Lana Wachowski, 47, the transgender filmmaker who directed, along with her brother, Andy Wachoski, the Matrix trilogy, starring Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, Carrie-Anne Moss and Hugo Weaving, as well as the upcoming Cloud Atlas, starring Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Hugh Grant and Susan Sarandon — a project also undertaken with her brother and Run, Lola, Run's Tom Tykwer — opened up at the Human Rights Campaign's fundraising gala in San Francisco over the weekend, when she accepted the HRC's Visibility Award.

“I am here because when I was young, I wanted very badly to be a writer, I wanted to be a filmmaker, but I couldn’t find anyone like me in the world and it felt like my dreams were foreclosed simply because my gender was less typical than others," Wachowski told the enthusiastic audience, despite having in the past expressed her "love" of "anonymity," which she compares to virginity in the sense that "you only lose it once."

Wachowski went on to talk about being an inspiration for others, "If I can be that person for someone else, then the sacrifice of my private civic life may have value. I know I am also here because of the strength and courage and love that I am blessed to receive from my wife, my family and my friends. And in this way I hope to offer their love in the form of my materiality to a project like this one started by the HRC, so that this world that we imagine in this room might be used to gain access to other rooms, to other worlds previously unimaginable."

Cloud Atlas, which is already garnering Oscar buzz, opens in theaters on October 26, 2012.

Watch Wachowski's Human Rights Campaign speech here:

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