I Feel Sorry for Jame Gumb
How watching The Silence of the Lambs set back my transition two decades
CW: Homophobia, Transphobia
I probably shouldn’t have watched The Silence of the Lambs when I was 13. At that point in my life, though, I had fallen asleep at 10 watching the famous severed arm scene in Predator, thought Total Recall was a very funny movie at 11 (it really is), and always got a kick out of that dude’s head exploding on Raiders of the Lost Ark. Why not go ahead and watch a movie about serial cannibalism and a guy wearing a skin suit? I’ll have a nice nap.
I remember the first time I saw the scene: the infamous minute of the evil Jame Gumb (aka “Buffalo Bill”) getting all gussied up in front of the mirror while he wears women’s clothes made of real women. My mother had to leave the room. “I can’t stomach f*g scenes,” she said as she left. I marveled that of everything that happened in this movie, that was the part she took issue with: not Hannibal’s fava beans and nice chianti, not the fact that Jame Gumb was skinning girls alive, but that he was putting on makeup and wearing a wig (well, a scalp). The violence of Buffalo Bill was not believable to her — though it is definitely real — but the idea of a crossdressing man… that stuck in her craw so badly that she had to leave the room. I in the meantime, at the ripe age of 13, watched the scene to its full, twisted completion.
Looking back on it, this moment in my life was one of the hints of my own struggles with gender identity. I learned all about the glorious changes of puberty and was already clawing at the door, silently screaming as the testosterone quickly overtook my body. The bottom had just dropped out of my voice, resulting in the rich, profound bass I get to reconcile with every day. It was becoming very apparent to me that I was born into a life I did not ask for: one with football and baseball and scouting and neckties and premature ejaculation. I was not having a good time of it but in the mean streets of Salt Lake City, you always smile for the cameras, even when the screaming inside you is deafening.
I totally got where Buffalo Bill was coming from.
The author of the book and portrayer of the villain maintain that Buffalo Bill is not genuinely transgender, but actually a man trying to appropriate gender fluidity to seize power from women. Fine, you can see Nazi paraphernalia in Gumb’s house and Nazis were known to skin people. However, this argument reverberates more with the TERF’s “shemale” idea than it does with an accurate portrayal of trans folks, serial killers, or… really anyone.
In a book, the author has a lot more time to paint his characters with the details necessary, but I fear a lot of Buffalo Bill’s character depth got left on the cutting room floor if it was shot at all, leaving people to fill in the blanks with what fears and fetishes they desire. They give a token nod to the trans community: “they’re actually pretty passive people.” Gee… thanks? Then they say that he’s not a real trans woman, like so many cis-hets love to say about the trans folks that aren’t up to their standards, and proceed with the manhunt.
What you do hear about our villain in Clarice’s investigation is the typical example of medical gatekeeping that the trans community still has to deal with. You hear about how Gumb got rejected from a surgery because the doctor thought he knew him better than Gumb knew himself. You hear the word “autogynephilia” and wonder how that applies to the feelings you’ve been having since pre-puberty (honestly, everything turns you on in 8th grade when you’re living the Testosterone Life).
Gumb is stuck in an aging male body that he has never liked, with no real-world outlet for something he has always needed to express. You watch his sad, twisted dance and see an maddened cry for help, while you watch your mother leave the room, calling this man a “f*g.” Then you sit, glazed for the rest of the movie, wondering how this all might have panned out for everyone involved if the doctor just let him have the surgery.
… I fear a lot of Buffalo Bill’s character depth got left on the cutting room floor…
Don’t get me wrong, I am not making excuses for this guy. Buffalo Bill took it about three million steps too far. In the real world, trans people don’t capture women, throw them in pits, and put lotion in baskets, regardless of what medical/psychological barriers they run into. However, this movie certainly affixed the two concepts to each other for long time, fanning the flames of anti-trans rhetoric in movies. Even now, I often can’t think about crossdressing — or even dressing myself in the morning — without thinking about the infamous scene.
I didn’t come out as trans until I was 35. How could I come out after that? How could I even explore that as an option after my mother indirectly admitted that she thought crossdressing to be a more heinous infraction of morality than cold-blooded murder?
I’m glad I eventually found my way. I am grateful that the community has strengthened to the point where I could feel safe coming out. I’m thankful that the barriers toward affirmation are slowly lifting, even in the face of tremendous backlash. I cannot imagine the hellscape that existed for my elders when I was a child, how many of us were driven mad by it, and how many people we could have saved if we had treated them with compassion and not condemnation.
