It’s notable that both of the Wachowskis are transgender, and that their transitions immediately make them two of the most high-profile female directors in Hollywood. And Lilly’s coming-out also provides an opportune moment to look at how media coverage of transgender people has changed over the past decade.

Lana’s announcement comes shortly after the ten-year anniversary of a piece in Rolling Stone that provides a horrifying benchmark for just how far the mainstream media has evolved in its practices. Titled “The Mystery of Larry Wachowski” — the name Lana was known by publicly prior to her coming-out — the piece suggested that Lana’s transition was a form of sexual fetishism; the opening scene in the piece involves Lana visiting a Los Angeles sex club where “friends say, he liked engaging in his pastime while dressed like a woman.” It also implies that Lana’s sex life and gender identity contributed to “one of the most widely derided sequences in recent movie history,” the rave sequence from “The Matrix Reloaded.”

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“Psychiatrists disagree about what forces are at work in men who cross-dress and take the ultimate step of having gender-reassignment surgery,” the piece continued. “One camp considers men of this type to have a ‘gender-identity disorder,’ to be ‘women trapped in men’s bodies.’ In recent years, another group of doctors labeled some men who demonstrate these tendencies to be autogynephiles — straight men who are essentially sexual fetishists, aroused by the thought or image of themselves as women.”

Notably, the author goes on to discuss and diagnose Lana Wachowski as the latter without providing any more context about gender dysmorphia. And in a uniquely gratuitous thread, the piece quotes a number of unflattering comments sources made about Lana’s physical appearance and gender presentation. The tone of the piece is consistent throughout: whatever is going on with Wachowski, and whatever prompted her withdrawal from public life, the reader is meant to think it’s weird and transgressive.

“The Mystery of Larry Wachowski” is the sort of piece that would be greeted with outrage today, and in fact, it is no longer available on Rolling Stone’s website, though it lives on in various Internet forums (thus the reason I am not linking to it). A Rolling Stone spokeswoman told me that the piece was one of many that wasn’t transferred over during a redesign.

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Eight years later, when Grantland published its now-infamous piece “Dr. V’s Magical Putter,” it was revealing what had — and hadn’t changed. Caleb Hannan structured the piece as his search for the story of how a scientist had designed an unusually effective golf club. And when he couldn’t verify certain elements in Essay Anne Vanderbilt’s biography, Hannan eventually learned that she was transgender.

While “Dr. V’s Magical Putter” didn’t treat being transgender as some sort of sexual fetish, it did portray Vanderbilt as deceptive and a fraud. It was fairly clear that Hannan didn’t understand the potential consequences of revealing that someone is transgender without their consent. Vanderbilt, who had attempted suicide before Hannan began his reporting, killed herself after he tried to get her to comment for the piece.

But if Grantland shouldn’t have published “Dr. V’s Magical Putter” at all — or at least not in the form that it arrived online — the institutional response was also a measure of how responsive a site like Grantland and its parent company, ESPN, felt they had to be to transgender readers and their allies. The ESPN ombudsman launched a near-immediate investigation of the story. Grantland commissioned a transgender journalist to write an autopsy of the piece. And Grantland founder Bill Simmons issued a sweeping apology for how the piece was handled.

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The hectoring Lilly Wachowski describes in her coming-out statement to the Windy City Times suggests that journalists still believe that the revelation that someone is transgender is sensational enough to move papers or generate clicks, and that aggressive tactics are justified in pursuit of that readership.

“Last night while getting ready to go out for dinner my doorbell rang. Standing on my front porch was a man I did not recognize. ‘This might be a little awkward,’ he said in an English accent,” Lilly wrote. “I remember sighing. Sometimes it’s really tough work to be an optimist. He proceeded to explain he was a journalist from the Daily Mail, which was the largest news service in the UK and was most definitely not a tabloid. And that I really had to sit down with him tomorrow or the next day or next week so that I could have my picture taken and tell my story which was so inspirational! And that I really didn’t want to have someone from the National Enquirer following me around, did I? BTW—The Daily Mail is so definitely not a tabloid.”

That the Daily Mail reporter dressed up his pitch in the language of social justice is telling: this person apparently understands that uplifting coming-out stories can be a big business, but has not absorbed any of the underlying ethics around allowing someone to come out on their own time and terms. And just because media coverage of transgender people has improved — from reality programming like “I Am Jazz” to Caitlyn Jenner’s carefully-choreographed Vanity Fair cover — doesn’t mean that the material realities many transgender people face have improved in a comparable way.

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As Lilly wrote in her statement, “I am one of the lucky ones. Having the support of my family and the means to afford doctors and therapists has given me the chance to actually survive this process. Transgender people without support, means and privilege do not have this luxury. And many do not survive. In 2015, the transgender murder rate hit an all-time high in this country. A horrifying disproportionate number of the victims were trans women of color. These are only the recorded homicides so, since trans people do not all fit in the tidy gender binary statistics of murder rates, it means the actual numbers are higher.”