BY: Nyla Stanford
Published 4 weeks ago
The popularization of asserting the downfall of an individual’s mental capacity to being transgender is a sloppy tale repeated in horror films. Films like “The Silence of the Lambs” and “Psycho” utilize this harmful trope without exercising much thought to the source of instability. And with Ryan Murphy’s clocked obsession with humanizing serial killers, it would have been thought that “Monster: The Ed Gein Story” would have taken a different route. However, this series suffers from the same sensationalism.
Who Is Ed Gein?
Ed Gein was a small-town farmer from Plainfield, Wis., or so it appeared. During Murphy’s Netflix retelling, the audience learns of Gein as a man stricken by the heavily religious beliefs of his mother and his obsession with the women she was. There are accounts of his interest in Ilse Koch, “The Witch of Buchenwald.” She was infamously known for decorating her lampshades with the tattooed skin of her concentration camp Jewish prisoners.
Murphy accurately depicts Gein’s affection for his mother, as she is the only person he believes truly loves him. This thought, coupled with his psychosis, is what is believed to drive him to do the unthinkable with the human body. However, as the series continues, the audience begins to see Gein’s fast deterioration. With him building an entire suit made of women’s skin, the perspective and terminology take a drastic and dangerous turn.
What Ed Gein a transgender individual?
The series depicts a hallucinatory scene between Gein and Christine Jorgensen. Jorgensen was the first person to become widely known for undergoing sexual reassignment surgery. In this scene, Gein is talking with Jorgensen, asking her about her transition and how this might be what he’s desired all along.
While television is allowed to take liberties, that is no confirmation of Gein wanting to transition into a woman. His only relation to the desire of a female figure is from his obsession with replicating his mother through the lenses of his own schizophrenia. This scene, as many other films mentioned previously, conflates the concept of gender nonconformity with deviance and violence, which only further perpetuates harm to the actual trans community.
The Relationship Between Gender and Violence
“The myth that serial murderers are motivated by ‘insanity’ and ‘gender distress’ originated from Gein and his fictionalized manifestations,” states Ryan Lee Cartwright in his book “Peculiar Places.” Before the 1950s, there was a distinct relationship between mental illness and violence. But with the looming Cold War and redirected focus on morals (especially for white males), a shift happened. In Irena Jurkovi?’s book, “Re-Imagining the Victim in Post-1970s Horror Media” the author shares that there had to be an understanding of why a white man would commit such acts against women, especially during a time period where ‘primitive’ and ‘savages’ were reserved for the depictions of Black Americans. Thus, the first sensationalized depiction of Gein is born with the movie “Psycho,” giving the American audience a ‘reason’ for such atrocities.
The Harm of Horror Transgender Tropes
Reinforcing the violent transgender trope not only stunts the plotline of the story but also harms real-life trans women in the process. In the scene between Gein and Jorgensen, Jorgensen states that she doesn’t believe he is a woman or wants to be one, but rather that he is a gynephile. Identiversity shares that gynophilia is “the attraction to females or femininity, regardless of one’s own sex or gender identity.” However, autogynephilia has become a foundational issue for anti-trans activists who conjoin sexual violence and being mentally ill. That said, the show’s depiction has given more fuel to attack and subvert the rights trans individuals have been fighting for.
Despite several interviews stating that Gein doesn’t think he wants to be a woman and several doctors relating his obsession with his mother to the building of a skin suit, the interpretations of his actions continue to be misused to the harm of trans individuals. Ultimately, Gein’s trial deemed him not guilty by reason of insanity (again, speaking deeply to the depths of his psychosis), and he was forced to spend the rest of his life in a mental hospital. Thus, leaving the world to use his wretched choices to subvert the LGBTQIA+ community.
Do you think his story is harmful to the trans community? Comment below!
