CW: silence of the lambs, medical gatekeeping, transphobia, representation
Like many people, the first book I read featuring a trans character was "Silence of the Lambs." My feelings about this work are...complicated to say the least. Let's dig in.
The elephant in the room is that the main antagonist, Jame Gumb or Buffalo Bill, flays cis women and uses their skin to make a wearable "woman-suit" in order to become a woman. Obviously, this is incredibly transphobic. What interests me is that, unlike the film, the book explicitly states that Jame Gumb is not in fact transgender. Apparently Jame has been rejected for Gender Confirmation Surgery and doesn't fit the psychological profile of a real transgender person. So not trans after all! When I first read the book, I took this at face value and didn't question it, despite already knowing I was trans. It's actually relieving to read this horrible caricature of yourself and then be reassured that it isn't really about you. It was so relieving that it was how I thought about the character for years: "He's not trans, he just thinks he is". Up until quite recently I could watch Demme's Silence of the Lambs and feel safe knowing the character onscreen wasn't a cruel parody of me; after all, the book said so.
That was until I realized how many times I'd been told I didn't fit the profile of a transgender person. How many times I'd been told that I wasn't actually trans but just believed myself to be. Whatever that means. As it turns out, it is very common for trans people (especially non-binary people) to be told they "aren't trans enough" or "aren't trans in the right way." When coming from a healthcare professional, this assessment is then used to deny us access to essential medical care such as HRT and GCS. The concept itself is generally called "transmedicalism" and its proponents "truscum", so named because they accuse other trans people of not being "truly trans." It goes without saying that transmedicalism is incredibly harmful as it unnecessarily gatekeeps who "gets to be trans" behind a set of arbitrary criteria. All this does is divide trans people and serve as a pretext to deny us healthcare.
With this in mind, I can no longer take seriously the book's insistence that Jame Gumb is not trans. Furthermore, the characters in the novel who utter these verdicts are all psychiatrists and cops, i.e. the two main proponents of transmedicalism! Accordingly, the denial of Gumb's trans identity in the text substantiates rather than silences the accusations of transphobia. Silence of the Lambs is incredibly transphobic in its portrayal of Jame Gumb and promotes harmful notions about what it means to be trans. This damage is exacerbated by the Demme film cementing Jame Gumb as the most prominent trans character in pop culture.
With that being said however, I'd like to offer up my own alternate, queer reading of Silence of the Lambs. If you think about it, the book's plot boils down to "a trans woman is denied medical care; later she is killed by a cop." Maybe there's a moral we can take from this after all? Allowing people to transition saves lives.
Let me say it again: Allowing people to have access to essential medical care including HRT and GCS saves lives.
All of this is to say that representation matters. The fact that I have to go through all of this analysis to even make sense of the first trans character I encountered in fiction speaks volumes. I don't want my children's first impression of trans characters in literature to come from Silence of the Lambs like mine did.
P.S. In Hannibal, Clarice shoots a black mother cradling her child. Fucking ACAB, in my queer reading Clarice and the FBI are the real serial killers. RIP Evelda and Jame, love ya ladies <3
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