On January 20, 1981, Ronald Reagan gave his inaugural address after being sworn in as President of the United States and made his way to a celebratory lunch. At the same time, almost to the minute, the 52 hostages held in Iran after the seizing of the US embassy in Tehran over a year earlier, were released from captivity. The timing of the release was suspiciously advantageous to Reagan’s campaign and may have carried him in the election over Jimmy Carter.
While this is a fascinating tale, it’s not really what this blog post is about, though, so let’s skip ahead a few months.
On March 29 of that same year, John Hinckley, Jr. arrived in Washington DC on a Greyhound bus. The next day, he waited in the crowd outside the Hilton Hotel where President Reagan had given a speech. Around 2:30pm, as Reagan was exiting the hotel, Hinckley leapt from the crowd and emptied his revolver. He missed Reagan with all six shots, but managed to wound Reagan nonetheless when the final shot ricocheted off of the presidential limousine and struck Reagan in the chest. Hinckley was quickly tackled and arrested. He was taken to a federal facility and evaluated by psychiatrists for four months. During the trial, Americans would learn that Hinckley had a history of severe mental illness, a problematic firearms hobby, and, what most people remember about him, a truly bizarre obsession with actor Jodie Foster. Hinckley had tried, unsuccessfully, to gain Jodie Foster’s attention by stalking her. He then created the plan to assassinate President Reagan in order to gain fame which would then gain Jodie Foster’s attention and then cause her to fall in love with him, or something. Hinckley had become obsessed with Foster after seeing her, at age 14 it must be noted, portraying a 12 year old prostitute in the movie Taxi Driver.
John Hinckley would not be the only male stalker to follow Jodie Foster. None of the others were as high profile as Hinckley, although one did come very close to killing her as she performed in a play while attending Yale shortly after Hinckley’s assassination attempt, but the stalker changed his mind at the last minute as he was overcome with emotions following her performance, allegedly. Again, keep in mind that Jodie Foster was only 19 at this point in time and attempting to enjoy the college experience while also learning to manage the world’s reaction to her fame and success.
To further complicate her young life, Jodie Foster was keeping her sexual identity as a lesbian a secret, at least from the public. Sure, there were rumors and it was perhaps an open secret among her family and friends, but clearly the message wasn’t getting across to the crazed male stalker demographic. Even now, in 2024, Jodie Foster has not made a definitive public statement of her sexual identity. She has made coy, teaser statements that hint and allude to her lesbian identity, and she has been married to a woman since 2014, but she’s never publicly referred to herself as gay or lesbian. Jodie Foster has maintained a relatively private life over the course of her career and certainly owes nothing to either her fans or the LGBTQIA+ community regarding her life off-screen. It should go without saying, but probably needs to be reiterated here, that private and even closeted identities are every bit as valid and worthy of protection as those on display during pride parades. There is no “but” coming here. There is no argument to be made about what Jodie Foster should or shouldn’t do in regard to her own identity nor the rainbow community at large. There is, however, context to be set for the more painful conversation ahead, and I do so wish to be thorough, if not fair, in my paragraphs to come.
Ok. Deep breaths. Let’s do this.
Let’s talk about The Silence of the Lambs.
Outside the building on that night, LGBT activist groups, led by Queer Nation, staged a protest against the representation of queer people in films of the year, most notably JFK and The Silence of the Lambs. The protestors were kept across the street from the venue by a metal railing and LAPD officers on horseback, although several attempted to stall cars from being able to drop off attendees. Ten protestors were arrested for disturbing the peace and allegedly throwing objects at cars. One protestor was able to make it inside the event and yell at John Candy during the presentation for best song, but the show’s producers were able to hide it completely from viewers. One of the protest organizers, Annette Gaudino, was hit with a nightstick, thrown into a van, and taken to the LA jail for attempting to block the street with a sit-in. Chants of “Burn, Hollywood, burn!” disrupted coverage of the red carpet event before the awards. The AIDS epidemic was nearing its peak in 1992, and event organizers warned attendees that some protestors might attempt to throw blood on them. Jodie Foster, in particular, was thought to be a target for the demonstrators in an attempt to out her publicly as a lesbian. The tension was high enough that Billy Crystal opened the show by joking about it in an attempt to ease the attendees’ fears. “Welcome to the Oscars, or, as it’s known tonight, Cape Fear.”
So, why exactly were these protestors so angry about The Silence of the Lambs? The LGBTQIA+ community, as the acronym suggests, is a diverse group with varied reasons for taking issue with the representation of queer people in the film. Hannibal Lecter and Clarice Starling, the main characters played by Sir Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Foster, respectively, are both queer-coded with implications of gayness. However, the most egregious representation in the film comes in the form of the character Jame Gumb, also known as Buffalo Bill, and played by Ted Levine. This character has been the subject of some debate between transgender activists, Jodie Foster, and the film’s director Jonathan Demme. While Demme and Foster have tried to retroactively remove Jame Gumb from criticism with various semantic arguments as to why the character is not really transsexual or transgender, the film speaks for itself.
Here is a description of the facts of the film without interpretation or evaluation. Bill is the villain of the film and Clarice and Hannibal are the heroes, although the character roles do get very murky, put a pin in this for later. Clarice is a young FBI agent tasked with capturing Bill, a serial killer who murders women in order to use their skin to make a suit that Bill believes will transform him into a woman. Hannibal, an imprisoned serial killer himself, aids Clarice in tracking down Bill through a series of second-hand psychological evaluations. Clarice is then able to determine that Bill is actually a person named Jame Gumb who lives in Ohio and ultimately kills Bill during an attempt to free Bill’s final victim before she can be murdered and, of course, skinned. Finally, Hannibal escapes to the Bahamas where it is implied that he will resume murdering people, starting with the doctor who was in charge of the hospital for the criminally insane where Hannibal was previously imprisoned.
When you ask people what they remember about The Silence of the Lambs, they will most likely recite the fava beans line with the “fpt,fpt,fpt,fpt,fpt,” noise, or talk about Hannibal’s introduction in his straight jacket and mask. If they keep digging into their memories of the film, the next scene they will recreate is Jame Gumb dancing naked in front of a mirror with his penis tucked between his legs while asking his reflection if he would have sex with him(self). Then, there’s the other memorable scene with Jame Gumb demanding that his captive victim put lotion on her skin and then return it to the basket that he had lowered down to her. “Would you fuck me? I’d fuck me.” “It rubs the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again.” Yes, they gave the serial killer catch phrases. When the film became a commercial success and a multiple Oscar winner, it was exposed to a massive audience. If there is one thing for which massive audiences are not known, it is developing a nuanced and careful evaluation of what they see on a screen. People are, however, very good at repeating catch phrases and making shallow and tasteless jokes. The forty four million viewers who tuned in to that Academy Award broadcast saw Billy Crystal doing just that, making context-free reference jokes about serial killer characters. If the audience didn’t feel comfortable making those jokes at work around the water cooler before that Sunday night, Billy Crystal implicitly gave them permission to do so on Monday morning.
In a 2014 interview, Jonathan Demme stated:
“Well, Jame Gumb isn’t gay. And this is my directorial failing in making The Silence Of The Lambs—that I didn’t find ways to emphasize the fact that Gumb wasn’t gay, but more importantly, that his whole thing is that Lecter’s profile on Gumb was that he was someone who was terribly abused as a child, and as a result of the abuse he suffered as a child, had extreme self-loathing, and whose life had become a series of efforts to not be himself anymore. The idea is that by turning himself into a female, then surely Gumb can feel like he has escaped himself. He’s not a traditional ‘cross-dresser,’ ‘transvestite,’ or ‘drag queen’—the various labels that respectfully come up for people who love to don the clothing of the opposite gender. So, Gumb is not gay, but there is a reference to a homosexual experience he had which is attributed to this quest. We were all banking a little too much on the metaphor of the Death’s-head moth—that Gumb is trying to achieve a metamorphosis through making his human suit.”
In a 2021 interview, Jodie Foster stated:
“It was over 30 years ago, and was one of the first transgender characters onscreen, unfortunately. They were not represented at the time, and we were very clear—and Thomas Harris was very clear in the book—that Buffalo Bill is not a transsexual, and that was the word that he used that we used at the time. He is somebody who hates himself and wants to change, and he is mistakenly identified. He wants to change this psychosis and this compulsion that he has, and he will use whatever this idea of ‘change’ is—the moth metaphor, etc. I think that was in Jonathan’s movie, but I think that he would tell you, as someone who wants to be a good filmmaker and who cares about the world, he took the criticism and that he wishes he could go back and revisit the movie, because we know so much more now. We welcome criticism as filmmakers, because it’s an opportunity to have a conversation that makes us better filmmakers. And look—maybe that discussion helped pave the way to where we are now. That’s what movies can do, they can open up discussions, and we can disagree, and we can want to get better.”
With respect to Demme’s quote, I am not sure how he conceptualized the character of Jame Gumb as a straight man. In both the book and the film, he murdered a male lover out of jealousy. Making the argument that he’s bisexual would be acceptable, but only in the sense of proving a negative - there are no references to him having relationships with women, so it’s theoretically possible he could have. As far as explaining that he is merely trying to escape his concept of himself by “turning himself into a female,” that is exactly what gender transition is for transgender people. Transgender people escape the concept of “self” that has been created by both internal and external forces in order to create a new self that is more harmonious, complete, and fulfilling. I am intentionally leaving out the word “authentic,” put a pin in that. Gender transition is not, however, stealing or appropriating another gender. The clear metaphor in Buffalo Bill's crimes is that trans* women are "killing" the "traditional" definition of women. It perpetuates the claims of female erasure that are becoming louder and louder on social media in anti-trans bubbles. The Silence of the Lambs is particularly dangerous representation because it presents these ideas and metaphors that viewers will accept as fact, and then it twists this dagger into the heart of trans* people by giving visible and literal documentation that cis women are in danger for their physical safety in the presence of a trans woman.
With respect to Jodie Foster’s quote, it is clear she starts to venture into trans-exclusionary radical feminism (TERF) territory, but seems to catch herself and retreats into vague pseudo apologies. She states that Jame Gumb is a transgender character, but not a transsexual character and is “mistakenly identified.” The distinction between transsexual and transgender does not matter at all in the context of this discussion of how the character represents trans* people. Hannibal Lecter has a line in the film that Jodie Foster is referencing here where he states, “Billy isn’t a real transsexual, but he thinks he is.” If Jame Gumb had received gender affirming surgery, would he have been given a different presentation in the film? It seems that Jodie Foster is making the “true trans” argument by implying that Jame Gumb was not a “true” trans* person because he did not have gender affirming surgery, and by extension, setting the standard that only people who have gender affirming surgery are truly valid trans* people. Some trans people have surgeries, some do not. Some trans people take hormone replacement therapy, some do not. There is no threshold of transness that trans people have to meet in order to be trans. There is no set of universal diagnostic standards for “authentic” transness. You do not have to be a drag queen to be gay, and you do not have to be butch to be a lesbian. Jodie Foster, more than most, should know this.
What if a trans woman cannot afford surgery?
What if she is afraid of the risk of incontinence or losing sexual sensation and function?
What if her insurance does not cover hormone therapy?
What if laws are passed that ban or restrict hormone therapy?
What if she’s afraid of losing her romantic partner?
What if she simply likes her penis and wants to keep it?
Look, I don’t understand that last one either, but just because I find the lower appendage to be a horrendous and grotesque abomination, it doesn’t mean that all trans women do.
When I started writing trans representation posts on this blog, I knew I would need to face Buffalo Bill at some point. It’s the single most egregious representation of trans people on film in my opinion. It’s worse than Norman Bates, Ray Finkle, Quagmire’s dad, and even Lady Ballers. It’s worse than every dead tr*nny hooker on every single cop show that’s ever been on TV. It’s so bad that the movie features another character who killed many more people, but Hannibal Lecter gets to be a hero because he helps catch the tr*nny serial killer. If you take issue with me calling Hannibal Lecter a hero, just take a look at how his legacy is perceived to this day. Donald Trump has praised the character several times during his rallies because he loves extremely dated movies references and also because he knows that Lecter’s character has a cool, anti-hero perception among the people that attend his rallies. Hannibal Lecter may have killed and eaten a lot of people, but at least he wasn’t a tr*nny.
I asked a very good friend how I should approach this topic and he said, “Just write about how it made you feel.” That’s a much more difficult task than reading old Rolling Stone articles and watching interviews with Jodie Foster and trying desperately to figure out why she has that accent. She was born and raised in Los Angeles, it makes no sense. Emotional misdirections aside, and I say this without exaggeration, The Silence of the Lambs did more to force me into the closet than anything else. I just knew that, as a very non-passing trans woman, if I stepped outside of my male presentation, Buffalo Bill would probably be the first image people conjured in their minds. At best, I would be open to jokes and laughter, and at worst, fear and rejection. And yet, there was something much, much worse that happened after I saw the movie. I internalized the idea that Buffalo Bill was part of being trans, and that he was lurking there inside me too if I dared to accept or acknowledge my feelings of hate for my own body and birth gender. Even now, when I look in a mirror with my testosterone-thinned hair and a face filled with masculine visual cues, sometimes I see Buffalo Bill looking back as he did in the film, preening and waving his arms like a ghoul. I have to have that battle with intrusive thoughts - “See? That’s who you are. Everybody else sees it too. Of course it’s true. The movie swept the major categories at the Oscars that year. No other movie has done that since then.” How would you feel if you had to reassure yourself for the last 30 years that you won’t turn into a serial killer if you put on a pair of yoga pants?
Obviously, transphobia has existed long before The Silence of the Lambs and Jonathan Demme and Jodie Foster are not the cause of my internal transphobia. None of them are ultimately to blame for the wave of anti-trans activity in the world today. Joanne Kool-Aid Rowling didn’t devote the last four years of her life to bringing the term TERF into our online conversations just because she saw The Silence of the Lambs when she was in college. She did, however, write some highly derivative serial killer novels featuring a villainous tr*nny under her male pen name Robert Galbraith. Maybe she based it solely on Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, or any of the other movies that feature the same trope. At the very least, The Silence of the Lambs is part of that pile of trans-as-psychotic-serial-killer library. It’s also the single most visible. It swept the major Oscar categories in 1992, the last film to do so. Whether we live in a culture that is informed by our art and media or a culture that stares into the mirror of art and media, we seem disinclined to view trans people as a functioning part of that culture.
I hate this blog post. I hate the journey and I hate the destination. I have no idea if it will still be online next week or next year, but I’m getting it out of me. It’s your problem now.
While this is a fascinating tale, it’s not really what this blog post is about, though, so let’s skip ahead a few months.
On March 29 of that same year, John Hinckley, Jr. arrived in Washington DC on a Greyhound bus. The next day, he waited in the crowd outside the Hilton Hotel where President Reagan had given a speech. Around 2:30pm, as Reagan was exiting the hotel, Hinckley leapt from the crowd and emptied his revolver. He missed Reagan with all six shots, but managed to wound Reagan nonetheless when the final shot ricocheted off of the presidential limousine and struck Reagan in the chest. Hinckley was quickly tackled and arrested. He was taken to a federal facility and evaluated by psychiatrists for four months. During the trial, Americans would learn that Hinckley had a history of severe mental illness, a problematic firearms hobby, and, what most people remember about him, a truly bizarre obsession with actor Jodie Foster. Hinckley had tried, unsuccessfully, to gain Jodie Foster’s attention by stalking her. He then created the plan to assassinate President Reagan in order to gain fame which would then gain Jodie Foster’s attention and then cause her to fall in love with him, or something. Hinckley had become obsessed with Foster after seeing her, at age 14 it must be noted, portraying a 12 year old prostitute in the movie Taxi Driver.
John Hinckley would not be the only male stalker to follow Jodie Foster. None of the others were as high profile as Hinckley, although one did come very close to killing her as she performed in a play while attending Yale shortly after Hinckley’s assassination attempt, but the stalker changed his mind at the last minute as he was overcome with emotions following her performance, allegedly. Again, keep in mind that Jodie Foster was only 19 at this point in time and attempting to enjoy the college experience while also learning to manage the world’s reaction to her fame and success.
To further complicate her young life, Jodie Foster was keeping her sexual identity as a lesbian a secret, at least from the public. Sure, there were rumors and it was perhaps an open secret among her family and friends, but clearly the message wasn’t getting across to the crazed male stalker demographic. Even now, in 2024, Jodie Foster has not made a definitive public statement of her sexual identity. She has made coy, teaser statements that hint and allude to her lesbian identity, and she has been married to a woman since 2014, but she’s never publicly referred to herself as gay or lesbian. Jodie Foster has maintained a relatively private life over the course of her career and certainly owes nothing to either her fans or the LGBTQIA+ community regarding her life off-screen. It should go without saying, but probably needs to be reiterated here, that private and even closeted identities are every bit as valid and worthy of protection as those on display during pride parades. There is no “but” coming here. There is no argument to be made about what Jodie Foster should or shouldn’t do in regard to her own identity nor the rainbow community at large. There is, however, context to be set for the more painful conversation ahead, and I do so wish to be thorough, if not fair, in my paragraphs to come.
Ok. Deep breaths. Let’s do this.
Let’s talk about The Silence of the Lambs.
Outside the building on that night, LGBT activist groups, led by Queer Nation, staged a protest against the representation of queer people in films of the year, most notably JFK and The Silence of the Lambs. The protestors were kept across the street from the venue by a metal railing and LAPD officers on horseback, although several attempted to stall cars from being able to drop off attendees. Ten protestors were arrested for disturbing the peace and allegedly throwing objects at cars. One protestor was able to make it inside the event and yell at John Candy during the presentation for best song, but the show’s producers were able to hide it completely from viewers. One of the protest organizers, Annette Gaudino, was hit with a nightstick, thrown into a van, and taken to the LA jail for attempting to block the street with a sit-in. Chants of “Burn, Hollywood, burn!” disrupted coverage of the red carpet event before the awards. The AIDS epidemic was nearing its peak in 1992, and event organizers warned attendees that some protestors might attempt to throw blood on them. Jodie Foster, in particular, was thought to be a target for the demonstrators in an attempt to out her publicly as a lesbian. The tension was high enough that Billy Crystal opened the show by joking about it in an attempt to ease the attendees’ fears. “Welcome to the Oscars, or, as it’s known tonight, Cape Fear.”
So, why exactly were these protestors so angry about The Silence of the Lambs? The LGBTQIA+ community, as the acronym suggests, is a diverse group with varied reasons for taking issue with the representation of queer people in the film. Hannibal Lecter and Clarice Starling, the main characters played by Sir Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Foster, respectively, are both queer-coded with implications of gayness. However, the most egregious representation in the film comes in the form of the character Jame Gumb, also known as Buffalo Bill, and played by Ted Levine. This character has been the subject of some debate between transgender activists, Jodie Foster, and the film’s director Jonathan Demme. While Demme and Foster have tried to retroactively remove Jame Gumb from criticism with various semantic arguments as to why the character is not really transsexual or transgender, the film speaks for itself.
Here is a description of the facts of the film without interpretation or evaluation. Bill is the villain of the film and Clarice and Hannibal are the heroes, although the character roles do get very murky, put a pin in this for later. Clarice is a young FBI agent tasked with capturing Bill, a serial killer who murders women in order to use their skin to make a suit that Bill believes will transform him into a woman. Hannibal, an imprisoned serial killer himself, aids Clarice in tracking down Bill through a series of second-hand psychological evaluations. Clarice is then able to determine that Bill is actually a person named Jame Gumb who lives in Ohio and ultimately kills Bill during an attempt to free Bill’s final victim before she can be murdered and, of course, skinned. Finally, Hannibal escapes to the Bahamas where it is implied that he will resume murdering people, starting with the doctor who was in charge of the hospital for the criminally insane where Hannibal was previously imprisoned.
When you ask people what they remember about The Silence of the Lambs, they will most likely recite the fava beans line with the “fpt,fpt,fpt,fpt,fpt,” noise, or talk about Hannibal’s introduction in his straight jacket and mask. If they keep digging into their memories of the film, the next scene they will recreate is Jame Gumb dancing naked in front of a mirror with his penis tucked between his legs while asking his reflection if he would have sex with him(self). Then, there’s the other memorable scene with Jame Gumb demanding that his captive victim put lotion on her skin and then return it to the basket that he had lowered down to her. “Would you fuck me? I’d fuck me.” “It rubs the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again.” Yes, they gave the serial killer catch phrases. When the film became a commercial success and a multiple Oscar winner, it was exposed to a massive audience. If there is one thing for which massive audiences are not known, it is developing a nuanced and careful evaluation of what they see on a screen. People are, however, very good at repeating catch phrases and making shallow and tasteless jokes. The forty four million viewers who tuned in to that Academy Award broadcast saw Billy Crystal doing just that, making context-free reference jokes about serial killer characters. If the audience didn’t feel comfortable making those jokes at work around the water cooler before that Sunday night, Billy Crystal implicitly gave them permission to do so on Monday morning.
In a 2014 interview, Jonathan Demme stated:
“Well, Jame Gumb isn’t gay. And this is my directorial failing in making The Silence Of The Lambs—that I didn’t find ways to emphasize the fact that Gumb wasn’t gay, but more importantly, that his whole thing is that Lecter’s profile on Gumb was that he was someone who was terribly abused as a child, and as a result of the abuse he suffered as a child, had extreme self-loathing, and whose life had become a series of efforts to not be himself anymore. The idea is that by turning himself into a female, then surely Gumb can feel like he has escaped himself. He’s not a traditional ‘cross-dresser,’ ‘transvestite,’ or ‘drag queen’—the various labels that respectfully come up for people who love to don the clothing of the opposite gender. So, Gumb is not gay, but there is a reference to a homosexual experience he had which is attributed to this quest. We were all banking a little too much on the metaphor of the Death’s-head moth—that Gumb is trying to achieve a metamorphosis through making his human suit.”
In a 2021 interview, Jodie Foster stated:
“It was over 30 years ago, and was one of the first transgender characters onscreen, unfortunately. They were not represented at the time, and we were very clear—and Thomas Harris was very clear in the book—that Buffalo Bill is not a transsexual, and that was the word that he used that we used at the time. He is somebody who hates himself and wants to change, and he is mistakenly identified. He wants to change this psychosis and this compulsion that he has, and he will use whatever this idea of ‘change’ is—the moth metaphor, etc. I think that was in Jonathan’s movie, but I think that he would tell you, as someone who wants to be a good filmmaker and who cares about the world, he took the criticism and that he wishes he could go back and revisit the movie, because we know so much more now. We welcome criticism as filmmakers, because it’s an opportunity to have a conversation that makes us better filmmakers. And look—maybe that discussion helped pave the way to where we are now. That’s what movies can do, they can open up discussions, and we can disagree, and we can want to get better.”
With respect to Demme’s quote, I am not sure how he conceptualized the character of Jame Gumb as a straight man. In both the book and the film, he murdered a male lover out of jealousy. Making the argument that he’s bisexual would be acceptable, but only in the sense of proving a negative - there are no references to him having relationships with women, so it’s theoretically possible he could have. As far as explaining that he is merely trying to escape his concept of himself by “turning himself into a female,” that is exactly what gender transition is for transgender people. Transgender people escape the concept of “self” that has been created by both internal and external forces in order to create a new self that is more harmonious, complete, and fulfilling. I am intentionally leaving out the word “authentic,” put a pin in that. Gender transition is not, however, stealing or appropriating another gender. The clear metaphor in Buffalo Bill's crimes is that trans* women are "killing" the "traditional" definition of women. It perpetuates the claims of female erasure that are becoming louder and louder on social media in anti-trans bubbles. The Silence of the Lambs is particularly dangerous representation because it presents these ideas and metaphors that viewers will accept as fact, and then it twists this dagger into the heart of trans* people by giving visible and literal documentation that cis women are in danger for their physical safety in the presence of a trans woman.
With respect to Jodie Foster’s quote, it is clear she starts to venture into trans-exclusionary radical feminism (TERF) territory, but seems to catch herself and retreats into vague pseudo apologies. She states that Jame Gumb is a transgender character, but not a transsexual character and is “mistakenly identified.” The distinction between transsexual and transgender does not matter at all in the context of this discussion of how the character represents trans* people. Hannibal Lecter has a line in the film that Jodie Foster is referencing here where he states, “Billy isn’t a real transsexual, but he thinks he is.” If Jame Gumb had received gender affirming surgery, would he have been given a different presentation in the film? It seems that Jodie Foster is making the “true trans” argument by implying that Jame Gumb was not a “true” trans* person because he did not have gender affirming surgery, and by extension, setting the standard that only people who have gender affirming surgery are truly valid trans* people. Some trans people have surgeries, some do not. Some trans people take hormone replacement therapy, some do not. There is no threshold of transness that trans people have to meet in order to be trans. There is no set of universal diagnostic standards for “authentic” transness. You do not have to be a drag queen to be gay, and you do not have to be butch to be a lesbian. Jodie Foster, more than most, should know this.
What if a trans woman cannot afford surgery?
What if she is afraid of the risk of incontinence or losing sexual sensation and function?
What if her insurance does not cover hormone therapy?
What if laws are passed that ban or restrict hormone therapy?
What if she’s afraid of losing her romantic partner?
What if she simply likes her penis and wants to keep it?
Look, I don’t understand that last one either, but just because I find the lower appendage to be a horrendous and grotesque abomination, it doesn’t mean that all trans women do.
When I started writing trans representation posts on this blog, I knew I would need to face Buffalo Bill at some point. It’s the single most egregious representation of trans people on film in my opinion. It’s worse than Norman Bates, Ray Finkle, Quagmire’s dad, and even Lady Ballers. It’s worse than every dead tr*nny hooker on every single cop show that’s ever been on TV. It’s so bad that the movie features another character who killed many more people, but Hannibal Lecter gets to be a hero because he helps catch the tr*nny serial killer. If you take issue with me calling Hannibal Lecter a hero, just take a look at how his legacy is perceived to this day. Donald Trump has praised the character several times during his rallies because he loves extremely dated movies references and also because he knows that Lecter’s character has a cool, anti-hero perception among the people that attend his rallies. Hannibal Lecter may have killed and eaten a lot of people, but at least he wasn’t a tr*nny.
I asked a very good friend how I should approach this topic and he said, “Just write about how it made you feel.” That’s a much more difficult task than reading old Rolling Stone articles and watching interviews with Jodie Foster and trying desperately to figure out why she has that accent. She was born and raised in Los Angeles, it makes no sense. Emotional misdirections aside, and I say this without exaggeration, The Silence of the Lambs did more to force me into the closet than anything else. I just knew that, as a very non-passing trans woman, if I stepped outside of my male presentation, Buffalo Bill would probably be the first image people conjured in their minds. At best, I would be open to jokes and laughter, and at worst, fear and rejection. And yet, there was something much, much worse that happened after I saw the movie. I internalized the idea that Buffalo Bill was part of being trans, and that he was lurking there inside me too if I dared to accept or acknowledge my feelings of hate for my own body and birth gender. Even now, when I look in a mirror with my testosterone-thinned hair and a face filled with masculine visual cues, sometimes I see Buffalo Bill looking back as he did in the film, preening and waving his arms like a ghoul. I have to have that battle with intrusive thoughts - “See? That’s who you are. Everybody else sees it too. Of course it’s true. The movie swept the major categories at the Oscars that year. No other movie has done that since then.” How would you feel if you had to reassure yourself for the last 30 years that you won’t turn into a serial killer if you put on a pair of yoga pants?
Obviously, transphobia has existed long before The Silence of the Lambs and Jonathan Demme and Jodie Foster are not the cause of my internal transphobia. None of them are ultimately to blame for the wave of anti-trans activity in the world today. Joanne Kool-Aid Rowling didn’t devote the last four years of her life to bringing the term TERF into our online conversations just because she saw The Silence of the Lambs when she was in college. She did, however, write some highly derivative serial killer novels featuring a villainous tr*nny under her male pen name Robert Galbraith. Maybe she based it solely on Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, or any of the other movies that feature the same trope. At the very least, The Silence of the Lambs is part of that pile of trans-as-psychotic-serial-killer library. It’s also the single most visible. It swept the major Oscar categories in 1992, the last film to do so. Whether we live in a culture that is informed by our art and media or a culture that stares into the mirror of art and media, we seem disinclined to view trans people as a functioning part of that culture.
I hate this blog post. I hate the journey and I hate the destination. I have no idea if it will still be online next week or next year, but I’m getting it out of me. It’s your problem now.
Comments
Post a Comment