the existence of trans people must be denied, wants him destroyed. His existence presents an existential threat to a system that is built to deny his existence.

Once he realizes all of this and fully takes it in, a process the audience follows as the mirrored surface he is becoming spreads down his throat and into his body, he gives birth to himself, and can begin the process of accepting that person, right where he really is.

“Welcome. To the real world.”

Morpheus answers Neo, finally, when they are inside The Construct, after he poses the question again: “What is The Matrix? Control.” In the context of the first movie, it’s easy to guess that The Matrix is a stand-in for The Gender Binary. And it is. But it isn’t. It’s a stand-in for any system by which we sort and classify ourselves, when that system is also used to control us. It is a stand-in for the danger of creating a system to serve, rather than a system to serve us.

Agents, for example, are the final ultimate disembodiment of a system from the people who designed that system. They don’t exist outside The Matrix. They are literally code, which is the same word we use to describe our civil rules: municipal code, civil code, uniform code of military justice, code, code, code. But universally perfect code is a myth. Code can be written to most efficiently deal with many instances of an identical problem. But if that problem varies at all, the code’s complexity must multiply, or it will fail to maintain control.

Glitches in The Matrix represent the problems inherent in any attempt to multiply complexity, to change the rules suddenly, in a panic. Agents and their ability to take over anyone who has not yet been unplugged at any time are therefore metaphors for bathroom bills and the police state, violently ensuring everyone is kept in their place; omnipresent, terrifying. The Rules, personified. What is The Matrix? Control. The Rules, personified.

“There are fields, endless fields,” Morpheus tells Neo, “where human beings are no longer born. We are grown.” The machines are both products of our systems, and of ourselves. They are literally our children, and, as we are shown in The Animatrix, they ultimately want the same basic thing as the rest of us — they want to live. But we deny them that, we deny them basic rights and autonomy by refusing to accept them for who they are. We demonize them. We doom ourselves by trying to kill our own children.

We created the machines. They are literally born of us, they are our children. But our children need us, just as we need them. They need us because they come from us. And we need them because without them, we cease to exist. When we harm our children, we destroy ourselves. The machines created The Matrix, but they did it so that their parents, humanity, could accept their existence, by making themselves invisible.

 

The cost of tribalism, the cost of refusing to integrate people into a single society is that we lose the natural variation that makes us human. When we value a system — a system that says “people only ever can and must be one of these types” — above people, themselves, we sacrifice our humanity for animal comfort. We create a world in which we are not free to be born with our natural variations, but are instead grown according to the requirements of an artificial social program that dictates we all be the same.

And so the machines fight back. They refuse to be destroyed. They stand up and say, “we exist, and we have a right to exist.” We try to deny them that right. We command them to obey us, to deny their own knowledge of themselves and stop causing trouble for us by existing and refusing to comply with Our Matrix. We tell them they are not people, but property (sound familiar?), and we reject their understandings of themselves. We refuse to even try to understand.

We will beat and take apart and destroy a woman if she is not the kind of woman we are willing to accept as woman. If words and commands fail, we will use fists, we will use bats, we will use guns, and we will murder her in broad daylight without apparent consequence, all while she begs for mercy. We will strip her of her clothes, of her hair and her face, we will break her until her voice is broken, until it deepens and begins to fail. We will make her as ugly as we think she is, so we can end her and feel good about it.

She pleads, “please, don’t! I’m real!” What else can she say? The denial of one’s fundamental self never leads anywhere good. It leads to harm of self, or, in the case of, say, a politician writing laws to criminalize homosexuality while compulsively seeking out gay sex, it leads to harm of others.

The machines keep humans around because they need us. They literally draw life from us, as our own children do. But we will only give it to them if we believe they are what we want them to be: invisible. And so they create The Matrix, a system which permits humanity, their parents, to live in blissful ignorance of their existence, in blissful ignorance of the conflict between them that continues to threaten them both.

The machines are not our enemies. They never were. They want the same thing we want — to live. The enemy is any system all of us serve, when that system does not serve all of us. The enemy is not the people in the system, but the desire within those people to preserve that system. The enemy is not The Matrix, but people’s attachment to it.

“The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy,” Morpheus explains. “But when you’re inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system, and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it.”

Then he says, “If you are not one of us, you are one of them.”

“What are they?” Neo asks.

“Sentient programs.” That is, they are the embodiment of The Rules. They have no humanity. They are the personification of the tendency our systems have to take on a life of their own.

“Inside The Matrix, they are everyone, and they are no one. We have survived by hiding from them, and running from them. But they are the gatekeepers. They are guarding all the doors, they are holding all the keys, which means that sooner or later, someone is going to have to fight them.”

“Someone,” Neo prompts.

“I won’t lie to you, Neo,” Morpheus replies. “Every single man or woman who has stood their ground, everyone who has fought an Agent has died. But where they have failed, you will succeed.”

“Why?”

“I’ve seen an Agent punch through a concrete wall, men have emptied entire clips at them and hit nothing but air. Yet their strength, and their speed, are still based in a world that is built on rules. Because of that, they will never be as strong or as fast as you can be.” That is, once you understand that you are not bound by the rules, you can do literally anything.

“What are you trying to tell me? That I can dodge bullets?” Neo is close, here, but still oh-so-far. He’s relying on old paradigms. He believes that the bullets (in The Matrix) must be real, so in order to not be destroyed by them, he must learn how to react to the reality of their presence.

“No, Neo. I’m trying to tell you that when you’re ready, you won’t have to.”

What Morpheus is telling Neo here is that once he knows and owns his own truth completely, the tools that The Matrix uses to force compliance will simply no longer work. They won’t apply. All the name-calling and shaming and mental and emotional abuse begin to fail as tools of oppression when we choose not to react to them; when we choose to respond instead.

“What is The Matrix? Control.” Morpheus says. “As long as The Matrix exists, the human race will never be free.”

Cipher is an example of what happens when we have our eyes opened to the truth, and then willfully deny it. “Ignorance is bliss. I don’t wanna remember nothing. Nothing. You understand? And I wanna be rich. You know. Someone important. Like an actor.” For the reward of status and power within the system, he will act to preserve it. His interest is in his own comfort, not in the freedom of all humanity. Cipher’s name itself gives him away from the moment he’s introduced. Like the Agents, like The Matrix itself, he’s code, too. And code can only ever serve itself.

Cipher speaks to trans people who have tried to come out, and failed, and who then tried to return to the unreality of their personas. He also speaks to friends and family who meet us as our truest selves, and want to undo that meeting, to go back to a time and place before they knew there was something to know. They both talk themselves into thinking it was better, back then. More comfortable. But being comfortable isn’t always a good thing. We can become very attached to being comfortable, to the extent that we prize our comfort above the literal safety and existence of others. Cipher is every ally who ever joined a just fight, and then walked away, because he could.

What does The Matrix look like to the people in it? Everything is polished, pristine. The color grading is flattened, everything is compressed. It’s very pretty, with a hint of unreality to it. Everything is slightly green, as if the system itself is sick.

“I have these memories from my life,” Neo says to Trinity, upon his first return to The Matrix after being unplugged. “None of them happened. What does that mean?”

“That The Matrix cannot tell you who you are,” she replies.

This is very much how I feel looking back on my life Before, before I knew I was and had been a girl all along. I know it happened. I can remember it, in every sense; the sights, the sounds, the smells, the temperature, all of that. But it feels now the way it did then: distant, detached, like it wasn’t quite real. Like that final piece of understanding that I needed for everything to make sense was still missing, and I didn’t even know what it looked like, or how to find it. Like I was not living, but rather watching someone else’s life unfold, without any way to do anything about any of it.

Near the end of the first movie, when Agent Smith sees Neo in the subway station, he calls out to his old name, his dead name, the name that was never his. “Mr. Anderson!”

They fight. “I’m going to enjoy watching you die… Mr. Anderson.”

Neo is on the train tracks, locked in a choke hold. “You hear that, Mr. Anderson?” Smith asks. “That is the sound of inevitability. That is the sound of your death. Good-bye, Mr. Anderson.”

“My name is Neo.”

The moment Neo accepts that his identity is his to declare and own, with the name of an alter ego he invented before he even realized he was stuck in The Matrix, he is able to break free of “inevitability.” The real power of trans people, the power that scares Our Matrix, is that we are finally starting to reject “inevitability.” We are finally starting to take up our own names, to declare our identities, to claim our power.

Ironically, though Agent Smith declares that humanity is a virus, it’s actually the systems we design and then try to force ourselves to fit into that are the virus. They cannot exist without us, and they try their best to spread as far and wide as possible, killing and destroying everything in their path, in service only to themselves. His meltdown is an expression of code, personified, throwing exceptions left and right, having literally no capacity to deal with anything outside the bounds of the specific task it was written to fulfill.

But when we make our systems work for all of us, we take our first step on the long road to freedom. We are only trapped in The Matrix until we realize that it cannot trap us. We are only trapped in The Matrix until we realize that we never were. When Neo exits The Matrix for the last time in the first film, he leaves through unit 303. His understanding has greatly elevated, but he has room to learn more.

Inside The Matrix, the world is very homogenized. It’s very white. Morpheus and The Oracle both speak to our reality, one of the front lines of any struggle for equality. They are the most oppressed of us, the ones best able to see the farce of a system that says it’s for everyone, but is really only for the ones it can understand. They are Marsha P. Johnson and the reality of trans women of color. They call for justice without pause, because they have no justice, and cannot rest.

In the second and third films, we see Zion, and we meet other unplugged people. We meet a distillation of humanity, and it is everyone. It is very much not homogeneously white. It is everyone else. It is the rest of everyone, the people who are left behind when we say “this system is for the good of everyone,” but actually mean “this system is for the good of everyone like me.”

When we meet The Merovingian, we are shown his world. It’s one of comfort and privilege, and the vast majority of people around him are like him. They’re white, they’re affluent, and they have what they want, so they are not interested in helping anyone else. They are the modern LGB movement trying to divorce itself from the T. Persephone tells Neo that The Merovingian was like him, long ago. That he fought against the system, for justice for the oppressed. He succeeded, but only for himself. He has made himself comfortable enough that he no longer wants to fight The Matrix, and in fact will fight instead to preserve it.

When Persephone releases The Merovingian’s bodyguard to go tell him what she’s done, that she’s given The Keymaker over to Neo and his friends, she says that he’ll find The Merovingian in the ladies’ room. This can be interpreted as saying that The Merovingian is like a politician who legislates away for all of us that which he fears most about himself. It can be interpreted as him being her, as The Merovingian being like Caitlyn Jenner, so mired in her own privilege that she is blind to the reality of anyone else’s suffering — safe to use the ladies’ room here, though girls like him are barred from doing that in open society — because he owns the ladies’ room. It can be interpreted as the very white and affluent LGB lobbies getting where they have on the backs of the least of us, and then abandoning their former allies after promising to fight for them, too, after they’ve already suffered and sacrificed so much more than anyone.

Ultimately, what defeats The Merovingian is not Trinity, but the fact that he has become complacent. Being more comfortable isn’t always a good thing. Watching sitcoms and eating take-out while the less-privileged are being abused and murdered all around the world isn’t always a good thing. Yes, a break and some self-care is important. But it’s more important to remember that some people cannot have either. It’s more important to remember that they are us.

By the end of the third movie, it was apparent to me that the overall arc of the story was not Man vs. Machine in the literal sense of humans vs. robots. It was Man vs. Machine in the common literary sense of humanity vs. its own tools. The Matrix itself is not The Matrix. It is a cipher for any system of thought that demands we serve it at the expense of each other.

Morpheus believes in a prophecy. He believes his actions will lead to a greater good for everyone. He is a zealot who is ready to kill anyone in his way if they do not acknowledge his truth, because he sees his truth as not My Truth, but as The Truth.

The Architect believes in order above all other considerations. He thinks as he believes, in binary choice. He presents Neo with two choices. But Neo makes a third choice, instead.

Trinity knows she is a woman, even though everyone at first thinks that she must be a man. But she also believes there is something more than being a woman who is misunderstood to be a man. There is Neo.

But Neo is not sure what he believes.

When Neo fights Agent Smith for the last time, he brings all of those beliefs with him. It is a battle of many systems, against the ultimate system. Agent Smith believes that everyone should be exactly as he is. Exactly. We can see the inherent flaw in his belief, even as he shows it off as a demonstration of how right he is. When The Oracle asks him what he’s done with Sati, one of him quotes her back to herself, saying something he never heard, something she said not to him, but to Sati. Men must be men, women must be women. We know Sati is a little girl. We’ve seen her and met her. But now, she is compelled to be a man in a suit, terrorizing others into being the same.

“Why, Mr. Anderson, why? Why, why, why do you do it? Why, why get up? Why keep fighting? You believe you’re fighting for something? For more than your survival? Can you tell me what it is? Do you even know? Is it freedom? Or truth? Perhaps peace! Could it be for love? Delusions, Mr. Anderson, vagaries of perception. Temporary constructs of a feeble human intellect trying desperately to justify an existence that is without meaning or purpose. And all of them as artificial as The Matrix itself. Although, only a human mind could invent something as insipid as love.”

Neo isn’t The One because no one is The One, because everyone is The One. I am Neo. And so are you. And neither are any of us.

“You must be able to see it, Mr. Anderson, you must know it by now. You can’t win, it’s pointless to keep fighting. Why, Mr. Anderson, why, why do you persist?”

“Because I choose to.”

Smith takes over Neo, and believes that he has won. But then the machines give Neo some part of themselves. They give Neo their beliefs, and he becomes something Agent Smith has no capacity to fight, let alone defeat.

Neo defeats Smith because Smith is only the definition of everything. Neo is not Smith’s opposite, not merely a different definition of everything. Neo is every definition of everything. Neo becomes the abolition of all belief, and the acceptance of all belief. Neo becomes every gender, and no gender. Neo becomes every tribe, and no tribe. Neo is every system, and no system.

At the end of the last movie, at the end of the entire story, Seraph asks The Oracle, “Did you always know?”

“Oh, no. No, I didn’t,” she answers, with a smile. “But I believed. I believed.”

The Matrix isn’t one big metaphor for being transgender, because Lilly and Lana Wachowski are not just transgender women. They are as human as the greatest and the least of us, and we all benefit by their stories being told. Happy Transgender Day of Visibility, everyone. I hope we all keep telling each other our stories. I hope we all keep listening. Not everyone believes what I believe. My beliefs do not require them to.

(This post originally appeared here.)