Lilly Wachowski sounds off on Hollywood for lack of “queer and trans stories”
If Lilly Wachowski is struggling, is there hope for any of us?!?
Mark
If even Lilly Wachowski, a.k.a. the badass trans filmmaker behind a little movie called The Matrix, is struggling to get a movie greenlit, is there hope for any of us?
The 58-year-old visionary director, who also helmed Netflix’s beloved Sense8 with her sister Lana, revealed that she had to come to terms with being “fine” with “never [making] another movie again” in the current political climate in a recent interview with Variety.
How about we take this to the next level?
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“I’ve pitched a lot of wonderful, cool queer stories and trans stories, and Hollywood didn’t want any of it,” she explained, citing her pitches for projects like Cosmoknights, which she described as “Star Wars with lesbians in space” and an adaptation of Gretchen Felker-Martin’s best-selling book Manhunt, which were ultimately shelved.
Most recently, her TV series Work in Progress, which followed a lesbian woman who gets into a relationship with a younger trans man, was unceremoniously canceled by Showtime after two seasons, despite rave reviews.
Unfortunately, her experiences seem to echo this year’s Where We Are in Film report from GLAAD, which found LGBTQ+ representation on the big screen to be at a three-year low. (The stats are even worse for trans folks, who were depicted in a whopping zero major motion pictures in 2025.)
Of course, Wachowski has her theories on how we got here after being at the “trans tipping point.” You know, those halcyon days less than 15 years ago when Orange is the New Black star Laverne Cox was gracing the cover of Time Magazine.
“It’s not that public opinion shifted, it’s that billionaires started pumping out negative propaganda against trans people,” she said.
“They started creating reports about kids with litter boxes … Jesse Watters was talking to the Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed about cutting kids’ tallywackers off. None of this is happening. This is all right-wing propaganda against trans people.”
That’s part of the reason why she created Anarchists United Foundation and Anarchists United Studio, a missive in the style of Charlie Chaplin’s famed United Artists studio, with “the mission of championing stories from marginalized communities.”
It’s also why she did not mince words when talking about Elon Musk and Ivanka Tr*mp, who, along with the rest of the alt-right, have co-opted the trans allegory of The Matrix and turned the “red pill” into an anti-woke rallying cry.
“They’re not misunderstanding the film; they’re co-opting a message,” she said. “And that’s what fascists do: They co-opt the messages of progressives and use it to their benefit to confuse and obfuscate what is going on and the intention of their ideology.”
And for the record, she doesn’t even have time for JK Rowling, whom she said “funds trans genocide,” and the upcoming television adaptation of Harry Potter, which Wachowski pointed out “is supporting my eradication.”
Still, there are some silver linings, like Elliot Page’s pivotal role in The Odyssey, which is on track to make $2 billion at the box office this year.
“You’ve got to hand it to Christopher Nolan for casting Elliot in the first place,” she said.
“That right there is the definition of allyship, and the fact that Christopher Nolan is going out there and talking up Elliot about how awesome he was to work with speaks volumes about him as a human being.”
Lilly Wachowski made The Matrix and Bound, that alone should give her free reign
— ✦⋆ jade ⋆✦ (@faded_jade_) September 11, 2026
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