{"id":312053,"date":"2026-06-05T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-06-05T11:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/electricliterature.com\/?p=312053"},"modified":"2026-06-03T16:15:36","modified_gmt":"2026-06-03T20:15:36","slug":"revisiting-silence-of-the-lambs-in-the-age-of-trans-backlash","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/electricliterature.com\/revisiting-silence-of-the-lambs-in-the-age-of-trans-backlash\/","title":{"rendered":"Revisiting “Silence of the Lambs” in the Age of Trans Backlash"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Sometimes you are reading a book\u2014not even one by a well-known transphobic children\u2019s author\u2014and are struck, halfway through or near the end, by a bit of transphobia. Sometimes it\u2019s load-bearing: Both Helen Oyeyemi\u2019s Boy, Snow, Bird<\/a><\/em> and Lidia Yuknavitch\u2019s The Book of Joan<\/a><\/em> end with revelations that their villain characters are caricatures of trans masculinity (Oyeyemi\u2019s, in particular, \u201cresolves\u201d this by having the primary characters agree to tell him he does not need to be trans anymore). Sometimes it\u2019s more by omission than by the letter itself: In Yoko Tawada\u2019s Scattered All Over the Earth<\/a><\/em>, a non-medically transitioning woman named Akash is treated by every character as a man without correction or regard for her sense of self. Every time, it\u2019s disappointing. Not only that the author would think that these ideas are okay, or that they would make it through the editorial process, but that they would be so under-discussed in the public acclaim these books receive.<\/p>\n\n\n

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It may seem silly, but I prefer to read books that are much more explicitly transphobic and a few decades old. You\u2019d be forgiven for not knowing how broadly blas\u00e9 people were even 10 years ago about transness. In 2014, Rush Limbaugh, never a paragon of wokeness, actually apologized to a trans caller to his show for using the slur \u201ctranny.\u201d Famously, when Christine Jorgensen returned from abroad with her gender newly affirmed, it was treated more with intrigue than with anger. \u201cEx-GI Becomes Blonde Beauty,\u201d the papers reported in 1952.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Don\u2019t get me wrong: Even with all the attacks against trans people now, it is better to be trans in America in 2026 than at almost any other time or place. But I do get a real enjoyment from, say, reading Gore Vidal\u2019s Myra Breckinridge<\/a> <\/em>and seeing both how much and how little Vidal understands about trans women.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this complicated space of retro transphobia, it\u2019s hard to think of a book that has had a greater impact on the representation and public imagination of trans people than Thomas Harris\u2019s 1988 novel The Silence of the Lambs<\/a><\/em>. Most of you have probably seen the movie; maybe you\u2019re even trans and you really adore it\u2014the canon of trans villains provokes diverse and complex responses from their transsexual audiences. I am not one of the trans people who has an easy time watching the film adaptation of Lambs<\/em>, though I acknowledge that it is in most respects a perfect film.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In case you don\u2019t know, or have forgotten, Lambs <\/em>is about a person the press call Buffalo Bill (\u201cbecause he skins his humps,\u201d girl detective Clarice Starling explains) who is killing women in order to make a suit out of their skin for himself. The novel was inspired by the press coverage of Ed Gein, a man who, in 1957, was found to have killed two women and robbed the graves of many more. Among the many handicrafts he made with these bodies were a \u201ccorset made from a female torso\u201d and \u201cmasks made from the skin of female heads,\u201d which, along with some leading questions by investigators, led to him being branded as gender-deviant. (This coverage also gave rise to Psycho <\/em>and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre<\/em>.) The film version of Lambs<\/em> is generally regarded as pretty transphobic, and even prompted director Jonathan Demme to make Philadelphia<\/em> as an apology to the queer community. (Which was of course unnecessary; Demme was still at queer net-zero in my books for directing Stop Making Sense<\/em>.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Both film and book go out of their way to clarify that Buffalo Bill (who I will henceforth call by their government name, Jame Gumb) is not a transsexual<\/em>. In the novel, Clarice tells Hannibal Lecter (a cannibal and more acceptable monster) there is \u201cno correlation I ever saw between transsexualism and violence.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is a long history of breaking trans people into categories that boil down to ‘real’ and ‘fake.’<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

\u201cBilly\u2019s not a real<\/em> transsexual,\u201d Lecter replies, \u201cbut he thinks he is<\/em>\u201d (emphasis mine). \u201cHe tries to be. He\u2019s tried to be a lot of things, I expect.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is a long history of breaking trans people into categories that boil down to \u201creal\u201d and \u201cfake.\u201d Most famously, if you wanted to transition into a straight woman (\u201cheterosexual transsexual\u201d or HSTS) you were allowed to; if you wanted to become some kind of degenerate lesbian freak, you were an \u201cautogynephile\u201d\u2014a man turned on by the idea of being a woman.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So how, in the imagination of Lambs<\/em> and the late 1980s, are we to distinguish between these categories?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lecter instructs Clarice to check the three extant gender clinics for people who have been rejected from transition. In particular, he suggests she look at a test called \u201cHouse-Tree-Person,\u201d in which a subject is asked to draw the titular trio. \u201cLook for someone who didn\u2019t draw the female figure first,\u201d Lecter says. \u201cLook for a house drawing without the rosy-future embellishments\u201d like baby carriages and flowers and curtains. \u201cYou get two kinds of trees with real<\/em> transsexuals: flowing, copious willows and castration themes . . . [but] Billy\u2019s tree will be frightful.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is the sort of detail that is, understandably, missing from the Best Picture-winning film adaptation. But it\u2019s what allows me to enjoy the book. Instead of distinguishing Jame as a fake, it exposes how absurd this entire taxonomic enterprise is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jame is \u201cnot a transsexual, he just thinks he is, and he\u2019s puzzled and angry because [the gender clinic] won\u2019t help him<\/em>.\u201d Early on, a doctor at Johns Hopkins says, \u201cTo even mention Buffalo Bill in the same breath with the problems we treat is ignorant and unfair and dangerous . . . it\u2019s taken years . . . showing the public that transsexuals aren\u2019t crazy, they aren\u2019t perverts, they aren\u2019t \u2018queers,\u2019 whatever that is . . . these are decent people with a real problem, a famously intransigent problem. They deserve help.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The book does not want to be sympathetic to Jame, but it is so interested in spending time with her that, in contrast to the (excellently acted, very upsetting) performance in the film by Ted Levine, I can\u2019t help but see myself in Jame (or \u201cMr. Gumb,\u201d as the narration insists on calling her). Jame has gotten electrolysis, started HRT. As she goes about her day, she notes that her \u201chands and feet [are] a little stubbly,\u201d but she decides that \u201cthey would do.\u201d She loves her dog Precious, coos frequently that \u201cMommy\u2019s going to be so<\/em> beautiful.\u201d The first time I read Lambs<\/em>, I had just adopted a cat; I was eight months on hormones\u2014just past the edge of the most uncomfortably in-between period\u2014and I remember thinking: This is <\/em>exactly how I talk to <\/em>my beloved pet<\/em>. I, too, move between attempts at eradicating all hair from my torso and legs and thinking, eh, what\u2019s a little stubble?<\/em> The narration calls this an \u201cearnest inept attempt . . . or hateful mocking\u201d of womanhood, but to me, for better and worse, it just looks like womanhood.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Like Jame, I have also been puzzled and angry that a gender clinic won\u2019t help me.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

What the book fails to ask or answer is what the difference is between being <\/em>trans and merely thinking<\/em> you are. What is the source of Jame\u2019s apparent gender euphoria when she tries on her in-progress woman suit? Some post-Freudian obsession with her beauty queen mother, the book suggests, but we get no clearer answer than that. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Like Jame, I have also been puzzled and angry that a gender clinic won\u2019t help me <\/strong>(and they didn\u2019t even ask me to draw a tree!).\u00a0I know from experience that insisting all the more that no, really, I am really trans, and I can tell you a thousand truths and lies that confirm that fact if you will just give me some fucking estrogen<\/em> doesn\u2019t work when the system really wants you to stay where you are. I haven\u2019t killed anyone over it, but it is easier to understand, in the context of Harris trying, again and again, to assuage any concerns you might have about the nature of Jame\u2019s identity, why Jame might have.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is far more pleasant to have an understandable trans villain than the ones Oyeyemi or Yuknavitch gave us. Their books have little interest in the psychologies of their trans characters or the arbitrary systems that aim to define what makes someone a \u201ctrue transsexual.\u201d How delightful, in contrast, to see the absurd system break down in Harris\u2019s Lambs<\/em>. Because despite occasional claims to the contrary, the only people who care these days about distinctions between \u201creal\u201d and \u201cfake\u201d transsexuals tend to be other transsexuals\u2014crabs kicking and screaming to stay at the top of our particular barrel. J.K. Rowling and Pamela Paul and Graham Linehan do not care how you embellish your tree or decorate the female figures you draw. They would rather I and all my friends and perhaps you, too, reading this be immiserated if not outright dead. They look at the taxonomic absurdity and decide we are all monsters. Reading Lambs<\/em>, you could conclude something similar: that trans women are freaks who would kill and skin a woman if that was the only way to be one; but you can as easily\u2014and more accurately, I think\u2014look at it and ask: What is the rational response to an irrational stricture?\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We see something of ourselves in these stories, even if they make us out to be monsters.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Taking after Lambs<\/em>, this became one of the chief questions I asked while writing my own novel, All Us Saints<\/a><\/em>\u2014in which a closeted, abused trans girl sees, like Jame, no future for herself, and decides maybe it is better to kill and to die than to go on feeling the deep horror of living. She doesn\u2019t die, and fails to kill her sister (taking out only her sister\u2019s three best friends).\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Early in the writing process, I went back to the accounts of Ed Gein to see how those initial murders were described; as with Gein\u2019s murders, my trans murderer can only be understood by the sensationalist true crime media complex as a freak of nature. In Harold Schechter\u2019s account of Gein\u2019s killings, he writes that Gein\u2019s \u201ctransvestism\u201d was a consequence of an Oedipal obsession with his mother, leaving Gein wishing he had been \u201ca woman instead of a man,\u201d wondering \u201cwhether it would be possible to change his sex.\u201d But as scholar K.E. Sullivan points out in the seminal essay \u201cEd Gein and the figure of the transgendered serial killer,\u201d there is little evidence of this beyond words that police put into Gein\u2019s mouth, asking \u201cWould you ever put on a pair of women\u2019s panties over your body and then put some of these vaginas over your penis?\u201d To which Gein responded, \u201cThat could be.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

That could be<\/em>. That\u2019s more or less the basis for decades of transphobic slasher stories.<\/p>\n\n\n