Welcome to #TransTuesday! It’s lucky part seven of THE UNINTENTIONAL (?) TRANS ALLEGORY OF SILO! Tillyvison available where legal, consult your local laws, it’s time to Silo up for episode 8!
It’d be super helpful if you read PART 1 first.
And even more helpful if you read PART 2!
And even MORE helpful if you read PART 3!
What’s that? You want something that’d be still more helpful? Okay, PART 4!
You want me to help you even more than that, don’t you? Like with a PART 5?
And listen, I’m not gonna half-ass the help, so here’s PART 6! And that brings you current!
EPISODE 8
When Sims arrives in Gloria’s room, he uncovers the mirror. Society WANTS you to see the wrong reflection, to not see yourself, to not BE yourself. Because, again, being who you are and not who they say you have to be threatens their power structure.
If Gloria helps him, he says he’ll guarantee “you’re never kept from your dreams again.” But that’s the only way society wants you to have what you deserve, what you have a RIGHT to… in a dream. Locked away where nobody else can see. And Gloria agrees.
Despite telling Juliette she’s the last of the Flamekeepers who must fight for their rights, for bodily autonomy, for their history… she will sell Juliette out if it means she doesn’t have to deal with the fight or the pain anymore. It’s very much like Cypher in the first Matrix movie.
Flashback to Juliette’s mom making a microscope to examine the sick rabbit, she’s gonna try to fix its heart. And if it works they can use it to help people. She builds the first magnifier in the silo, and wants to use it to help others.
She wants to USE THE KNOWLEDGE SHE’S NOT ALLOWED TO HAVE TO HELP OTHERS. This is every trans person helping every other trans person along the way, knowing more about ourselves than the establishment knows (or even wants to know).
See the Trans Tuesday on ANECDOTAL TRANS HEALTHCARE for some of the exact ways this works for all of us.
Now this is not a WHITE rabbit, but it’s used in the same way the white rabbit is in the Matrix films. It’s taken from Alice in Wonderland, a sign to the path to realizing and accepting your transness and then choosing to transition and finding trans joy.
Curiouser and curiouser.
In another flashback Judicial raiders tear up kid Juliette’s apartment, and they break the chair she fixed. You think you can fix what society deemed broken and beyond repair? Well then we’re just gonna break it again. STAY PRETENDING TO BE CIS, no fixing the problem.
They also smash up the magnifier, the tool they’d made with what they had to help learn more about the world. This is taking the clothes of the “wrong” gender away, forcing you to cut your hair, etc etc. Banning anything that would lead to you learning more about yourself.
Juliette’s mom: “Why is a magnifier even illegal in the first place?” GOOD QUESTION. Because they don’t want you to LOOK TOO CLOSELY or you will discover the truth. About the world and so much of what it tells us being a lie, and about yourself and who you are inside.
Juliette confronts her dad about it later. Dr. Nichols: “…your mother, grief turned her outward. Pushed her toward dangerous things. She so desperately wanted answers she stopped caring about the lines she had to cross to get them.” But all he cared about was protecting her.
A lot of cis people, parents especially, keep the knowledge of and access to transition care hidden from their kids in some misguided attempt to protect them. But transitioning isn’t dangerous, they just don’t understand it. They’re prioritizing their feelings over ours.
Once again, you know it, here comes CIS GRIEF (over trans people when we come out).
Juliette knows Judicial was watching her mom with sensors through the mirrors. The mirrors betrayed her mom too, which is a lot more evidence that her mom was an egg.
After Juliette arrests Sims, he’s in jail and asks to use the radio, and wants his one call! HE knows how important communication is, and believes HE deserves access to it even when he’s been locked up. But it’s something the average citizen still doesn’t get. Hypocrisy.
Walk’s waiting for Juliette, who’s late. She manages to open her apartment door and step into the frame. She tries to come out but can’t. Her concern over Juliette has ALMOST pushed her into being able to come out herself, in the hope it would aid Juliette in her fight.
And it could. It always does. Again, the more of us that come out the more siblings we have in this fight and the more normalized we become to cis people (and the more other trans people will be inspired to come out too). But Walk’s fear is too powerful to overcome.
Juliette (now with her own mirror covered, she’s discovered they’re lying to her) shows Lukas the hard drive. They had a connection, he wondered about things too. She thought he might be able to help her get in.
He’s scared to poke deeper even if it has the answers to the lights in the sky. He’s fascinated by those lights, but he won’t push it. “The rules apply to everyone.”
She pulls the blanket off the mirror and smashes it to show the camera. They are everywhere. “If we don’t figure out the truth, no one else will.”
THAT IS NOT ME IN THE MIRROR, THAT IS WHAT SOCIETY WANTS TO SEE (literally and allegorically!). She sees in Lukas what she sees in herself (and in Holston, and Gloria). Transness.
But he still won’t help her, he’s the only one taking care of his mom and if anything happened to him… society has saddled him with obligations. To seek answers, and the truth about reality and about who he is, means he’d be abandoning her.
These are the obligations to the system society saddles so many of us with, in ways overt and subtle, to keep us conforming to the cis binary. They’re cishetero normativity, “the nuclear family,” the “obligation” to have kids, the “obligation” to blood family…
Even if they betray you, even if they think you shouldn’t have equal rights, even if they think you shouldn’t be allowed to exist as your true self. BUT THEY’RE FAMILY! No, nah, uh uh. Toxic bigots don’t deserve to be in your life just because they share your genetic material.
As so many trans and queer people know, this is why chosen, found family is so important to us. Because those are the people who ARE worthy of being in our life, who love us for who we ARE and not who they want us to be. And that is, again, a threat to the system.
And it’s been a minute so let me just say again that the Matrix films go over all of that too, the “obligations” society saddles us with to keep us compliant. BEGIN TRANSMISSION: THE TRANS ALLEGORIES OF THE MATRIX. It’s for cis people too!
We get to that scene in the cornfield where Bernard and Sims corner Juliette, and she figures out Bernard is behind it all. He admits it, but then, the most evil part of the entire season. Bernard: “I’m sorry sheriff Nichols, did you just say you want to go outside?”
Juliette: “No I didn’t.” Bernard: “I distinctly heard you say you want to go outside. Robert, did you hear that?” Sims: “Sure did.” So we know Juliette’s intense fire to know the truth is leading her in that direction. Going outside is coming out as trans, right? So what’s happening here?
They know she’s heading in that direction too, and THEY ARE OUTING HER TO EVERYONE SO THAT THEY CAN THEN CAST HER OUT OF SOCIETY AND GET HER OUT OF THEIR WAY. As she is in a position of power, her knowing the truth is EXCEPTIONALLY dangerous.
And they will not abide any threat to their power. Bernard: “The Founders knew someone would have to make the hard decisions to keep our Silo alive.” “…throughout our entire existence, problems have arisen that must be taken care of.”
This is a direct analogue to THE ARCHITECT’S SPEECH in Matrix Reloaded! Blah blah old cis white men blah blah more important than you blah blah conform or die blah blah we’re right and everyone else is wrong and we’re the heroes despite being the oppressors.
There are “problems” to be taken care of… like “anomalies” in the Matrix? Like “anomalies” in airport scanners? Like anyone who doesn’t conform to the narrow conformity of cisgender normativity? Oh. huh.
So what you’re seeing here, and now know has been true all along, is that Bernard is a liar who will say and do anything to keep himself in power (like the Architect and the Analyst in the Matrix). And that’s vital for understanding this next line of his.
Bernard: “This isn’t about heat tape, this is about survival, and that hard drive threatens the lives of everyone in this silo. And you are the greatest threat to our home in 140 years.”
This *IS* ACTUALLY ABOUT THE HEAT TAPE (in the surface story), and the hard drive doesn’t threaten the lives of anyone. It’s not a threat to their home. It’s a threat TO HIM and TO HIS POWER.
Flashback to Juliette at her mom’s funeral. Juliette: “Where are her friends? Her sister, her aunt?” Dr. Nichols: “you know why they’re not-“ Juliette cuts him off: “They’re cowards.”
Some of this is SUPERtext, because trans people transitioning often basically makes us dead to our family or friends, who cast us out for the crime of being ourselves. And they want nothing more to do with us.
Dr. Nichols: “If she died of a heart attack they’d all be here.” Juliette: “They’re cowards, and so was she”. Her dad is outright admitting people didn’t come to the funeral because they didn’t approve of Juliette’s mom and what she did.
And Juliette rightfully calls them cowards, but she also thinks the same of her mom. They’ve shown how like her mom Juliette was, and we know her mom was a proto-Flamekeeper aka an egg. And Juliette is trans.
Juliette saw how LIKE HER MOM she was, and her mom’s failure to come out, to live her truth (the opposite of LIVING your truth is very much like DEATH) as cowardly, because she didn’t have the courage to. Which would have made things easier for Juliette in accepting herself.
In the flashback, kid Juliette sets the bunny free. If this rabbit is a loose analogue of the white rabbit from Alice in Wonderland and The Matrix, this was Juliette giving up on that path. Letting it go. Because she thought she couldn’t have it.
But chronologically this scene happens BEFORE the egg cracking flashback scene, so what you get was that the loss of the magnifier/loss of knowledge crushed her and she gave up, because her mom gave up.
And then, a little while later, still as a kid, she went down to mechanical to try and fix other things because she couldn’t figure out (or accept, or feel safe enough to) fix what was broken about the world, that made her feel broken about herself.
She didn’t realize that was the moment it happened, but present Juliette is waking up to it now (or did, back when the egg cracking flashback happened). The flashbacks appear non-linearly, so it gets a little confusing to talk about.
Juliette is being taken up to jail with Billings, telling him she never said she wanted to go out. Sims punches her. VIOLENCE for non-conformity. Billings is all WTF and is shaking from the syndrome… look what they did to someone else who didn’t conform. I’m in trouble.
Juliette seizes the moment, grabs the hard drive (the vital information that trans people have always existed) and vaults over the railing.
Isn’t it weird how trans allegories keep having people leaping off of things and other people thinking that means they’re suicidal? HUH.
Tilly Bridges, end transmission.
tillysbridges@gmail.com
Ps – part 8 is here!