My Severed Year - Reissue
On Severance Season 2 and being in the closet.
For Taurus Season, I’m reposting some of my older essays that I think deserve more love. This one is a “review” of Apple TV’s Severance from a trans perspective. This contains major spoilers for Season 1 of the show and minor spoilers for Season 2 (minor on the order of “these two characters have a conversation” but not the content of that conversation). If you don’t want to be spoiled, don’t read ahead!
This was also a paid post when it was originally released, so if you want to read more essays like this in the future, consider becoming a paid member!
Severance is a show about a group of workers who undergo a surgical procedure (“severance”) that splits their memory in half such that their work lives (their “innies”) and their personal lives (their “outies”) are separate. The innie has no experience of the world outside their office building, while the outie has no memory of their work life.
When you come up with a premise like that, the first good idea you get is, “What if a person’s innie and outie have parallel story arcs, thereby exploring themes of identity, self-actualization, and human rights?” The first bad idea you get is, “What if the protagonist of the story and the antagonist of the story are the same person?? That would be such a CRAZY twist!” Severance Season 1 follows through on both those ideas in a way that I would argue is well done.
The most obvious analysis you could do on the show is a socialist one: Marx talked about alienation from labor, what could be more alienating than 1) clicking numbers on a computer while having no clue what the purpose of it is and 2) having your labor physiologically cleaved from your memory the moment you step out of the factory? Workers at Lumon, the show’s evil corporation, are also under intense surveillance and are fed propaganda about workers from other departments, all seemingly to prevent the workers from uniting.
However, what’s much more interesting than this literal interpretation of worker power in a surveillance state is the way that different characters arrive at their decision to “rebel”…
Mark, unlike most fictional protagonists, does not choose to fight Lumon the moment he’s confronted with the chance to. Both his innie and outie “reject the call” several times throughout the show, reflecting how in the real world, people don’t magically become leftists overnight after gaining one crucial piece of information. Mark is pushed to carry out an Overtime Contingency on himself after being repeatedly told to forget about his loss of Petey, his best friend, and after receiving help from his outie (a security officer’s access card). Solidarity is not enough: there must be love.
Irving’s innie is a company man throughout the entire show, diligently reciting work manuals and praising his company’s founder, Kier, as a sort of god. Crucially, Lumon, the evil corporation who severs its employees for nefarious purposes, is more than just “Amazon on steroids”; it can best be understood as having its own religion, and Irving is a true believer. He’s pushed to rebellion after his gay lover, Burt, is taken from him by Lumon, after which he does a complete 180 (“let’s burn this place to the ground!”) We later learn that Irving in real life is deeply troubled by a vision of a black hallway (explored more in Season 2) and appears to be enacting his own investigation of Lumon. On one hand, his innie and outie seem to be the furthest apart in terms of ideology; on the other, could his innie’s rebellion somehow be a result of his outie’s skepticism?
Dylan is skeptical of Lumon from episode one, but he also entirely buys into the idea that other departments are somehow “not like us” and thus shouldn’t be associated with. He’s pushed to collaborating with his coworkers after getting just the slightest glimpse of his real life—his kids in a random closet in his real home—as well as the ease with which one of his supervisors, Mr. Milchick, is able to infiltrate his outie’s life on demand through the Overtime Contingency.
Helly also hates Lumon from the jump, but due to her inherent fiery nature is constantly trying to convince others to topple the system. The plot twist that her outie is actually an Eagan, and thus the de facto antagonist of the story, works because it reinforces the themes of the show and tells us more about this character: the drive to rage against the machine and the drive to accelerate the machine’s growth can both come from the same person. She’s also fighting for her own autonomy, and the person taking away her autonomy is the corporation, but somehow also herself (put a pin in that for later). Also, she falls for Mark S., mostly to meet the show’s mandatory heterosexuality quota but also to give her something more to fight for.
While all the innies crave bodily autonomy, love seems to be what pushes everyone into action.
[elevator ding sound plays, dolly zoom pans in on Anna’s face]
Between October 2017 and September 2018, I was in the closet. I was undergoing my gender transition in my personal life, but I kept it a complete secret from my coworkers. I often tell people that during this period I was “living a double life”, but that’s only about 40% a joke. During working hours, I had to be A. LaChance: PhD student in the Department of Chemical Engineering. On nights and weekends, I got to be Anna Marie: gamer, vinyl collector, cat lover, baby queer, friend. The scientist side of me and the queer/human side of me were kept separate.
“Anna, are you saying that Severance is a trans story?” That question undermines the entire point of narrative analysis. To paraphrase Torey Akers’ excellent essay on Wicked, “Elphaba isn’t Jewish or Black or Fat or Queer or Autistic; she’s green”. Severance is a story about identity, an artifact of culture that all are free to take meaning from.
I’m by no means mad at myself for choosing to stay closeted for a year. I did it to protect myself and now it’s an important part of my story. Still, Severance asks us to consider how we sever our own work and personal lives. What bizzare rituals do we carry out at work that we would never do in our personal lives? What do our coworkers not know about us? Is it fair—to ourselves, to the people we work with—that we take part in this separation of ourselves? Is it necessary for the functioning of society or is it actually just violent?
At the time, I felt like had to remain in the closet for safety reasons. I felt like I couldn’t come out at work until I was “ready”, until my decision transition could be considered more “legitimate”. What makes a transition legitimate? In 2017, when most Americans were still getting used to the idea of trans people and Trump’s first term was in full effect, “legitimacy” was a function of persistence in the new identity, medicalism, and legal recognition. First, you couldn’t simply come out to yourself on Friday and then come out to all your coworkers on Monday; they’d never take you seriously. Surely, the “correct” thing to do would be transition in private for at least a year to “prove” that you’re “serious”. It also helps to get experience dressing/acting feminine before you attempt to do so in an “important” context, lest you risk embarrassing yourself. Second, you had to be pursuing medical transition; nobody would ever accept an AMAB person as a woman if they didn’t at minimum take cross-sex hormones, ideally get numerous surgeries as well. Finally, you must have started the process of legally changing your name; again, to prove that you’re taking this seriously, and also so that all the documentation can be prepared for you to change your name at work with no in-between phase where you’re out but your name badge says something different. That would just be confusing!
At least, that’s what I told myself. Aside from a few awkward hiccups—e.g., a coworker point-blank asking whether I’d be getting “the surgery”—my colleagues were broadly very accepting. What this severance procedure really meant was that I never allowed myself to get close to my colleagues; when they asked what I was getting up to on a given weekend or what my hobbies were, I often lied to them, making something up rather than telling them about my real life (doctor’s appointments, therapy, trying on new clothes). Even years after I did come out of the closet, I continued keeping them at arm’s length; when I did get bottom surgery, I simply took the week off first and told none of them what it was for.
In a way it was practical, but in a way it was cruel. Why was I working so hard to prove the legitimacy of my transition? Why was I so afraid to let my coworkers see the real me? Oddly enough, I feel so much of myself in the quiet moments between Burt and Irving; there’s a deep sadness in not being able to embrace true love being doing so would be dangerous, because you would be considered dangerous.
[elevator ding sound plays, dolly zoom pans out from Anna’s face]
It needs to be said that the writing in Season 2 isn’t as strong as in Season 1.
There are plenty of strong moments: at one point in the show, each of the four mains characters are in their own romance subplot, with severance complicating each one in interesting ways. Mark and Helly can’t trust one another. Outie Irving and Outie Burt start hanging out and the sexual tension hits devastating levels. Dylan develops a relationship with his outie’s wife. In a way, the late season’s “all is lost” moment comes when the MDR team is the most separated from one another. Season 2 also gets weird in the best way possible. We’re talking “episodes randomly shot in a totally different directorial style” weird. We’re talking “episodes that seemingly don’t follow from the plot of the previous one at all, and it doesn’t quite make sense until the end of the episode”.
At the same time, there are some issues. Several plot points are brought up early in the season but are never revisited, such as Ricken writing a version of his book for innies or the fact that after a certain point we never hear from Reghabi again. There are also multiple episodes devoted entirely to individual characters’ backstories, which itself is not a terrible idea, but these stand in stark contrast to earlier episodes’ deeply interwoven plots (think Arrested Development Season 4 pre-remix). I wouldn’t be surprised if we see an unnecessary filler episode devoted entirely to how Mr. Milchick got started at Lumon in Season 3.
The second good idea you would get after coming up with the premise of Severance is, “What if an outie and their innie had a face-to-face conversation, but despite being the same person, they disagreed, thereby diving deeper into themes of identity and the self?” The second bad idea you would get is, “What if the bad guy pretends to be an innie for a few episodes?” Once again, Severance Season 2 follows through on both those ideas, though far less effectively than the last time. The twist that one character has been posing as their innie doesn’t tell us anything new about this character (we knew they were evil and cunning) and was so predictable that it was boring. It would be like if I ended this essay by saying “Ah, but the real irony is that this is a TV show produced by Apple, who is an evil corporation just like in the show! Something something lampshading, something something redwashing, I am very smart.” You would rightfully roll your eyes, unsubscribe from this publication, and never listen to a word I had to say again.
And now you can’t accuse me of lampshading because I’m pointing out that that’s what I’m doing. And now you can’t accuse me of lampshading my lampshading because I’m pointing that out. And now—
[elevator ding sound plays, dolly zoom pans in on Anna’s face]
I was entirely in the right to be afraid: we were in the beginnings of a massive anti-trans backlash, after all, and I had never known a trans chemical engineer before. I hid myself because I feared violence, discrimination, ridicule. I was cruel to myself and to my colleagues because of forces I couldn’t control. Like Helly R, my autonomy was taken away from me by the government, but somehow also myself.
The cruelty of bigotry doesn’t just come from its first-order effects—e.g., you telling me that I’m going to hell for being trans, etc. Its second-order effects are just as real. The fear of potential bigotry is what causes us to have internalized transphobia, to obey in advance, to not even try to come out, to not be totally honest with our colleagues, to separate ourselves from one another. Despite being far more confident eight years after my transition, to this day I try to spend as little time in women’s restrooms as possible because what if something happens. When I dated someone briefly in 2019, that person was in the closet themselves, so when we broke up I couldn’t talk to any of my coworkers about the pain I was going through. People in even worse situations, namely trans youth whose parents aren’t supportive, may experience extreme abuse by people who take advantage of society’s general transphobia; you’re trans, who’s going to believe you? Maybe it makes sense that Helly, in an act of desperation, turns to self-harm, the one act of autonomy that nobody can take away from you.
…But do I really need to be so critical of myself? Mark severs because his trauma prevents him from holding a steady job. Dylan is in a similar scenario, his neurodivergence being heavily implied by his wife’s description of his outie. These are portrayed sympathetically by the show; as much as severance is a means of control, our characters take part in it as a means of survival. As you might expect, I’ve recently been thinking a lot about how visible I want to be. Going back underground for my own survival is not totally out of the question right now.
[ding!]
Fortunately, the show doesn’t rely on plot twists as its backbone. Season 2 is still an enjoyable watch because, like most compelling shows, it builds and resolves tension without giving clear answers to the questions it brings up. The fact is that we all compromise parts of ourselves to be members of society; if we were always living our most authentic selves all the time, then in all likelihood our homes wouldn’t have power and there would be no food in our grocery stores. We all rely on massive collective efforts every single day, we just don’t realize it or are resentful of it, as Albert Einstein identified in his essay on socialism:
I have now reached the point where I may indicate briefly what to me constitutes the essence of the crisis of our time. It concerns the relationship of the individual to society. The individual has become more conscious than ever of his dependence upon society. But he does not experience this dependence as a positive asset, as an organic tie, as a protective force, but rather as a threat to his natural rights, or even to his economic existence. Moreover, his position in society is such that the egotistical drives of his make-up are constantly being accentuated, while his social drives, which are by nature weaker, progressively deteriorate. All human beings, whatever their position in society, are suffering from this process of deterioration. Unknowingly prisoners of their own egotism, they feel insecure, lonely, and deprived of the naive, simple, and unsophisticated enjoyment of life. Man can find meaning in life, short and perilous as it is, only through devoting himself to society.
What I can say is that I’m extremely glad that I “reintegrated”; after coming out at work, my quality of life drastically improved. Once I got to wear my queerness on my sleeve at work, it was no longer a hindrance, but a superpower. Queerness has greatly influenced the way I teach, the way I mentor, the way I carry out research, and who I use my STEM skills for. I am not just a scientist or just a queer person, I am both, and the two inform each other. And now I get to share my story with my community’s youth as well as with STEM professionals worldwide (I’m booking for summer, by the way!) Transitioning, as it turns out, is the ultimate act of autonomy and the ultimate act of love. And love makes us do crazy things (like rebel against our capitalist overlords!!)
It was right for me to closet myself for a year. It’s still right to keep my colleagues at arm’s distance today, for certain things. But we’d all be a hell of a lot better off if we realized how much in common we have and how much we need each other.
In community,
-Anna
P.S. Your weekly Koko.
