Welcome to #TransTuesday! It’s time for the fifth part of THE UNINTENTIONAL (?) TRANS ALLEGORY OF SILO! Tillyvison reservoir full, it’s time to Silo up! This week we’re covering episode 6! It’s a HUGE one for the allegory and gets an installment all its own!
So lemme hit you with the hotness from PART 1.
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And the double hotness from PART 2!
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And the triple hotness from PART 3!
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And the “you get the drill” from PART 4!
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EPISODE 6
Juliet breaks into Trumbull’s apartment and plants the rubber duck pez dispenser relic for Billings to find. Which he does.
Flashback to Juliet looking at the pez dispenser with George. She says the heat tape SAVES LIVES (he drew the map that helped her steal it). Again important to remember when we get to the end.
Juliet: “These [relics] aren’t worth risking our lives for.” George: “If these things aren’t worth risking our lives for, why do they make it a risk to our lives to have them?” And the way this reads about trans history, trans medicine, trans rights…
If being trans isn’t a real thing, why have you erased us from history? How can we be a threat to the lies if we’re entirely wrong about our own identities? Why do you fight so hard to stop us from being ourselves if being trans isn’t real? Hmm? HMMMM?
PHEW.
To George, the watch relic is everything, because relics are clues to the past. It DOESN’T WORK, but we know Juliet later fixes it. Look what that foreshadows… SHE can FIX what broke in the PAST so that works in the FUTURE, ie change society.
There’s a competition for knowing the pact. Billings won it four times, but he says these days when you win it’s Sims that gives you the pin, not Judge Meadows. Showing you again that the system of justice is distorted and controlled by the men at the top.
Here we see Billings has the syndrome and is trying to hide it. We’ll talk a whole lot more about that in a bit.
When Juliet and Billings meet Sims, he says that they have files on every relic found over the last 140 years. But note not everyone has those files, JUST Judicial. Juliet tried to get information on the pez dispenser and found nothing. They’re CONTROLLING INFORMATION.
In a flashback, we get the line: “People leave traces. History is just traces of a whole lot of people over a whole lot of time.” And what happens when you erase people from history? Like the rebels, or anyone pre-rebellion… or trans people?
You get people who don’t understand why there are “suddenly” more trans people, and feel like it’s all so “new.” “We didn’t have transgenders in my day!” Yes you did, old man, they were just afraid to come out publicly. But if you erase us from history, how would they know?
Again, see the trans tuesday on TRANS HISTORY 1.
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George: “Don’t you ever think about the world beyond the silo.” Juliet: “No, when would I have time to do that?” and then she complains about people messing up the generator. And if that seems like it’s not important, let me stop you right there.
Because the only way the oppression of marginalized people, like TRANS PEOPLE, works is by those who are not marginalized letting it happen. By them keeping you TOO BUSY with OBLIGATIONS to realize you yourself are trans, or to realize you’re participating in our oppression.
Juliet: “… when you talk about these [relics], something ignites in you and I can see it on your face. And I don’t see that on a lot of people. And whatever that feeling is, when you feel it I feel it too.”
To me this speaks DIRECTLY to seeing other trans people happy post-transition, full of joy and life and laughter, living happy lives. Representation matters, if you can see it you can be it. When I came out I thanked all the trans ladies whose visibility made me feel I could do it too.
Juliet: “It was easy to fix once I made the right tools.” She’s talking about the relic watch, again, something that was broken in the past. And it works NOW because she MADE THE RIGHT TOOLS and that FIXED it.
That ABSOLUTELY speaks to me of changing your body to alleviate gender dysphoria. And I’m not saying transition is “easy,” but compared to not being able to do ANYTHING about the dysphoria that’s drowning you? By comparison, yeah, it’s easy as hell.
So Juliet and Billings go see Regina, George’s old girlfriend. She says George went down into his camp by the digger to “explore the big questions. Illegal questions.” “He lost his family but he didn’t mind isolating me from mine.”
Regina says that George’s obsession with relics and the past (uncovering his transness and trying to transition) COST HIM HIS FAMILY. And because she helped him obtain relics (continue his transition), the bigotry HER family had for him meant her family shunned her, too.
Could that be any clearer? In the ways so many trans people get kicked out of homes and jobs, lose friends and family for coming out? And here was Regina, who HELPED George, and then bigotry directed at George got applied to her.
And she blames George for this. Note that she never once blames her family for being bigots! Or wonders why she wants the love and approval of bigots anyway. Having bigots in her life, and having their respect, was more important to her than George discovering his truth.
And, like, yikes, right? Now remember this is a very real thing that happens to trans people ALL THE DAMNED TIME.
Sims tells Juliet they knew the pez dispenser belonged to her “colleague” George. His apartment was searched before he died and it wasn’t there, but then it WAS found when Juliet searched Trumbull’s apartment. She says that’s the first time she ever saw it.
Bernard wants to know if Trumbull was on the team that searched George’s apartment. Sims says the names of search team members are strictly confidential, and right here you see one of the guiding principles of those as the top: consequences for thee but not for me.
And we see this all the time, where cis people do all kinds of things trans people do, but it’s FINE when cis people do it. Yet when we trans people do it, it’s suddenly a problem. AGAIN see the trans tuesday on CIS PEOPLE GET GENDER AFFIRMING HEALTHCARE TOO.
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And we see it again immediately with Bernard: “Any further investigation might expose the truth, and that could prove destabilizing. Some mysteries are best left unsolved.” Uncovering the truth might cause problems for him, and we can’t have that! So let’s just stop knowing things.
Juliet and Billings talk, and she lays this on him: “Your hands shake, you have flashes of pain. Under pressure you clench your hands so tight I’m surprised your fingers don’t fall off. You have the syndrome. And you’re hiding it.”
“So deputy, living by the letter of the Pact, you know it’s a crime what you’re doing, not reporting yourself. And according to the pact you’re in no way qualified to be in a position of authority, to have access to a firearm, to detain criminals, to even be a deputy in this department.”
What this is showing you is that Billings is trying to PASS. Again this doesn’t mean he’s the only allegorical trans representation in the show, you’ve seen others already.
But he tries to hide something physical on his body, so he’ll be accepted by people who do not have that attribute, and does all he can to pass as one of them and tell no one… and thus is VERY MUCH a stealth trans person (they can pass as cis and let people think they are).
And Juliet can spot it in him because she’s a Flamekeeper/trans person too. No, she does not have the syndrome. Again, a lot of this allegory isn’t “clean” in the way others I’ve written about are, but the direct parallels to trans life are definitely still there.
And here she’s calling out the hypocrisy of him being Mr. All About the Pact, which was an overcorrection on his part to try to hide his truth. Kind of like when you see stridently anti-gay politicians getting caught in gay extramarital affairs, y’know?
Later Billings is at home, his hands are shaking from the Syndrome. He’s worried their baby has it too. His wife: “Just because you have it doesn’t mean she will.” Billings: “But I worry.” He’s worried his kid is gonna be trans too.
We don’t know exactly what the root reason for transness is, some people are just born this way. But there’s also a lot of evidence of people in the same family being trans, be they parent/child or even siblings (some of whom made a paragon of trans allegories of their own).
In a flashback, Juliet asks: “What’s the big question?” George: “There are a lot of them. What’s outside? What’s beyond what the sensor can see? Why are we here? How long have we been here? How much time do we have left?”
He’s wondering about the world, about all the gaps in their knowledge from the selective information they’ve been taught. He wants to KNOW.
Juliet: “what’s the biggest one?” George: “What if everything you know to be true, everything you’ve been told by the people you love… was in fact just one big lie?” This is THE TRANSIEST QUESTION EVER!! I almost screamed when he said it (also hi, hello Matrix connection).
Because for a whole lot of us trans folks, that is EXACTLY our reality. Transness was erased from history, erased from public life. I didn’t even know trans was something a person could BE until I was an adult! That information was KEPT FROM ME by society, by family, by friends.
Some of them may have known and not talked about it because it was “shameful” or “a joke” or for even worse reasons. Some of them probably also didn’t know trans was something a person could be because they, too, had been lied to and fooled by society and everyone around them.
The cis binary matrix of assigned gender at birth IS A LIE. Gender does not work that way. But our entire society is founded upon that lie, and it keeps cis white men in power at the top, and so it goes right on perpetuating across generations.
And when you realize the entire WORLD has been lying to you for your ENTIRE LIFE, let me tell you… there is no bigger question you could ever ask yourself. Do I really know myself better than ALL OF FREAKIN’ SOCIETY?
In fact, yes. Yes you do.
When Walk and Juliet talk on the radio, Walk has a great bit that defines her. “Time? You got no concept of time. You think you do but you don’t. Because you’ve got a whole lot more ahead of you than behind. Time to you is just an idea.”
“To me it’s years spent trapped behind a closed door with memories. All your friends and loved ones, somewhere out there on the other side of it. You can talk to me about time when you can’t bring yourself to step out the door… When seconds have become years.”
Right there you can so CLEARLY see Walk is a closeted trans person. She even talks about all the people she cares about kept away from her, in one way I described an aspect of my gender dysphoria… like a wall separating me from the people I cared about and I couldn’t get to them.
And she couldn’t bring herself to step out of the closet, because she was too scared of the people out in the world and what they’d do, how they’d react. And now she looks back and sees the YEARS she’s lost, years of memories she didn’t get to have and a life she didn’t get to live.
I still have that even now, because again the past will always haunt those of us who transition as adults. I wasn’t in the closet so much as entirely lost without knowing why, but the effect is the same. A life missed out on because we didn’t get to live it as ourselves.
Again, here’s the trans tuesday on THE PAST AND WHY IT HAUNTS US.
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Walk: “See I don’t know what happened but when you left here, love had you trying to do the right thing. And now anger is making you give up? Fear did the same thing to me. And that IS a waste of time.”
She has a photo of her and her ex-wife, and she TURNS OUT THE LIGHT OVER IT leaving it in darkness. Her inability to come out of the closet even cost her the woman she loved most, because she wasn’t able to authentically BE WITH HER.
Juliet goes back to Regina, who again goes on about how her relationship with George cost her everything, all because she dared to help him seek the truth. She gives Juliet a relic George left with her, the kids’ travel guide about Georgia.
It was George’s, given to him by his aunt Gloria (you see here that Flamekeepers/transness runs in families). It was passed down and hidden for generations. It’s from “Before the silo. Before there was a reason to lie.” An AUTHENTIC PIECE OF HISTORY.
In fact, this book, this piece of truth, was so important that George was NAMED after it. His entire family was Flamekeepers, and it cost them everything. Regina: “When you see what you’ll see, don’t speak it out loud. Don’t let them hear. This will get you killed.”
Juliet looks at the book in her apartment. There are trees, WATER with boats on top and dolphins underneath. A shell/spiral on the beach. Order from chaos. And yes, A BEACH. More WATER. But none of this water is dangerous. Again, the spiral: ORDER FROM CHAOS.
If you can learn about the water in a safe environment, if you can understand it, it’s not so scary. You can address the fear and learn how to combat it. IF TRANS PEOPLE CAN ADDRESS THEIR GENDER DYSPHORIA AS KIDS, THEY CAN DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT.
It can prevent a lifetime of pain and anguish, it can prevent body changes from the wrong puberty that are SO MUCH of what gives trans people gender dysphoria. IF YOU CAN NAME THE PAIN, YOU CAN FIX IT. And THAT is what society doesn’t want trans people to know.
We get a shot of the mirror, the flowers are knocked down and the secret Judicial control room is watching her. And if you’re paying attention, you know what’s coming, trans friends:
THE MIRROR BETRAYED HER. Yeah, see, I told you it was transy.
And I wasn’t kiddin’.
Tilly Bridges, end transmission.
tillysbridges@gmail.com
Ps – Part 6 is here!
