Lana Wachowski Had a 'Gender Situation,' Says The New Yorker
Rich Juzwiak
http://gawker.com/5940452/lana-wachowski-had-a-gender-situation-says-the-new-yorker (http://gawker.com/5940452/lana-wachowski-had-a-gender-situation-says-the-new-yorker)
This week's New Yorker has a lengthy profile on reclusive director siblings Andy and Lana Wachowski and their collaboration with Tom Tykwer to turn David Mitchell's seemingly unfilmable 2004 novel Cloud Atlas into a movie.
Lana, you may know, used to be called Larry before she came out as transgender, and if you don't know that, reporter Aleksandar Hemon will tell you multiple times. Another thing Hemon does, 14 times in all, is refer to the Wachowskis as "brothers." Granted, Hemon only refers to Lana as male before her public coming out, and it could be argued that he did so for the sake of narrative clarity. But the piece also acknowledges her virtually lifelong awareness of being transgender very early on:
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Beyond the Matrix
The Wachowskis travel to even more mind-bending realms.
by Aleksandar Hemon September 10, 2012
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/09/10/120910fa_fact_hemon?currentPage=all (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/09/10/120910fa_fact_hemon?currentPage=all)
Perhaps not coincidentally, Lana's gender consciousness started to emerge at around the same time. In third grade, Larry transferred to a Catholic school, where boys and girls wore different uniforms and stood in separate lines before class. "I have a formative memory of walking through the girls' line and hesitating, knowing that my clothes didn't match," Lana told me. "But as I continued on I felt I did not belong in the other line, so I just stopped in between them. I stood for a long moment with everyone staring at me, including the nun. She told me to get in line. I was stuck—I couldn't move. I think some unconscious part of me figured I was exactly where I belonged: betwixt." Larry was often bullied for his betwixtness. "As a result, I hid and found tremendous solace in books, vastly preferring imagined worlds to this world," Lana said.
I see this a lot in articles featuring transgender people. It can be done with more or less grace, and the amount of which usually helps determine what I think the article is really saying about transgender identity. I do think that we are just too far away from a time when social acknowledgment, education, understanding, and acceptance are stable enough that mainstream news would even consider gendering us properly. The sad fact is that the audience would be confused. Now, the other sad fact is that the audience would probably be upset, and so too might the author. In general, it can be frustrating to see the cis world discuss us with such authority. The sense of entitlement over who and what we are is...grotesque.