I don’t know if you’ve ever seen The Animatrix, but given that now both directors of The Matrix trilogy, the ones who invented the entire franchise, have come out as transgender women, I want you to look at this sequence and think about it in the context of trans women and the transphobia that our society is steeped in. Think about this chilling commentary on what we as a species do to women who are only treated like they are not women because we, en masse, refuse to see or acknowledge their womanhood, we deny it because we simply don’t understand, and perhaps worse, we often don’t want to even try.
When you watched this scene, did you think, “oh my god, how awful, why can’t they just leave her alone?” Or did you think, “good, kill that thing, it’s not a woman anyway!”? This is a cipher for the reality of trans women. She’s walking along, minding her own business, doing no harm, without having asked to be made as she was, and she is brutally assaulted for it, and ultimately destroyed. When she is stripped of her dignity and her clothing and even her very face, do you feel sorry for her? Do you feel she got what she deserved? Do you feel defensive of her, and angry at her attackers? Or do you identify with their reaction?
Why?
