Zachary Leeman is a US-based journalist and author of the novel Nigh.

1999’s ‘The Matrix’ is perhaps one of the most written-about films in history. Its story of reality being an artificial design by dominating machines and characters being chosen to ‘wake up’ from the false world into the real one, where humans battle machines, lends itself to endless theories.

Wachowski put all that theorizing to bed this week, however, by claiming the film was always intended to be an allegory for the experience of a transgender person.

“I’m glad that it’s gotten out that that was the original intention,” she said, in an Netflix interview promoting the documentary ‘Disclosure.’ “The world wasn’t quite ready, at a corporate level...the corporate world wasn’t ready for it [at the time].”

While this revisionist thinking has earned plenty of praise from social justice warriors looking to only view art through the prism of modern woke standards, others have groaned at the idea of the film’s meaning suddenly being carved in stone over 20 years after its initial release.

“A creator telling people what their creation *really* meant years after the fact with no canonical indication of it can be safely disregarded, especially if the retcon aligns with a currently-trendy social narrative,” podcaster Noah Blum tweeted. He went on to compare the ‘revelation’ by Wachowski to author JK Rowling, saying (years after the series’ publication) that various ‘Harry Potter’ characters were actually intended to have different races or sexual orientations than people thought, or that were then portrayed in the hit film series.