Credit: Timothy HiattLana Wachowski made major news when she was named one of Marc Jacobs’ muses. Now her filmmaking partner and sibling has announced that she has also transitioned. Lilly, formerly Andy Wachowski, made a statement in the Windy City Times, an LGBTQ publication from the Wachowskis’ hometown of Chicago.
In her statement, she says that she nearly came out much earlier — and not by choice. She says she had her statement prepared.
“In response to this threatened public outing against my will, I had a prepared a statement that was one part piss, one part vinegar and 12 parts gasoline,” she writes.
Although a major director confirming her gender is undeniably news, heightened transgender suicide and murder rates (not to mention basic standards of respect) mean that any transgender person has a right to their own transitional timeline.
However, some publications seemed intent on outing her before she was ready to announce her true gender. She writes about one such request from the Daily Mail, which sent a reporter to her door. Lilly points in particular to that paper's record of involuntarily outing a transgender teacher who then took her own life.
Wachowski confirms that she has transitioned and announced her transition to family, friends, and work associates. She also says that the tags “transition” and “transgender,” while the most commonly accepted phrasings for gender confirmation, don’t do her justice. She writes:
“But these words, 'transgender' and 'transitioned' are hard for me because they both have lost their complexity in their assimilation into the mainstream. There is a lack of nuance of time and space. To be transgender is something largely understood as existing within the dogmatic terminus of male or female. And to 'transition' imparts a sense of immediacy, a before and after from one terminus to another. But the reality, my reality is that I've been transitioning and will continue to transition all of my life, through the infinite that exists between male and female as it does in the infinite between the binary of zero and one. We need to elevate the dialogue beyond the simplicity of binary. Binary is a false idol.”
GLAAD commended her choice to come out and released a statement with guidelines for how to cover her transition.
Refinery29 reached out to Lilly's manager, who refused comment, as well as the Daily Mail and her agent, who have yet to provide their responses.
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