Welcome to #TransTuesday! It’s part the sixth of THE UNINTENTIONAL (?) TRANS ALLEGORY OF SILO! Tillyvison set to 4k ultra HD, it’s time to Silo up! And to talk about episode 7!
Presuming you’d like this all to make sense, do read PART 1 first.
Presuming you want it to make even more sense than that, here’s PART 2!
And you know what I presume? I think you do, so here’s PART 3!
Honestly though, it’s not easy to come up with a new little theme for these when there are so many of them. I’m only one lady, I can only do so much! Hmm? Oh, right, PART 4!
And I presume you’ll also want PART 5! Which covers episode 6! Because nothing is easy and life is confusion.
EPISODE 7
Gloria imagines toes in the sand, holding a spiral nautilus, at the ocean with her imaginary family. She’s dreaming about order from chaos, about not being afraid of the dysphoria, about the bodily autonomy she never got to have. Could. it. be. any. clearer?
Bernard wants a meeting but Juliette blows him off to go see Gloria. Nurse: “She suffers from hallucinations. They’re a symptom of her condition. Advanced vascular dementia.” No no she’s not actually trans, she’s just mentally ill! You’d have to be to think you’re trans! Rage.
Gloria: “I found them right where I left them. Right by the water… The water they don’t want us to know about.” They don’t want you to know the water/dysphoria can be controlled, tamed, understood. They don’t want you to know how to swim, or that you can swim out of it.
Billings confronts Juliette and thinks she’s dishonoring the badge… which she is, because it’s a symbol of authority built on lies. And somewhere inside Billings knows that, due to the way he’s treated for having the syndrome. So he still wants to know the truth, so she tells him everything.
Lukas finds Juliette in the cafeteria at night. She saw the lights in the sky but they’re gone now due to clouds. The stars come back into view and he matches them to his past drawings. She wonders if they’ve always been there, even before humans lived in the silo.
Bernard and Juliette argue about what’s most important in the silo. Juliette says it’s the generator because it powers everything. Juliette: “Without power we have nothing.” OH HAI SUPERTEXT.
Bernard says IT is most important because “it’s how the power is used.” OH HAI AGAIN SUPERTEXT. “To water crops, transmit messages, circulate air. All these invisible functions are controlled by the servers in IT.”
“If the servers fell into the hands of the wrong person, no amount of power would matter.” He shows you right there it’s about CONTROLLING information and communication, and WHO controls it is all that matters to him. So he can keep suppressing the truth.
Juliette goes to see Judge Meadows, who is not well. Meadows has an etch-a-sketch on display, a RELIC in a place of prominence right inside her door. She has relics ALL OVER in display cases. This is society REWARDING her for her compliance in upholding the system.
Note Meadows is ill again, I suspect she’s being kept that way by Judicial to keep her more compliant with their wishes. Even for people who support and uphold the system of oppression, they’re more likely to keep doing that if they’re too tired to even think about it.
Juliette wants to know why Gloria’s being held captive in medical. Meadows: “It’s for her own good.” I mean, definitely not, but that’s certainly how the people in power view keeping trans people from the rights and healthcare we need.
Dr. Nichols helps Juliette get Gloria out, and they discover she’s being dosed with Lorazepam, which is a sedative. Note that they will happily give you medical care to make you COMPLY WITH THEIR WISHES, but NOT FOR YOUR OWN BODILY AUTONOMY. Transness abounds.
Here’s a reminder about how cis politicians are writing laws making surgery on trans kids (which does NOT happen) illegal, but write in carve-outs where they’re allowed to force surgery on intersex kids (to make them conform with the false gender binary).
Gloria awakens and says Dr. Nichols was the one who faked removing her birth control, refusing to grant her the bodily autonomy she deserves. AWKWARD. Juliette sends him away.
Juliette: “They are drugging you so you will forget.” Gloria: “I want to forget. I want to be anywhere but here. I don’t trust you.” Gloria has caved to the pressures of the system, because the fight is so hard. Which tracks with her never having the courage to transition herself.
She’s given up the hope of living her truth. She’d rather live in a false fantasy pretending she had the life she always wanted than continue fighting to make it a reality. Matrix Resurrections deals with this a lot, but see also THE CONSTANT FIGHT (of existing while trans).
Gloria: “Have you heard of the Flamekeepers? …they erased us. The silo. They’ve been trying since the rebellion.” Society LITERALLY erased the existence of those who didn’t conform. I’ve been telling you.
“That’s when they put something in the water so memories would fade.” WHAT HAVE I BEEN TELLING YOU ABOUT THE WATER? This speaks to THE DISSOCIATION OF DYSPHORIA, where you seemingly disconnect from your body and life because it’s so awful.
A lot of trans people have gaps in our memories from dissociation, parts of our lives spent in our false shells that we can’t remember. We tuned out, because we HAD to in order to get through it.
And here SOCIETY has intentionally DONE THAT, in effect forcing dissociation and dysphoria on the population to keep them upholding the lie that cis is all you can be. They EXACERBATE our dysphoria by refusing to acknowledge it or help make it better.
So who were the Flamekeepers? Gloria: “The people who fought back. Who kept things, like this book. To keep their memories alive.” Gloria was one of them, “until they put our flame out.” That’s trans people to a T.
We’ve had to fight back, even if we don’t want to, because cis society SET IT UP THAT WAY. If we don’t fight back we can’t exist, can’t self-actualize, cannot live lives free of dysphoria, cannot be fully present in our own lives as ourselves to find happiness and joy.
Look what was kept from me in how dramatically my life changed once my dysphoria lessened and dissipated. First, in the trans tuesday on CONFIDENCE 2: INTO THE UNKNOWN aka WHAT IS HAPPENING aka A WHOLE NEW WORLD.
And then see the trans tuesday on FREEING UP MY BRAIN aka LUNCH WITH TILLY.
Juliette: “You said my dad stopped you from having a baby.” Gloria: “They wanted us to die off. They made us think we had a chance of having a family but we never did.”
Again this speaks to transness in two ways, in that due to hormone replacement therapy and surgeries, many trans people cannot have biological children. But it speaks just as much to literally wanting us to die off, so no other trans people see us and feel inspired to come out too.
Gloria references the beach photo in the book, and says she’ll never know what it sounded like or how it smelled. Again, she can never know what it’s like to NOT have the constant pain and fear of dysphoria clouding absolutely everything.
Gloria then wants to hold one of the babies, and this is a representation of her wanting the bodily autonomy that was denied to her for her entire life. Gloria was surprised they “let a woman like” Juliette’s mom have children. Juliette’s mom had that Flamekeeper curiosity.
Gloria: “It’s the one thing they can never breed out of us” and “when I heard what happened to her it really felt like we’d lost one of our own.” I think Juliette’s mom was a trans person who didn’t know it yet, an egg. And Gloria recognized that in her.
And look, no, we can’t always tell, but every out trans person was an egg first. We’ve all been there, and we know what it’s like. We know the signs, because we saw them in ourselves. So sometimes, kind of often, yeah, we can kinda tell. Or at least suspect.
Juliette confronts her dad about tricking patients and saying their birth control had been removed when it hadn’t. He says he didn’t have a choice. But nah, you always have a choice. You can say no. You can refuse to participate in stripping people of bodily autonomy.
Juliette says they were using it to breed people out of the population, to kill off trans people (if we don’t have bodily autonomy, we can’t medically transition). Juliette: “But why lie to people? …Did you ever think to question that?”
Dr. Nichols: “I always wondered if they did it to punish the ones they picked” And yet he went along with it! This is the kinda person who says they’re your friend, they don’t hate you… but they uphold transphobia. See the trans tuesday on PERFORMATIVE ALLYSHIP 2: FALSE ALLYSHIP.
Back in Gloria’s room, she looks at the mirror. Her flowers are gone. She remembers Holston came to see her. He brought the flowers and put them in front of the mirror. SO SHE WOULDN’T BE BETRAYED BY HER REFLECTION.
Juliette remembers her flowers with the missing vase, and Holston’s note to double the flowers in front of the mirror to obscure more of it. Juliette: “I think they can see us through the mirror.” She covers the mirror with a blanket.
Juliette pulls a bag with the hard drive out of the vent in Gloria’s room, she has history in her hands. Gloria: “You’re the last Flamekeeper now. You didn’t ask for it, it’s not fair, but it’s the way it is. It’s down to you. If you let it die, the truth dies too.”
So this is weird, but… I feel this sense of responsibility, being out as trans, of being a fairly visible trans woman with a sizable audience. I feel like I owe it to the trans people coming up and out after me to do what I can to make this world better for them than it was for me.
It’s part of why I started trans tuesdays in the first place. I have a remarkable amount of privilege for a trans woman. I didn’t ask for it, and it’s not fair I have it and others don’t, but it’s the way it is. See the trans tuesday on WHAT IS TRANS TUESDAY?
And if *I* let the truth of transness die… well I’m not the only one out there supporting trans rights and talking about trans issues, thank goodness. But we need ALL THE VOICES WE CAN GET. And to hide, to NOT use what I have to help who I can, would be an abdication.
Others who came before were there for me, and I will be there for the ones coming after. I mean this is what COMMUNITY is, and it’s a two way street. The community is there for us, but just as important is that WE are there for the community.
Tilly Bridges, end transmission.
tillysbridges@gmail.com
PS – Part 7 is here!