Mid-Op

A year ago tonight, by this time (10:00 P.M. PST as I write this), I was gorked out of my mind on pre-surgery medications, and being tended to by Kim (#FKAgirlfriend) in her relatively new Queen Anne apartment. I hadn't actually had my orchiectomy, though I'd been scheduled to. This is the last photo of me beforehand:

We're here. I'm very sleepy. Actually, I think everyone here who isn't working is very sleepy.

A photo posted by Seranine Elliot (@aggressivefrontpocket) on Jan 22, 2016 at 6:24am PST

An orchiectomy is the removal of a testicle. My variation of the procedure was a simple bilateral orchiectomy; simple meaning relative to radical, in which more tissue is removed (this is usually reserved for treatment of testicular cancer); bilateral meaning both testicles. Some trans women do not feel a sense of embodied gender dysphoria, and are content to keep their penises and sometimes testicles. For me, having any of this kind of apparatus feels physically wrong in a way that I could not make sense of or articulate until I understood that I was actually a girl. All of it has always felt wrong, and contributed greatly to my depression; depression which mostly came on with puberty.

You may wonder why I would bother with this surgery, when my ultimate goal is GRS. The reason is that I got the orchi done about a year ago, while I am just now finally in line for my GRS, which is scheduled to take place on February 4, 2020. This is a stopgap solution, but it is better than not addressing the problem at all until the Trump administration, if it lasts so long, has already entered its fourth year.

One of the things that trans women's HRT does is suppress testosterone. Ultimately, at my peak dose, I was taking 5mg medroxyprogresterone and 200mg spironolactone daily to suppress it. This suppression created half of my sense of hormonally-related physiological relief. My experience of the world softened. The other half was the introduction of estrogen via 1-4mg estradiol daily (the dose changed every so often; this was not a choose-your-own-adventure of estrogen each day kind of thing). But the point is that I wanted to not have testosterone in my bloodstream. At all. Ever again. Ever. Removing my testosterone factories seemed like a good way to do that.

Women's underwear is typically not designed to accommodate much in the way of external genitalia. Many trans women "tuck," or draw the penis back through the legs, and set things into place in such a way that can be contained by some panties comfortably. Some also use tape to keep things in place, although I never went there, myself. But the point is that removing some of the bulk between my legs would naturally mean better-fitting women's bottoms in general. Removing my testicles seemed like a good way to do that. I was thinking in terms of volume, of space occupied. I had no way to understand how to think about the weight until it was gone.

It turns out I was right on both counts, although I did, in the year since, ultimately argue for (and win) the reintroduction of both of testosterone-suppressing meds I had been taken off of following the surgery. I wanted to add medroxyprogresterone back in order to mitigate or eliminate the occasional erection that had begun, ahem, popping up. Having an erection is generally a very unpleasant experience for me. While in theory, medroxyprogesterone should not have had any impact (since there should not be any testosterone to suppress), it did actually all but halt erectile function, making a marked impact on the volume and frequency. I returned, in that regard, to my pre-op, post-start-of-HRT state, and that was very nice.

I asked for spironolactone to be reintroduced in order to try to hormonally induce more breast development. I'd heard anecdotally that cis women who had been prescribed it for some other purpose experienced breast development, regardless of their age, and induced breast development regardless of age is a thing I'd like just a touch more of. My breast development appeared to have ceased following the removal of the drug from my schedule. It has noticeably continued since adding it back, to my pre-op amount, same as the medroxyprogesterone.

A last-second emergency surgery came in and bumped me from my slot just before they were going to put me under. I remember being very upset, sad for myself because I had been waiting for so long to have this done. But when the surgeon came to console me about being bumped, I told him I was only upset for myself, and that I was happy to give up my spot for an emergency surgery. That I hoped the other patient, the other veteran, would be helped. He assured me I would be scheduled for the first available slot, which turned out to be January 22, 2016; the very next day.

People ask about whether girls like me regret this kind of surgery. Some just assume we will regret it, though the data generally do not support that. For myself, I can say that I did regret when I did it, though I do not regret actually having done it. I posted vlogs about my recovery weekly for awhile, and in some of them, talked about that. I regretted it because my post-surgical state strained my already damaged relationship with Kim, and so the timing of it certainly was a large factor in the end of our relationship. I wished I had done it at some other time, some other time that would let me have the orchiectomy that has brought me so much relief, without losing the love of my life.

Overall, my health in regard to gender dysphoria and embodied gender dysphoria has improved greatly as a result of my successful orchiectomy. I have less actual weight between my legs. Tangentially, as a result of continued conscientious HRT adjustment, I also have slightly more weight on my chest, and the sensations that these simultaneous states produce are becoming closer and closer to what my brain experiences as "right," when it comes to how it feels to live in my body.

Plus, now everything I do is balls out.

Everything went according to plan in the end. When I can make better sentences, I will be writing director-level staff in all involved departments to tell them not only how remarkably wonderful my experience was with all interactions, but that this clinic should absolutely be the model for successful, respectful, empathic trans healthcare throughout the VA healthcare system. #lotr #frodo #orchiectomy #surgery #Seattle #Washington #transgender #veteran #musician #model #trans #girl #girlslikeus #selfie #nomakeup #nofilter #noshave

A video posted by Seranine Elliot (@aggressivefrontpocket) on Jan 22, 2016 at 12:33pm PST

Show Me How to Live

So, I founded a church.

I had no grand ambition of founding or leading a church. I still don't. In fact, I am actively doing what I can to explain that I am, objectively, only the founder. I am not the leader. There cannot be any such thing that is not declared, invented; inherently not objectively real. If I lead, it is a part of objective reality to the extent that I do it. But whether I am called a leader means only that I am called a leader by whomever decides to refer to me as such.

In many ways, the Church of Objective Reality is an anti-church. It is as descriptive as possible, avoiding prescription as much as possible. It is about practicing being as close as possible to pure perception — our best capacity to know what is — and practicing recognition of what is not that for what it necessarily must be: subjective reality, a subset of what is; thoughts, emotions. It is about acknowledging that every living thing's scope is necessarily limited.

I have a few labels for the COR that reflect not the entire thing, but major aspects of it; labels like "first framework," or "disorganized religion." But really, every church is about abstract thought, a subjective interpretation of what is, turned prescription of what is supposed to be; in human terms, how to live. But every living thing, by definition, clearly knows how to live; it is alive. Whatever it's doing, in terms of "are you alive or not," it's working.

Humans can understand that, conceptually, there are different ways one could possibly live. For any number of reasons, many are not content only to live, but want also to divine how to live better; that is, how to make their own reality better than it is, in any given moment. Humans have developed complex systems of communication, and each human innately has some capacity to invent and understand language. So, around the world, people began not just living, like the animals many forget we are, but talking about how they lived.

Around the world, in different contexts — different climates, for example, or different history — people described how they were living, to each other, whether by showing, or telling. Thoughts about ways to be were no longer limited to genetic passage. Now they could travel memetically, as culture; through language. But thoughts about how to be were (and are) still only thoughts. A thought is inherently only a subset of objective reality; limited to the one who holds it. A thought is not reality itself, but a response to perception of it. Mechanically, it is the end product of the process of noticing, experiencing, concluding.

Prescriptive religions — those that command people to live in a particular way — mechanically interfere with the believer's experience of objective reality by disrupting the first step: they condition ignorance in noticing; this necessarily mutes experiencing, supporting the practice of conclusion before fact. The end result — the thought — is necessarily distorted. That is, for example, if one is taught (and comes to believe) that there is a God who creates all things, and that God made Man and Woman, with strict definition, and no variance from those core definitions, it is natural to conclude that people like me, transgender women, are an affront of some sort to God. And so, ironically, in pursuit of instruction in how to live optimally, many have forgotten how they actually live, just live, in the first place at all. To live optimally requires context; measures of better or worse. To live, just to live, requires only being alive.

Years ago, in the Before, Jenn introduced me to Buddhist schools of thought; Buddhist frameworks for processing and understanding reality. I did not understand this at the time, but Buddhism, like every other religion I'd ever heard of to that point, is fractured and factional, with many common core elements, but divergence beyond them. So, when I say "Buddhist," I really mean "interpretations of Buddhism through the lenses of a limited subset of authors who are Buddhists, writing as Buddhists." I started with Thich Nhat Hanh, and a book called No Death, No Fear. I had what, at the time, I would have grudgingly described as a "mystical experience" — a sense of being able to see the connections between all things in objective reality. Seeing through the wall of the apartment, out to the balcony, where Jenn's bike was hanging from a hook. From parts of the bike (and the apartment wall, and the cars outside, and and and) to manufacturers all over the country or world, to the workers in those factories, to their lunches, to whomever had made those lunches, to the bakers and butchers and grocers who had provided access to all the ingredients, to the farmers, and so on, and so on, forever; all expressed as light in void. For like two minutes. I cried. Nothing like that had ever happened to me before. For more than ten years, nothing like it happened again.

I understand that experience, now, not as mystical, but as a sort of proto-visualization, an early form of what I went on to first consciously create and direct in guided lovingkindness meditation practice, but which I now frequently create consciously during informal visualizations, as well. I was experiencing a suddenly much deeper awareness of reality, so much deeper that it overwhelmed my senses for a few minutes, as I struggled to comprehend the truth of our inherent connectedness, of our interbeing. The next closest sensation to this was when I realized I was trans; that, in the context of binary gender, I had been as wrongly categorized as I possibly could be. That was followed by sensory overload, as well, while my entire body woke up for the first time, to process uninterrupted hours of lived past experience. Everything made sense deeply in this way, too. I had only two great truths: that we are all connected; that I was and always had been a girl. I understand these both as true, still, but also as incomplete expressions of what is. But, writing this, I was struck, again, that I was always already living in accordance with my church; I just did not understand what I was doing, and so made many temporally subjectively good choices that were objectively poor.

My capacity to make objectively better choices in any given moment, I realized, was founded upon my capacity to notice what is; to distinguish it from what is not. Where I failed, where I suffered, it was invariably to the degree I was not in accordance with reality. Before I understood I was a girl, I tried very hard to be a boy, while also knowing (though not understanding) that it was inherently not who I was. Naturally, my best attempts included as much avoidance of the role as possible in the first place; it wasn't who I was. So, when I found ways to check out of objective reality that were still in many ways permitted and even encouraged by what was available to me, cast as male, in the subset of objective reality I could experience, I took them. They were, more than anything else, video games.

At first, any sort of other reality was preferable. At least those other realities, if nothing else, made complete sense almost immediately, and were implicitly self-contained. In contrast, my subjective reality — that is, my lived experience of objective reality — never had made sense, prior to my realizing I was a girl, and also had no limit I could understand. But with video games, if I did not like them, I could discard them; it was easy to recognize them as not objectively real. If I loved them, I could play them again — relive those alternate realities — as often as I liked. As video games evolved, went online, became better approximations of objective reality, I invested myself more completely. I had spaces in which I could live a life, or something close to it, as someone much closer to who I really was. Not a wizard, or warrior, not a paladin or a priest. But a girl. Just a girl.

My suffering all along was not born of what I was, or even what was, at all, entirely, objectively. My suffering arose entirely because I had become attached to ideas of what was supposed to be, without ever really considering them.

Today, to give tiny example, I was planning to head down to SoDo Deli. I think of them, in many ways, as my family. Not just the owners, but everyone who works there. The shop will close early, tonight, but from then on, we will relax and enjoy food and conversation and singing and... actually, probably television, to be honest. Feelin' like 99% sure there will be television basically the whole time. Also today, as the last day of the month, I was running out of time to do a thing I generally prefer to do, and have so far only rarely failed to do: publish at least one new post on this blog a month.

I have much more to write about this, about my church. Prior to today, I had approached these blog posts as complete, distinct entities. I would sometimes interlink them, but the idea of writing an explicitly serial piece with explicitly connected pieces was always terrifying to me. I am not sure why. But when I ask myself, as I sit with apprehension over the idea of trying such an enterprise, why I am afraid, my best answers fill me with love for myself, and a gentle smile. I want to not say anything wrong. I want to not make a mistake. If I write and publish a single blog entry that is self-contained, as hermetic as I can make it, I will not have committed myself to an entire structure of things that could later be wrong, or not what I would say then. When I examine those answers gently, repeatedly, like a gentle washing, with "why?" they are reduced to only this: I do not want to mislead; I do not want to harm by misleading.

When I ask myself whether I really have any control at all over any of it — any response to what I ever do or say — I know implicitly that the answer is "no." I am only me, after all. What I can control is very limited.

Today, my tiny example, had me beginning to feel distressed, because all else I wish to pack into this blog entry, my backstory to my church, will take too long to articulate, in the context of my wanting to spend the evening with family. There is no objective benefit in my staying here and pushing myself to do what seems impossible; even if I succeed, I am still only creating a subjective benefit. I am creating relief from my own expectations. But as I understand expectations, fundamentally, as a form of "I would like it if," I have a new way to relieve myself of them. It is far simpler. I will tell you about it later.

Be safe. See you next year.

Seranine Elliot
December 31, 2016

There Is Nowhere Else to Be

I recently read a NY Times op-ed titled, "Actually, Let’s Not Be in the Moment" by Ruth Whippman. In it, Whippman describes her frustrations with mindfulness, which, she says, "is supposed to be a defense against the pressures of modern life" before going on to say that mindfulness is "a special circle of self-improvement hell, striving not just for a Pinterest-worthy home, but a Pinterest-worthy mind."

When I got to the word "striving," I noticed that I expected I would see several more paragraphs of what mindfulness is supposed to do for us, rather than what it actually is. There is no striving in mindfulness practice. It is, frankly, mechanically too simple for that. It is only being present; paying attention; noticing. This includes noticing that my focus has drifted from what is, to something subjunctive, and then returning to what is. Or, noticing that I've drifted from a guided meditation, and coming back to it. I acknowledged the expectation that the rest of Whippman's op-ed would be reaction to something wildly different from what I understand mindfulness to be. Then, I released that expectation, acknowledging that it was based not on the piece, but my expectations of it, and kept reading.

Whippman seems to believe that mindfulness practice has a goal beyond being present. This is not an unreasonable conclusion for her to draw, given that she seems to have been sold mindfulness as a solution to her stress. "Practice this to achieve that." I tried to approach mindfulness that way Before, and got very little out of it. I understand now that all of the discomfort I felt, and the lack of progress I experienced early on, was normal. After all, I was finally examining my own emotions after dousing them for decades. My mistake was going in wanting to see immediate and profound results, rather than simply taking up a practice for its inherent benefits. Being aware of what is happening in each moment is a generically useful skill, like walking.

Mindfulness practice is asking myself, "what's happening, right now?" Mindfulness practice is answering that question continuously; being aware of what is. The outcome of the practice is not important. The practice is its own reward. The benefits people seek, when they arrive, do so without being dragged into being. They are not goals. They are the natural result of being present to what is.

Whippman argues that "[mindfulness] is a philosophy likely to be more rewarding for those whose lives contain more privileged moments than grinding, humiliating or exhausting ones." And yet I could not fully embrace the practice until my class privilege was decimated, until my life became mostly a string of grinding and humiliating and exhausting moments, until I was so utterly cut off from distractions that I had no choice but to notice how deeply I felt that I wished I was a girl, and to sit with that feeling and try to make sense of it.

This predated my formal instruction in mindfulness practice, through classes at the VA. And yet, even without that guidance, I was able to examine that feeling, and explore why I was feeling it. Why it had always been there. What that meant. My depression and apathy, secondary to unrealized gender dysphoria, had finally won out. I'd cornered myself, after nearly 40 years. I literally could no longer afford to distract myself from myself, my actual self, where I actually was.

It is no wonder that sitting with the sentiment of wishing that I was a girl was deeply uncomfortable; I'd spent my entire life being told I was a boy. For a boy to wish he is a girl does not make sense, and wishing that hurt too much for me to ever examine it closely, when I could just ignore it, and dull that pain instead. But it was only in sitting with it, and asking myself why I wished that, exploring it, that I came to understand I had had the grammar all wrong. At some point, "I wish I was a girl" gave rise to the right response, at last:

Am I not?

Whippman wants to "offset the tedium of washing dishes" without examining why she considers washing dishes to be tedious. She says, "happiness does not come so much from our experiences themselves, but from the stories we tell ourselves that make them matter." Here, she acknowledges that happiness can come from experiences themselves, but goes on to give greater weight to our stories about our experiences. Telling ourselves stories about our experiences, stories about the other people in them, is a very big part of how we ended up with President Trump. We can synthesize joy with our stories, but I have found objective reality to be more joyful, overall, in no small part because it is inherently less harmful; things that are simply are.

I find it more difficult to believe that a rock I have stumbled on is somehow out to get me when I consciously acknowledge that it is a rock. I find it more difficult to believe that Kim went to Trans Pride expressly to meet a new trans woman to replace me with when I consciously acknowledge that she, like me, like every living thing, wants for the same things: safety, health, happiness, ease. When I sift out what I feel and conclude based on my feelings of being discarded and replaced, and instead guide myself into responding only to what is, the reality is plain. She was unhappy with me as her girlfriend. Of course she left. It was inevitable.

Number of days free of full-on sobbing meltdowns over #FKAgirlfriend: [0]

A photo posted by Seranine Elliot (@aggressivefrontpocket) on Oct 7, 2016 at 4:40pm PDT

Recognizing this does not make me feel instantly wonderful. In fact, even consciously stating it now, in writing, I necessarily go through most of that hell again. My chest implodes, I struggle to breathe. I cry. But I cannot process those feelings without processing them. I cannot wish them away and ignore them without suffering. So, I acknowledge it. Reality. Each time, the pain seems a little bit smaller. It dissipates a little bit sooner. Being present with my emotions, loving myself enough to care to do that work, like anything else, is practice.

To avoid telling myself stories about my experiences, to avoid necessarily defining others and their motivations or intentions, is to avoid disappointment in the future when my stories inevitably fail to line up perfectly with reality. Mindfulness practice is recognizing what is real, and what is a story. Lovingkindness practice leads me to conclude that responding to what is real is more likely to be kind than responding to what is a story. Mindfulness is fundamental to lovingkindness, and leads naturally to it, but, alone, mindfulness is only the skill of noticing.

I found it distressing that Whippman describes her experience with mindfulness advice as containing "moralizing smugness" and "'moment-shaming' for the distractible [sic]," as these ideas and attitudes are directly opposed to what I was taught. I was taught a thing I found true when I considered it: that it is the natural tendency of the human mind to wander. There is no shame in being what we are. The practice as taught to me explicitly excludes judgment. 

I have been recommending to people that they seek out mindfulness classes in their area, because of how impactful my own practice has been for me. But Whippman describes a westernized, commodified version of mindfulness that is outcome-oriented in that it sets expectations. Ironically, she's very close to understanding the practice more as I do. She argues that in mindfulness, "happiness is seen not as a response to our circumstances but as a result of our own individual mental effort, a reward for the deserving." Mindfulness practice has made it possible for me to be much more deeply aware of my circumstances. Aware to the extent that my happiness is largely in response to my circumstances. Mindfulness practice is not difficult. The things I can see with it frequently are.

Whippman laments that "we give inner-city schoolchildren mindfulness classes rather than engage with education inequality, and instruct exhausted office workers in mindful breathing rather than giving them paid vacation or better health care benefits." But mindfulness practice, the practice of noticing what is, is the only way to address problems of education inequality, inadequate healthcare, and so forth. After all, to the degree that a problem is not understood, it cannot be solved.

Far-right conservative Christians, for example, tend to believe that I am a man who wishes he were a woman, and is now engaged in a years-long process of mutilating his body so that it looks like some sort of facsimile of a "real woman." But while they ask themselves "what kind of man would do that?" and then answer that question with whatever seems reasonable to them, they remain blind to the fact that their question can never lead to an answer that makes sense, because it is the wrong question. It begins with the presumption that I must be a man. With that presumption, as when I was designated male at birth, comes a whole host of cultural footnotes. For example, the idea that men are inherently sexually predatory, and can have no relationship with any girl or woman that is not either sexual, or paternal. Cast as such, of course they fear my presence in the women's room. Why would a man be there? But that isn't the problem. The problem is that they do not understand the problem well enough to realize that there is no problem.

Were they to ask themselves the right question, as I finally did, the answer becomes so obvious that the question is rendered rhetorical. When the question is, "what kind of woman would do that?" it collapses on itself:

What kind of woman would want to use the women's room?
What kind of woman would want to have a vagina instead of a penis?
What kind of woman would be upset that she grows facial hair?
What kind of woman would want to join a women's group?
What kind of woman would wear women's clothes?
What kind of woman would feel erased and unseen when called a man?

Whippman closes by arguing that the results of a "an enormous meta-analysis of over 18,000 separate studies on meditation and mindfulness techniques" were underwhelming. This makes sense, given that what she has been taught about mindfulness is so very far from what I was taught that they are more different than alike. She seems to be talking about westernized, mass-marketed mindfulness instruction, and if that is what was analyzed (by the United States Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality) it does not surprise me in the least that the results were underwhelming. Internal results within the VA have led to persistent expansion of mindfulness-based programs; where the kind of mindfulness I was taught is employed, it produces enough benefit that the VA invests in more.

Mindfulness is not a hammer one can use to beat stress into submission. It is only noticing what is, and what is not. Like everything else, it is a practice. Whippman closes by saying, "perhaps, rather than expending our energy struggling to stay in the Moment [sic], we should simply be grateful that our brains allow us to be elsewhere." Mindfulness permits me to consciously recognize that desire to check out, to be elsewhere, so that the reason why I want to disconnect from reality reveals itself. It is only then, when I understand the problem, that I can solve it.

Mindfulness is not "a defense against the pressures of modern life." It's no defense at all. It is being, where we are, when we are, unadorned, ourselves. It lays the foundation for lovingkindness practice, for cultivating a soft and gentle response to the reality that is, rather than a harsh and commanding attempt to craft or sustain a reality that is not.

Whippman says, "Actually, Let’s Not Be in the Moment."

But there is nowhere else to be.

It's a Boy

I talked to my friend Anna the other night about theories of attraction, but in explaining mine to her, I realized that I was actually talking about just one facet of a much larger problem.

My theory of attraction is that people experience a sort of bodily sense of increased gravity around someone they're attracted to. It's a feeling of being pulled towards them. We may be able to see some patterns emerge in the general types of people we are attracted to, but I don't know that we actually have a lot of choice in the matter. Given things like anti-LGBT priests being caught with male escorts, or government officials who vote against LGBT equality and end up getting caught exposing themselves to other men in public restrooms, I confidently believe that whomever we are truly drawn to, we are drawn to, and that is that.

Knowing that, it's easy to extrapolate that this is the case for not just me, but everyone else. But I must remain especially mindful of including people to whom I am drawn; because they may not be drawn to me. Or perhaps not in the same manner.

I should clarify that this kind of pull does not have to be sexual or romantic.

Returning to Anna as an excellent case in point, I am about 3000% sure that neither of us has a particularly sexual or romantic sort of attraction towards the other. But we do seem to mutually feel a strong platonic attraction, which has created, in me, a sense of being in a sort of sisterly relationship. We enjoy each other's company, and the easy conversation that flows between us. We hardly know each other, really, at this point. But we feel a mutual attraction in this familial and easy way that is often referred to as a "kindred spirit."

Seeing @annabelle__perez off on her last night at #papamurphys with @aldamodeling 😊🙏🏻 #mytransreality

A photo posted by Seranine Elliot (@aggressivefrontpocket) on Sep 9, 2016 at 9:45pm PDT

I went on to explain that when I experienced a more complete sort of attraction in the past (up to and including the very recent past), I noticed that I would feel a sort of compounding secondary attraction to the idea of being attracted. I was enjoying that feeling, and wanted to hold onto it. In order to do that, I began to paint over the person I was attracted to. They became, from my point of view, a canvas onto which I told my own story about them to myself. In the very beginning of this kind of painting, it is not hard to adjust to things I notice about the way they are that are different from the way I was going to draw them. But before long, they are invisible, hidden by what I want to see in them. The weight of expectation.

I noticed this happening in my mind most recently as I was drawn in a way I have never been drawn before to anyone. I don't mean that in the simple sense of Xtreme Powar Pull or anything. I just mean it is unique in its character, this sense of attraction. I feel powerfully magnetically pulled to her to the extent that I can tell when she enters a space I'm in before I have any way to really know that. I sense that she's arrived, because I feel pulled. I look in that general direction, and see her. I also feel equally powerfully magnetically repulsed, at a fixed distance. It's as if I am a comet who gets pulled into orbit. Exactly this close; hang around; but no closer. It is the most remarkable thing. I treasure it for its uniqueness. But I noticed myself beginning to covet her as its source.

So it was that one day when she did a thing that I found injurious, I found it especially so. Because on some level, I'd permitted myself to believe that she was not capable of injuring me in that way. I had painted over that part of her. I'd made it the realization of a beautiful dream, for me; a woman I'm drawn to in this powerful and mesmerizing way, who is also incapable of hurting me in the most painful ways. But it had nothing at all to do with her. The weight of expectation.

The pain of being hurt was doubled by a tiny sense of betrayal, just large enough to echo the pain back on itself, and double again, and again. But in experiencing that pain mindfully, I saw how empty it was. It was the realization that the movie I was watching wasn't real after all. This angelic creature — for what else would I be drawn to? — was just an actress in a role I'd cast her for, a role I'd been trying to fill without realizing it. She wasn't an angel at all. No flying warrior princess with gleaming armor and a sword that never missed, even when she threw it. No invincible Valkyrie, who would unfailingly be on my side in any fight. But a woman. Not just a woman, or only a woman. A woman. A completely independent person. I would say I am fond of her, but that is a thing I cannot say honestly while setting expectations upon her, for that is not kind. Expectations always weigh something.

I realized that many times in my past, when I'd allowed myself to believe that the women who joined me in failing at being together romantically had really been the ones at fault, I was engaging in this same practice, but not mindfully. I let it play out and run for months, or years. The ones who left me were betrayers. The problem wasn't that I'd misread them, because the attraction was so real. The painting I'd made was so lifelike. The problem had to be them.

But it never was. It never even could have been, because the biggest problem was that I was more interested in being with some idea loosely based on their life than with them. It's possible, perhaps even likely, that they were also doing the same thing with me. But what they were doing doesn't really matter, because what I was doing made every one of those relationships doomed from the start. (Yes, even with #FKAgirlfriend.)

The pain of experiencing all of those kinds of feelings was delightfully brief, this time around. And I am confident it will be one of the last, because most of the pain was the sense of mourning all the time I spent invested in these tools for painting the people I was drawn to out of existence, under a picture of what I decided they had to be.

This most recent and unique attraction still exists, of course. I still feel drawn to her, in exactly the same way I did before. I suppose this is why break-ups hurt so badly. Anyway, she messaged me the other day, telling me about a date she had coming up that night. I felt instinctively a sense of joy. This beautiful creature I was drawn to and intent on observing and protecting in some way, being kind to in some way, was telling me about something that she was excited about. I noticed a sense of joy in myself, a sense of satisfaction that my instinctive response to her telling me this had nothing at all to do with me. I worried that perhaps a few hours or days later, I might feel something else. But so far, I haven't.

By accepting who she is as she is in every moment, and not investing myself into an idea of her that nobody could ever live up to — if nothing else, paintings don't move; people do — I can be as kind as possible to everyone. To her, by seeing her truly, as she is. By demonstrating kindness to that actual person, and not my idea of her. To myself, by not carrying around this painting, and trying desperately to keep it between us, so I can only see something I want, and not someone I can be kind to.

I understand that this is the kindest way to relate to people, now. For myself, anyway. Your mileage may vary. But in understanding that whatever sort of attraction I feel towards anyone is entirely a product of myself, even if I qualify it as a response to them or something about them, I can understand that by extension, everyone else has the same set of conditions to work with, more or less. That is, whether I'm attracted to someone is not up to me; whether someone is attracted to me is not up to them.

What is up to each of us is what we do with that sense of attraction. For myself, I figure if I am going to be inexplicably drawn to someone, I may as well make the kindest possible thing out of that feeling. If nothing else, that keeps things simple; I try to find the kindest action in each moment as it is, already. I have mixed success. But the goal doesn't change, the intention doesn't change, and as long as I don't lose sight of that — as long as being present and being kind are the two foremost practices in my life — I think I shall do much less damage going forward. In fact I think I'll foster some real joy.

In coming to understand these mechanisms through the lens of romance, I realized that the same fundamental principles for attraction can be used to understand the bond between parents and children, because the same kinds of things go wrong for the same kinds of reasons. When children come into our lives, we feel some kind of pull towards them, generally. If we have two or more, we probably feel more pulled towards one, and call them "favorite," to ourselves, and hope nobody else notices. But in any case, it's a pull. It's the pull that we build a bond on, the one that has us doing our best to come home from grocery shopping with the same kids we took there.


I got my birth certificate in the mail the other day. In order to prep for a working retreat over the winter in Mexico, I need to get my passport, and in order to do that, I needed to get a certified copy of my birth certificate. I was born in 1975. I'm not sure what sort of technology they had back then for guessing at my gender. What I am sure of is that until a guess at my gender was made based on what my body looked like, I was freer than I would ever be after that.

The weight of expectation around gender is one of the biggest any of us has. It's even built into the phrasing we have used in birth announcements for at least as long as I've been alive: It's a _____! Without the reveal, we are not even people, really. Not "they," but "it." A thing waiting to have gender conferred upon it. But that is a false construction.

So, I was born, and the doctor said, "It's a boy!" and I screamed for the next 39 years. Mostly internally. Mostly at myself. What I was screaming for was my mother. I wanted her to see me. But she didn't. Because the moment someone told her, "it's a boy!" she started painting.

Being trans is not the only way to get a ticket to this show. In my case, it just put me in a seat with just the right view to see how the magic happened on stage; to see the painters painting. Had my mother been correctly told, "it's a girl!" when I was born, she would still have started painting. Perhaps she would have seen me longer; perhaps the things she felt she ought to paint, the things that said "girl" to her, would have naturally aligned better with what I was actually doing; with who I actually was. But she still would have been painting, and eventually, I would have disappeared.

I understand that teenage rebellion is not rebellion for the sake of rebellion. It is a child saying, I am tired of not being seen. I am tired of being unknown to you. You're so busy staring at your painting of me from when I was born that you haven't had time for me since. Well, you will make time for me. I will make you make time for me. You will see who I am. You will know.

It is rage and hurt at realizing on some level that the people who were supposed to best love us for who we are — the people who we know, deep down inside, were always supposed to teach us how to love ourselves, to teach us that receiving kindness is our birthright, that giving kindness is our duty — taught us that we were only worth covering up. That we were not even worth seeing, never mind acknowledging. Never mind loving.

To disappoint your parents is not a cruelty. It is a kindness. It is freeing them from the weight of the painting they've been holding up between you, the painting that parents start before their children are even born. It is offering them the opportunity to see you. It is giving them the only chance in the world that they will ever have of really putting that painting down. It is giving them the chance to learn how to love someone they have finally just met.

A Bookmark for Sera

I realized this morning that I've been homeless most of my life.

A few years ago, I was homeless for about a year and a half, in the common definition. I didn't have a fixed address, I couldn't receive mail. I had no landline telephone. For a little while, I had no phone at all, actually. I lived in a tiny, run-down RV in a church parking lot. I hated it there. It was a constant reminder of how badly I'd failed everyone, including my girlfriend at the time, #myfavoritemistake; she lived there, too.

I spent as little time there as possible. Pulling 25-credit quarters at a 4.0 invited questions. People would ask me how I did it. I said, "well, I'm homeless." They'd be shocked and confused, so I'd explain. "When I'm done with classes for the day, I can go back to my beat-up RV in a parking lot in Marysville, with a slanty floor, with cats and trash everywhere, with a girlfriend who can't stand me, or I can be in the library, with level floors, and running water, and climate control, and people who don't touch me because there's room to move around me. You have no idea how awful it is to live on a slanted floor. I can't think there."

I wasn't a naturally stellar student. I was just another girl who was never happy where she was. I had no other way to distract myself from how awful my life was, so I dove into my classes, and I went overboard with it. I spent every waking moment as focused on school as possible, because I couldn't bear to let my awareness rest where I was. I wasn't even planning for the future. I was just taking every class I could, just to take them. Whenever I managed to get a shower, at the school or at the YMCA about a mile down the hill from the RV, I'd run lines in my head, rehearsing French or singing or acting. I never just ate, I ate while doing other things. I was never where I was.

I moved into this house I live in now. It's my friend #GingerAl's place. I hated it, but I hated it less than the parking lot. It was far from everyone and everything, it was also somewhat run-down, it needed work that I had no idea how to even begin to go about doing. There were bugs and spiders everywhere, dust and grime from years gone by. The room I moved into had cut cables dangling from the ceiling in several places, pieces of a broken drum set and other assorted trash. I knew I was supposed to be grateful, that gratitude was all anyone would want to see. I mouthed the words, and tried to pretend I wasn't steeping in bitterness. I used to have a nice place to live. I used to have things.

I moved my computer into the house. I set it back up and patched the games I used to live in: League of Legends, Champions Online, The Lord of the Rings Online. My computer was set up in the living room, because I thought the living room had grounded wiring, and I didn't want to lose my computer while I couldn't afford to replace it. I didn't play my games too much, because there were usually people around, and I didn't want to seem rude. As soon as I realized none of the wiring in the house was grounded, I set my computer up in my room. I returned to my game worlds like a hero coming home. Like a junkie who'd been clean for a year, and then found an old stash. I shut my door, and left.

I tried to clean the place up, sometimes. When some of #GingerAl's friends came over, they remarked that the place looked cleaner than they'd seen it in years. I thought it was still filthy. I mostly gave up trying to get it clean. I started focusing on getting just my room clean. But eventually, I gave up on that, too.

At some point, I realized that I was a girl. It wasn't long before I understood that I always had been. I looked around at the house I lived in, and I felt real gratitude. For a moment. Then, I lost myself in something new: me. I learned how to relax and move without inhibitions. I watched a few youtube tutorials to teach myself how to do my own makeup. I got excited about putting outfits together each day. I looked forward to seeing people. I participated in my classes, I did things.

I thought, "this must be what living is like."

Then, I went home, and I got on the Internet, and I played video games. I could deal with the real world as long as I was doing a thing, like driving somewhere, or working on something, or writing a song... or playing video games. But I couldn't deal with the real world as it was, as I was. And so I'd arrived in the real world, but not really. I was never where I was.

I met a girl on the Internet, which surprised exactly no one, as I'd always met my girls on the Internet. #FKAgirlfriend taught me more about my sexual self than every previous partner had, combined. That's not to say my previous partners were terrible, or even not good — it's that I wasn't there, Before. With #FKAgirlfriend, in sex, I came as close as I ever had to real sustained periods of being present. I didn't know what would come next. I was on high alert, but in pleasure, not terror. I learned what I liked and did not like in bed, and I started learning how to talk with a partner about it all.

Yet even then, I was doing a thing. I was learning sex, and I was present for my own sensations. My girlfriend could see me, but I could not see her. She would touch me, but I would rarely touch her. I was just on the other side of my skin. There, but not there. The ultimate sex toy. But not a partner.

I'd check in sometimes, but not often enough. I didn't recognize my boredom for what it was. Not a lack of activity, but a lack of capacity to just be. So I would go to #FKAgirlfriend's place, and as long as I was doing a thing, I was okay. I'd read a book, or cook a meal for us, or watch a TV show or movie, or write a blog post about all the things I was doing. But I still wasn't there, in between things. I'd started showing up in the real world for activity time, but I still went home to nowhere.

The most horrible thing in each of those places was me.

Prior to figuring out that I was a girl, I was present as little as possible. I couldn't even deal with sitting around and socializing, I couldn't just be where I was. I had to be doing a thing, and as soon as that thing was over, I needed to be doing another thing. I was an actual waste of space — a person-sized nothing person. I was holding space for the person I'd ultimately find myself to be, though I didn't know it at the time. I was a placeholder, a bookmark for Sera. I was always doing a thing, or asleep. I didn't rest, because I didn't know how.

After figuring out that I was a girl, I was present for thing-doing, but still not in between. I could do things, and I could talk about the things I'd been doing, but I had a very, very hard time not doing anything at all. #FKAgirlfriend broke up with me, and literally as I am writing this now today, nearly five months later, I realize that that was probably why. How lonely it must have been for her. Kim, if you can see this, please know how sorry I am to have put you through that. I'm sure I was with you sometimes. And I'm sure it wasn't nearly often enough. I was always doing a thing, or asleep. I didn't rest, because I didn't know how.

I started yoga classes at the VA. Some of the poses were challenging, but the hardest thing to do was lie there and just breathe. Even with the difficult balance poses, and the particulars of form, I was still doing a thing. I was learning yoga, memorizing transitions and techniques. But those first and last five minutes are still the hardest parts of the whole routine. At the beginning, I want to hurry up and yoga. At the end, I want to hurry up and finish yoga so I can do other things. I want to be doing a thing, or asleep. I don't rest. Because I don't know how.

A few weeks ago, I made a new rule for myself: when I am eating, I am eating. Not reading, or playing a game, or even talking to anybody.

A few days ago, I started noticing that I hadn't been following my new rule. Last night, I noticed that it had been all day that I'd broken it. I was transferring some bulk candies I'd bought at Winco the other day from their plastic bags, into some of the little mason jars I'd bought to hold weed. I was about to eat a few of the curry candied cashews, because they were higher than the lid line, when I remembered my new rule. I shut my monitor off, and I put one in my mouth.

I felt the moment the thin, waxy coating broke, when the flavors really came alive. I felt juices going everywhere, which was impossible, of course. As I thought, "how like a grape this is!" I realized that it was my own saliva, my body making more in response to this food. Enough of the candy coating melted away that a little bit of the cashew was exposed to my tongue.  There was firmness that wouldn't give way like the coating had. It invited a bite. I bit down and a new flavor was added. It was nutty, roasted, but also creamy. I thought it would be wonderful with some coconut milk. I sat and chewed, content.

I looked at the jar, and saw a few deformed ones. They'd been partially melted, taking on the shape of the part of the bag that had been pressed against them by Wobblefoot, whose pillow I'd left the bag on. I checked the top and saw that it was still a tiny bit over. I recognized that I wasn't really hungry, but that I wouldn't mind another, so I put another one in my mouth. I smiled and let it dissolve a bit for a moment while I put the lid on the jar, and sat back with my eyes closed. I shifted my focus between my breath and the cashew until the cashew was gone. And then I noticed how very, very tired I was.

I turned my monitor on and checked the time. It was just after 8p. "So early!" I thought. And then I remembered that I worked in a confectionery, and that I had to get up at 3:30 each morning, Monday through Friday, to be able to get there on time. I turned my monitor off, brushed my teeth, and went to bed. I woke up at about 5:30 this morning.

I pet my cats. I played my guitar. I did some yoga (and those first and last five minutes are still really hard). I had some yogurt while doing nothing else. I smoked a bowl with #MyFirstBong, and sat on the porch. I looked out at the sky, partly cloudy, and I made a point of not mentally blocking out #GingerAl's car. I came back inside to find Something Black growling at Pokey. I led Pokey away and got him interested in a toy instead. And then I sat down to write.

I realized this morning that I'd been homeless most of my life.

Learning to Fly

I've been meaning to write something for release today for about two weeks. And none of the ideas I could think of for theme or intent or anything of that sort panned out. I mean, I'm certain that someone, somewhere, if I were to post a sort of dispassionate analysis of what it was like growing up with my dad, would say "a-HA! See? This is why you think you're a girl," which is cute. I can't think of another word for it. It's cute in the same way it was cute when Bailey, my middle child, wanted the hotel swimming pool to be warmer, and I told him to just keep swimming and he'd warm up. He came back to me about 10 minutes later and said, "Daddy, I warmed up the pool!" Adorable.

I'd write more about playing the part of dad with my own kids, but there's no good way for me to do that without talking about their other mother. Perhaps by next year, I'll have figured out a way to tell those stories effectively, while still deliberately leaving so much out. The anecdote above doesn't require context. But if I string enough of them together, they'll open up conversations that I can't have, because I've resolved to do my best to speak as little as possible about their other mother publicly.

So instead, I'm going to just sort of ramble about growing up with my dad. I'm a self-motivated, unpaid blogger, so I think this will be okay, the rambliness. Like, I'm not going to upset any advertisers. I certainly won't feel like I've ripped anyone off. If you've ever wondered what child-me was like, wonder no more. These are my memories of my father, who is still alive, last I checked. We interact sometimes on Facebook, but we're not Friends, which I think is appropriate, since we're not friends, either. My niece set up a private group for blood relatives, and we're both in it. In the last ten years, we've probably had fewer than ten minutes of interaction of any kind.

When I was maybe seven years old or so, my dad and I went on a road trip. I don't remember much about it at all. I don't know why my mom or my older brother weren't there. I think we were probably in Wisconsin, but I'm not sure. I know we were in my dad's Chevy Cavalier station wagon. It was sort of light blue. I made him put the seats down in the back so I could lie down on them like it was a bed, just two front seats and a bed, flying down the highway. It was winter, and the landscape was bleak and sleepy.

I had a cassette with Pink Floyd's "Learning to Fly" on it, and I didn't want to listen to anything else. I made that poor man listen to this song and nothing else for six or eight hours while I warbled along, not knowing most of the words. I don't know how he felt about it at the time, or if he even remembers it now.

That's the only purely happy memory I have with my dad. It's happy because he permitted me to be myself for a few hours, a few hours in which my mom was not around to criticize either of us. Maybe he enjoyed seeing me be free, I don't know. Maybe he couldn't wait to get back to my mom, who would never have permitted me to listen to any song I liked while I laid on my back in a beat-up station wagon and sang along. Not for five minutes, never mind five or more hours.

From what I understand now, today, my dad is basically playing along with the fact of my gender. Family of mine that are around him more have said that they think he doesn't actually believe I'm a girl, but that I'm just doing all this for attention; that that's the way he is behaving. Which makes sense, since his media diet is just about entirely Fox News, I'm told. I wonder if he worries I'm a danger to anyone. I wonder whether he worries about the danger I'm in; I mean, I really wonder, because I don't think he does. What a tremendously sad thought.

I've read and heard elsewhere that long-term depression can have severe impact on memory. I can't remember where I've read or heard that, though, which I think is hilarious. Anyway, the point is that I'm not exaggerating when I say I remember almost nothing from before I was about 15. Instead of an endless stream of human joys and sorrows to pull from and reflect upon, I have something more like an edited 90-second reel, a trailer that barely makes sense. Some kind of art film that leaves viewers with a sense of disconnected sadness, but no real idea what was happening.

I have a not-purely-happy memory of going somewhere else alone with my dad, on a family vacation to the American Southwest. I was probably about 12. We'd gone to Four Corners and the Grand Canyon and such. One morning, my mom wanted us to all get up before dawn to watch the sunrise before breakfast. It was important to her, so it must therefore be important to us. But what was important to me was sleeping in, and reading more God Emperor of Dune when I woke up. She threatened that I'd get nothing to eat until dinner if I didn't get up, and I refused, so they all left and I stayed in bed. Eventually, I woke up, and I laid there reading until they returned. I felt a little bit grown up, but mostly I felt like a kid who'd finally gotten her way about something, anything. I read more of Hwi Noree's tale, and lost myself in her life, so preferable to mine, even with all the danger and intrigue hers had.

They returned eventually, and my mom went on and on about how I'd really missed out. My dad wanted to go see Pikes Peak, and I was bored of sitting in the hotel room by then, so I asked if I could go with him. My mom and my brother didn't want to go, so they stayed behind, but my mom warned my dad not to buy me anything to eat, and this is probably how I came best to understand the concept of foreshadowing.

We drove up to the summit, and went into the gift shop. I pointed out all the things I wanted or thought were interesting. He bought me a small stuffed animal ram with comically large horns made of corduroy. Just the horns; the rest was ordinary plush. He bought me a little bit of fudge that they made on-site. Thinking I was a terribly clever kid, I named my ram Horny; a joke I was barely old enough to get. I wanted my parents to roll their eyes and laugh about how smart I was to make such a grown-up pun. We drove back to the hotel, and I carried a happiness with me whose fragility I did not understand.

Once my mom learned that my dad had not only allowed me to eat, but had facilitated it, the rest of the day, at least, was ruined. Maybe it was the next several days, I don't know, I don't remember. I remember my mom screaming bloody murder at him for what he'd done. I remember him mumbling, looking at the floor, shuffling his feet. I remember being yelled at for naming my stuffed animal Horny. My clever joke was offensive, but what I didn't understand at the time was that it was really only offensive because my mom was mad that my dad hadn't obeyed her.

When I was in high school, my dad walked through the kitchen early one weekday morning. He was in briefs, and nothing else, which was just how he was in the mornings. He saw me sitting there on a stool at the island (it was more of a peninsula, actually), wrapped in heavy blankets, eating cereal, barely awake. He patted me on the head, and said, "you're kinda weird." Then he went to take his shower and get ready for work.

Much later, during the first block of eight or so years in which I did not speak to my parents, I was back in Michigan for a friend's wedding. My wife at the time, Dimple, sought a rapprochement between my parents and me. The nearest I could bring myself was to drive past their house, my childhood home. I saw my dad riding the lawnmower, staring vacantly into space as he ponderously whirlpooled around the yard. He'd come to some central point about three hours after he started, I estimated. Just like I used to. I missed cutting the grass, that chore I used to hate. He didn't see me. And I never stopped.

Other Mother

One of the great gifts of my transness is that I am forced, constantly, as a matter of course, to try to explain my existence around the context of existing social constructs that naturally exclude me. And being forced to do that, without pause, without rest, has led me to some different views of reality. It's not that I think I have the best possible view of reality. We all have our own view of it, and mine, like yours, is necessarily limited and defined by my own experience. But so much of what comprises my view of reality these days is an understanding that I will never, ever be able to see all of it.

So, with that, today, I am asking myself, more pointedly, a series of questions I have had mulling around in the background for almost two years. Am I a father? Am I a mother? Am I both? Neither? Have I always been all of those things, in some way? What is a mother?

One common refrain I hear is that simply contributing to the birth of a child is not what makes one a mother or a father. So, in that regard, the fact that I contributed sperm and not egg to create three children has no real meaning or value. It has genetic value, but not social value. I had to do more than that to be a father. I had to do something other than that to be a mother. I fathered children in the genetic sense, but that wasn't what made me a father. And while I agree with that construct, I find it darkly amusing that I have the same problem here as I have elsewhere when it comes to gender. We use the same words to mean different things. We say "father" when we mean "contributor of sperm, and nothing else," and when we mean "male child-rearing person, and nothing else." Often, people are both. But sometimes they are one or the other. Like gender and sex, when we use the same word to define different things, it's easy to see how quickly things become confused.

One way to think of "father" is "male role model." This is the definition people are leaning on when they say someone is "a father to us all." They're saying that the man in question is the kind of man every man should aspire to be like. And while I tried to be that for my own kids, I realize now that if I was always female (true), then I could never have actually been a male role model, for anyone. I certainly tried my best. But trying to be the best version of something I could not be doesn't change the fact that I could not be that thing. I could not show them how to be a man. I could only show them how to pretend to be one.

That's not to say that I showed my kids malignant examples of manhood. Just that all I could ever show them was a drawing, a schematic, an idea of what it might be. It was a poor idea, based on poor data, like the account of a disoriented eyewitness. I essentially said, "this is what a man is supposed to be. Right? I think?" There is literally nothing about masculinity or being a man that I can inherently understand.

So, did I show them an alternate kind of motherhood, or womanhood? A version of motherhood that was dressed up to look like fatherhood? What's the difference?

Does it matter?

I have to back up further and ask myself that question. Because I think that all the questions before that are rooted in this notion that every child needs a mother and a father, in the role-model sense. But when I think of myself, I realize that having a dad meant nothing to me, in terms of having a male role model. How ever much I ended up being like him, I never set out to be like my dad, because his life and his dreams were never mine. But that would've been true even if I'd been born cisgender female. And it's also true of my own mom.

In that sense, I don't have parents. And I've become more comfortable with that than with the idea of adopting new ones. I've become comfortable with the idea of having come from nowhere. Or at least from nowhere I can identify or place or give name to. It's a place that precedes modern cultural definitions of gender because I have always existed outside of those definitions.

From there, it makes more sense to argue that we aren't mothers or fathers, any of us, but simply parents. But to argue that is to stop before passing that boundary back into gendered space, where I acknowledge that there is an aspect to human reality that we all share: that my gender is core to who I am, and it matters. Even agender people, those who are genderless, have that property as a core element of who they are: existing as not-gender can only be expressed in relation to gender. Gender is inescapable.

So if I am a parent (true) and I am a woman (true) and being a woman and a parent are both core to who I am (true), and those are things shared by a number of other people (probably true) then it's reasonable to define this category of person, "mother," as "woman who is a parent" or "parent who is a woman." And it's reasonable to define "father" similarly, for men. But I also fathered children, genetically, so I'm kind of back to square one. Am I a father? Am I a mother? Am I both? Neither? Have I always been all of those things, in some way? What is a mother?

At the end of my post last year on Mother's Day, I somewhat flippantly stated that for all those who feel they have no mother, for whatever reason, that I was their mother, now. And a couple people have taken me up on that with some seriousness.

I can't quite remember how I ended up with two "adopted" daughters, but I know it was through a series of Third Eye Blind fan groups I have been a part of on Facebook. The younger of the two, Brittnie, is still in touch with her biological mother. But Brittnie's mom has always struggled with addiction, and has never been reliable for her in any way. I had probably said to her something like what I said at the end of last year's Mother's Day blog post — that since she didn't feel like she had a mom, I was her mom, now, too bad, haha. But it was real to her, and it's become real to me, too.

She came to me for solace and advice as she struggled to come to terms with the end of her marriage. She came to me because she needed a mom, and that is who she understands me to be. Her daughters, whom I regard as granddaughters, call me "Grandma Sera." I know that at 41 this should make me feel old and disregarded, culturally, but it has the opposite effect for me. I'm in this remarkable position of being able to finally grow up as a girl, alongside girls of all different ages. From my granddaughters, to my friend Liz, who just turned 16; to the many women I befriended this time around at college, who are generally in their mid-20s; to my other daughter, Olivia, in her early 30s; and even to women my own age, or nearly so, like my high school friends Kelly and Deanna, whom I only recently reconnected with. I get to grow as a woman in the context of other women, and I get the advantage of all this life experience that I collected but never processed. I get to take apart and digest every old trauma that even slightly resembles theirs, and we get to grow up a little bit, together.

Of all the wonderful and amazing ways in which women in general have welcomed me as a woman, this has been by far the most profound. I don't feel disregarded, I feel connected. I feel like I'm part of some great sprawling tree of womanhood, that there are parts that gave rise to me and my place, and that I in turn give rise to that in others. And it turns out nothing makes me feel younger at 41 than unboxing and getting over something I should've figured out when I was 21. That Liz should say to me, "I really do look up to you as a role model for the woman I want to be, and I'm glad I met you" makes my chest burst. It makes me want to keep aspiring to be that, to be my own ideal conception of woman. Not to just exist as woman, which I would do no matter what, but to step beyond that primordial sea and onto land, towards the sky.

Does that make me a mother? Yes. Because now I've figured it out.

I am a mother because I am a parent and I am female. We are mothers if anyone sees us as such. Sometimes that's the racing heartbeat of a scared, pregnant 13-year-old, coming to terms with the idea of themselves as a mother, before anyone else knows. Sometimes it's the recently-out trans man with adult children. Sometimes it's the 41-year-old trans woman with two daughters who have never known her as anyone but who she always was. Sometimes it's me, acknowledging to myself that I am a woman who is also a parent, which is also known as "mother."

"Mother" is an observed relationship. And if anyone observes it, anyone at all, even if it's only you, then congratulations, you have it. Happy Mother's Day.

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.)