By Taj M. Smith

I first saw The Matrix in the seventh grade at my friend Rich’s birthday party. He had just finished opening his presents and there, amid the piles of wrapping paper, lay a thin plastic box with “D-V-D” emblazoned on its side. Four figures clad in all-black and sunglasses graced the cover, with white streaks of letters and numbers cascading down against a grey backdrop. I cradled the box like it was a precious photograph. The rigid plastic warmed in my hands, becoming pliable while we watched Trinity (Carrie Ann Moss) singlehandedly take down what seemed like eight cops in the opening scene. The film moved on different but simultaneous temporal planes, and, as the plot unfurled, I felt as if my reality was slowly being explained to me. I suddenly had language for the things I had been feeling—that nothing is as it seems.

The Matrix was more complicated than any other science fiction movie I had seen before. In the film, the reality we know is actually a computer simulation. Known as the Matrix, this simulation serves as a power source for the intelligent machines that dominate the real world. Morpheus and Trinity are in search of “the One” who will free humankind from the machines, releasing them from the Matrix. Enter Neo (Keanu Reeves), the film’s protagonist, who must learn and unlearn the ways of the Matrix. As he watches a bald child bend spoons using telekinesis, the child tells him, “There is no spoon.” Neo repeats the phrase, taking it in as the spoon he is holding bends. By the end of the movie, my perception of limits had melted away all together.

“There is no spoon” became my mantra. I began to question the reality of everything, including my own identity. Though this kind of searching is to be expected of any middle schooler, the questions I had weren’t typical of most kids in my middle school. I began to wonder about gender. The Matrix helped me put words and images to a reality that I thought only I was experiencing. I was about twelve when I knew for certain that something about me was different. I wouldn’t admit it until college—I violently repressed it until then—but I knew. I would lie in bed, wishing that life were a computer simulation from which I would awaken into my true self, a cool and confident young man. At twelve, this movie turned my world upside down.

The Matrix revealed to me an alternate world in which change is inevitable and welcomed. In this fictional world, created by Lily and Lana Wachowski, boundaries are challenges that need transforming. The world is malleable—not fixed. Seeing the film marked the beginning of a serious journey into self-discovery and transformation. Sixteen years after the film’s release, I see it reflected in almost every aspect of my worldview. To me, the world is malleable, even if it is not a computer simulation. I am a transgender Christian who sees the promise of new life as an imagined future in which people are charged with the task of building their world from the ground up. This world is imagined in that it does not yet exist, but the possibility to create it is embedded in present-day society if we ask, “what if,” aware that reality encompasses both the quotidian and the strange.

This became more and more apparent to me in the years after I saw The Matrix. I started reading science fiction, and I began to wonder whether it was possible for the things I read to become real. Maybe there could be a planet with a sea of sand dunes like Frank Herbert’s Dune, where people fight against an imperial force for use of their planet’s resources. Perhaps, in the future, toxic dust will cover the earth such that most organic life will need to emigrate to some other planet orbiting some other star, as in Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Could the humanoid robots we create become so humanlike that they blend into society? I let my imagination run wild, thinking through as many scenarios as I could for the future. I looked for parallels between what was happening around me and what was happening in the books I read. I made connections between what authors saw in the world around them and what made them construct the worlds in their stories. I began opening the books as if they were oracles, as if the writers knew what life would be like in some far corner of the universe eons into the future. I began to see the novels I read as urgent calls for people to form ethical relationships with each other and the world. This is when science fiction started to feel more like a religious experience than escapism.

I had always been interested in science fiction, having grown up with shows like Star Trek and The X-Files, but I hid this information from my peers, knowing it would land me in the “nerd” category. For a while, I actively shunned sci-fi. I left Ender’s Game behind, choosing to bring the latest issue of Guitar Player Magazine to school with me instead. When my peers expressed disdain for Lois Lowry’s The Giver, I did too, even though it was my favorite piece of required reading in school. In spite of hiding my interests, most of my middle school attempts to fit in failed. I thought people would like me if I was good at things, so I made it a point to be the best at every activity I undertook. After school, I ran sprints and layup drills in the park until sunset to make myself indispensable to my basketball team. After sunset, I played my trumpet and guitar, sending scales set to Miles Davis songs through the flimsy walls separating my family’s apartment from our neighbors. Bleeding lips and jammed fingers were signposts telling me that, soon enough, I would have a fabulous life filled with all of the love I desired. I didn’t count on the unfortunate reality that boys tend not to like it when girls are better than them at sports and music, nor did I realize that these were not considered typical “feminine” activities. I was constantly met with statements like “Girls can’t play football” or “Trumpet isn’t a very feminine instrument,” and “You’d be such a pretty girl if you just acted like one.” This last phrase cut me each time I heard it, and as I got older, I heard it frequently. Being myself would never be enough to earn the approval that I was taught to need. Worse than that, being my actual self would necessitate a change that I didn’t think was possible in Vacaville, California.

In my hometown, two state prisons and an air force base just outside of city limits served as constant reminders of the social order, and the ubiquitous phrase “biblical family values” enforced a moral order I learned I was excluded from. Though my family wasn’t religious, most of my peers were evangelical Christians. By high school, I was well aware that, in the beginning, God created “Adam and Eve” and not “Adam and Steve,” that “God created man in his image,” and that the only sanctioned romantic relationship was between one man and one woman, who were allowed to have sex only after they married. Friends explained these things to me, opening their Bibles to chapters and verses that burrowed into my brain. Pieces of Genesis and Leviticus, Romans and Revelation burst from my lips at will.

After I came out as a lesbian in my senior year, each friendly attempt at “saving” my soul felt like a personal affront to the new sense of reality I was beginning to claim. Still, I could see how my friends thought they were doing a good thing for me, despite how terrible it made me feel, so I went along with them until I no longer felt like I was pretending. At the time, my friendships were the most important things to me. I would be a youth group–going, praise band–loving Christian if it meant that I would get to keep them. I couldn’t keep these friendships, though, regardless of how many songs I knew by Christian bands like DC Talk or how many altar calls I joined. The closer my spiritual path brought me to my actual self, the more I had to choose between my newfound community and the self I was discovering. I left churches almost as quickly as I joined them. In the end, I quit looking. A god who did not want me to be myself was not a god that I wanted to worship.

Eventually I returned to the genre I had scorned in my early adolescence, having become politically engaged through the dystopian world of George Orwell’s 1984. In the world of 1984, constant surveillance, perpetual war, and a hierarchical language that leaves no room for nuance are the norms. The sixteen-year-old version of myself looked up from this novel to see similarities with the post-9/11 world. I revisited The Matrix, determined to find clues that I was already living in a dystopia of sorts. My wardrobe turned black, my sunglasses stayed on, my track jacket became a leather trench coat, and my vision of the world grew a little less certain. I began to “wake up” like Neo did. Cynicism crept in as I reconnected with my rebellious spirit, questioning authority and questioning God. It never occurred to me that God could have been questioning me as well. I knew the god I could not worship but did not yet know the god for which I searched.