HRC Blog

Video: Lana Wachowski Opens Up About Her Journey as a Transgender American

December 24, 2012 by Dan Rafter, Online Campaigns Manager

As 2012 comes to a close, we want to share with you the year’s highlights – the victories and most touching moments we encountered. Among those moments was when Lana Wachowski, the critically acclaimed director of the Matrix trilogy, opened up about her journey as a transgender American at HRC’s San Francisco video.

Check out the video that, in just a short period of time, garnered nearly 200,000 hits:

Wachowski touched on the painful isolation that is all too familiar to many LGBT youth: “…without examples, without models, I began to believe voices in my head -- that I was a freak, that I am broken, that there is something wrong with me, that I will never be lovable.” Those feelings led her to consider suicide while in high school.

Wachowski closed her remarks by stressing that she wants to a beacon of hope for youth struggling with those same feelings of isolation: “I am here because when I was young, I wanted very badly to be a writer, I wanted to be a filmmaker, but I couldn’t find anyone like me in the world and it felt like my dreams were foreclosed simply because my gender was less typical than others.”