“Screwing is, for a man, a defense against his desire to be female,” proclaims the SCUM Manifesto. The paradox of the male libido is that it isn’t actually male. Nowhere is this more evident today than in the manosphere, that awfully named borough of the Internet where pickup artists, men’s rights activists, incels, Men Going Their Own Way, and other alt-right communities go to commiserate, swap tips, and air their woman-hating and racism without fear of reprisal. At the heart of the manosphere lies the conviction that men—paradigmatically, though not always, white men—have lost status in the past fifty years, ultimately thanks to the rise of feminism. To awaken to this fact is to take the red pill—a phrase borrowed from the 1999 film The Matrix, whose hacker protagonist Neo is given the choice between a red pill and a blue. The latter will return Neo to his simulated everyday life with no memory of the choice ; the former, which he picks, transports him out of the Matrix and into the real world where humanity has been enslaved by sentient machines. In recent years, the alt-right has co-opted the scene as a parable for seeing past feminist brainwashing to the truth : feminism is a disease, all women wish to be dominated, and nice guys finish last.
Of course, another interpretation of the red pill is possible. Trans women have claimed The Matrix as an allegory for gender transition since at least 2012, when director Lana Wachowski publicly came out as a trans woman while doing press for the film Cloud Atlas. (Her sister and codirector Lilly followed suit in 2016.) The symbolism is easy to find in the plot : Thomas Anderson’s double life (he’s a hacker by night), his chosen name (Neo), his vague but maddening sense that something is off about the world (“a splinter in your mind,” resistance leader Morpheus calls it). Neo has dysphoria. The Matrix is the gender binary. You get it.
And then there’s the red pill itself, less a metaphor for hormone therapy than a literal hormone. Many have pointed out online that back in the nineties, prescription estrogen was, in fact, red : the 0.625 mg Premarin tablet, derived in Matrix-like fashion from the urine of pregnant mares, came in smooth, chocolatey maroon. Trans allies on Twitter now gleefully brandish this fact as a well, actually–style rejoinder to the alt-right’s recent co-optation of the red pill scene as a parable for “awakening” from feminist brainwashing.
There’s something to this. Taken seriously, it suggests that the manosphere red-piller’s resentment of immigrants, black people, and queers is a sadistic expression of his own gender dysphoria. In this reading, he is an abortive man, a beta trapped in an alpha’s body, consumed with the desire to be female and desperately trying to repress it. His desire to increase his manhood is not primary, but a second-tier defense mechanism. Those around him assume he is a leader, a provider, a president ; but his greatest fear is that they are mistaken. He radicalizes—shoots up a school, builds a wall—in order to avoid transitioning, the way some closeted trans women join the military in order to get the girl beaten out of them.
But there’s another level. The Wachowski sisters, even if they knew about Premarin, could never have predicted that the most common form of prescription estrogen today would be blue. Aquamarine, actually—a tiny, coarse 2 mg estradiol pill supplied by Israeli pharmaceutical company Teva that turns to powder in your mouth. At present, I take the blue pill twice a day, once upon waking and once before bed, sending myself back into the simulation. By this logic, the hidden trans woman of The Matrix is not the messianic Neo, but Cypher, the sleazy traitor, who agrees to hand Morpheus over to the machines in exchange for being reinserted into the Matrix. “Ignorance is bliss,” he tells the agents, mouth full of juicy, nonexistent steak. (Recall that cipher is an old word for zero.) “I don’t wanna remember nothing. Nothing. You understand?”
Valerie would have approved of hormone therapy, I think. The SCUM Manifesto alludes, positively, to a futuristic world where men are transformed into women “by means of operations on the brain and nervous system.” This was one of SCUM’s nongenocidal solutions for the few men who might remain after the revolution. Another, hinted at in a footnote, sounds a lot like the Matrix—a vast virtual reality network that men would willingly plug themselves into as “vicarious livers.” “It will be electronically possible for [men] to tune into any specific female [they want] to and follow in detail her every movement,” Valerie explains, declaring it a “marvelously kind and humane way” for women to treat their “unfortunate, handicapped fellow beings.”
Isn’t that the whole point of gender—letting someone else do your living for you ?