Lana Wachowski on growing up transgender

Lana Wachowski, director of Cloud Atlas, describes in a speech delivered this week at the Human Rights Campaign's gala fundraising dinner how she "once suffered a physical beating at the hands of a Catholic school nun after she failed to join a line of boys and nearly committed suicide as a young adult before being stared down by a man who wandered onto an empty subway platform where Wachowski was standing."

The Matrix auteur tells the crowd, "I don't know why he wouldn't look away, All I know is that because he didn't, I am still here."

Here's the video, at The Hollywood Reporter. The cheesy montage intro is skippable. The speech that follows from 5:35 onward is not.

Lana and her co-director brother Andy haven't done press or made any public appearances together in 12 years, and as she says in the speech, this was presumed to be have something to do with her gender transition.

"It does not," she explains. "We became acutely aware of the preciousness of anonymity, understanding it as a form of virginity—something you only lose once."

There's an extensive interview with Lana, Andy, and Tom Tykwer about Cloud Atlas here on THR.

(thanks, @somebadideas)