OK these are my notes. Every quote is written out with it's source and link (if available). It's not like an essay per say, it's just my messy notes typed out.
Why am I doing this? (I explain before I even say what this is. Yikes). I watched Insidious Ch 2 and Wes Craven's Deadly Blessing in back to back and couldn't help but notices they had the same twist. The woman killing people was actually born a male... and that seemed familiar... so I did some (a lot) of research and found this is a trope (a transphobic trope) that's fairly common.
I tried to stick to talking about slashers, and horror films, but I did not...
We have to talk terminology first.
Gender Expression - how you look (by choice), how you dress, hair length, if you wear make up, ect.
Gender Identity - how you identify, are you a man, woman, non-binary, gender-fluid, ect.
Sexuality - who do you love? Are you straight, gay, bi, pan, asexual, ect.
Queer: denoting or relating to a sexual identity that does not correspond to established ideas of sexuality, especially heterosexual norms. [gay].
Transgender: denoting or relating to a person whose gender identity does not correspond with the sex registered for them at birth.
Drag / Cross Dressing: dressing in clothes associated with the other sex. This is regarding gender expression and does not mean a person in queer or trans.
DID: Dissociative Identity Disorder, formally multiple personality disorder.
CA = child abuse
GNC = Gender Non Conforming
A little history of "Trans" and the DSM, from Psychiatry.org - the APA. link.
"It was not until 1980 with the publication of DSM–III that the diagnosis “transsexualism” first appeared."
"With the release of DSM–IV in 1994, “transsexualism” was replaced with “gender identity disorder in adults and adolescence” in an effort to reduce stigma."
"With the publication of DSM–5 in 2013, “gender identity disorder” was eliminated and replaced with “gender dysphoria.”"
Other factors to keep in mind:
Textual evidence: the content of the film - dialogue, setting, background, ect.
Context: author intent, when/where it was made, who directed it, ect.
Interpretation: critics and audience readings of the film.
Before we talk about Psycho 1960, we need to talk about an older Hitchcock film.
Murder! 1930 - killer dresses in women’s clothes to hide from police...
Hitchcock and queer coding: Psycho, Rope, Strangers on a Train, Rebecca, Birds. Hitchcock capitalized on homophobia - specifically the audience’s fear of Other - his entire career.
“In most trans horror “representation,” depictions of transness, particularly transfemininity, are molded by cisgender anxiety, using some of the most harmful and disturbing misconceptions around transness under the guise of the horror genre.” - Monstrous Transgressions by Evelyn Nelson and Sasha Carney. Link.
The Hays' Code was a form of self censorship by the film industry in the US from 1934 until it was phased out by the MPA's rating system (R, PG-13, PG, ect) in 1968. The Code consisted of a list of Do's and Don'ts. A Don't was the inclusion of characters with 'sexual perversion'... meaning queer.
Queer coding is a way to have a queer character in a film at a time they weren't allowed by using subtext. Such as, clothes (women wearing pants), behavior (man speaking in a high pitched voice and lisp), any Disney villain...
Lessons from Barbie: we are all victims of gender socialization and the socio-cultural expectations laid upon us based on our gender.
PSYCHO
The first modern slasher that changed the landscape and trajectory of the entire horror genre!
The Oedipal Complex that launched a thousand horror movies…
Momism (time period misogyny and fear of loss of masculinity)... enter Freud.
Def: an excessive popular adoration and over sentimentalization of mothers that is held to be oedipal in nature and that is thought to allow overprotective or clinging mothers unconsciously to deny their offspring emotional emancipation and thus to set up psychoneuroses. - Merriam-Webster link.
*note on Freud + homophobia + misogyny = heavy criticism on mothers and a masculinity crisis. So we see overbearing or over loving mom = queer son. A way to queer code during the Hays Code era - even now it’s a stereotype that persists.
Who are we willing to demonize as a culture…?
Norman as Queer: “Norman Bates is a queer male subject whose queerness is not registered through any explicit reference to his sexuality, even though, at the same time, he has inescapably been read as “the homosexual.”” - Psycho-Sexual: Male Desire in Hitchcock, De Palma, Scorsese, and Friedkin by David Greven.
“Most critics and the public appear to be divided between understanding soft-spoken, stuttering Norman as another one of Hitchcock’s “crazy- and I mean crazy-dykes and faggots,” and finding him a frightening and/or pitiable straight guy ruined by his too-close relationship with his mother. Even in its straight incarnations, however, Norman’s sexuality is understood as perverse somehow” he is the quintessential mama’s boy gone horribly bad. But this incestuous mama’s boy coding is also the basis for reading Norman as homosexual. Granted the dominant cultural trope of mama’s-boy-as-homosexual is a tired one, but it has maintained its pop Freudian, pop culture power.” - Alesander Doty. Link.
Also the asexual thing with the peephole, umm asexual masterbate and fetishes exists.
Norman has many queer markers to code him as such. Shy, timid, stuttering, mama’s boy… that’s a blaring red sign that says in bright rainbow neon “GAY”.
Plus the casting of Anthony Perkins… I mean… time would show how telling that would be. For better or worse… probably worse. RIP.
Then there is how he’s juxtaposed with Sam Loomis, who even has a kinda Cruising moment with Norman to distract him.
BUT… Norman does kill women. I really went back and forth on this and ultimately decided he is supposed to be read as straight and the queer coding is just used to make him more weird to the audience, but also, hopefully more pathetic and sympathetic.
Was the dead mother necessary? Couldn’t she be alive and the killer in a Friday the 13th or Butcher Baker Nightmare Maker. Or if she is dead did he need to wear a dress + wig?
The Reveal:
The reveal at the climax of the film tells us not only who the killer is...
But also that they are not the gender we were led to believe...
And often that they are also mentally ill.
Therefore it connects in the audience’ mind GNC with violence and insanity.
It’s an easy way to further Other the killer and by making them more different than the cis-het audience, they become distinctly more frightening.
Ed Gein
Real life case that inspired:
Psycho (Norman Bates) - effeminate, mentally ill, killer, Oedipal
Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Letherface) - perverse
Silence of the Lambs (Jame Gumb) - dr diagnoses them, ‘real’ trans, fem!
Book - Robert Bloch
Real Ed Gein was arrested in December 1957 in Wisconsin.
Gein began grave robbing in 1948…
He was not queer or trans.
He killed two women we know of.
He did rob graves… BUT there is a lot of misinformation. Like most of it.
There’s actually little facts and loads of speculation that tends to err on the bizarre side… because sensationalism sells. Let’s talk Yellow Journalism, aka 20th century click-bait, and how quoting works…
All of the following quote are from ‘Ed Gein and the figure of the transgendered serial killer’ by K.E. Sullivan. Link.
“Gein would eventually be tried for the murders of two women; the rest of the body parts were apparently obtained from graves he had robbed. The common consensus was that Gein sought out women who bore a resemblance to his dead mother. Needless to say, these revelations stunned the community.” [Common consensus is not fact/truth].
“Bloch took a number of liberties with the case, and many other reports were wildly inaccurate. Even now it is difficult to sift fact from fiction.”
“What seems very clear, however, is that Gein and the initial fictionalization of his case in the figure of Norman Bates in Psycho function as larger cultural symbols which reflect contemporary concerns about masculinity, motherhood and sexual deviance.”
“the accounts cannot offer much information to support the conclusion that Gein was a transgendered individual or gay; indeed, he was quite clearly interested in women even if none returned this interest. Nor are most transgendered persons psychopathic or murderers. In fact, most serial killers are heterosexual men whose victims are women or children.”
There were newspaper articles before he’d been seen by a psychiatrist. - armchair psychology was taken as fact. (The Journal by Dr. Edward Kelleher, a Chicago psychiatrist).
More of a Frankenstein than a Jame Gumb.
“the evaluations stressed that Gein was highly "suggestible" and had "trouble distinguishing between what he remember[ed] and what he [was] told," a potentially problematic situation for Gein's police interrogators.”
“It is difficult to discern whether Augusta Gein was as overbearing as accounts indicate, or if the representations of her merely dovetail with 1950's attitudes about bad mothers? At any rate, Augusta as a castrating, harpy mother figure both reflects and "explains" Ed's deviance. She is, according to popular accounts, in many ways the monster behind the monster. Ironically, Gein described his father, not his mother, as abusive, indicating that George Gein was an alcoholic who drank excessively and abused both Ed and his brother. Given the era's paranoia about the improper influence of mothers on sons, it is not difficult to understand the lack of attention paid to the role of Ed's father in the formulation of Gein's psychosis.”
“1950's United States was rife with fear about homosexuality, mothers and male effeminacy. Like effeminacy, homosexuality and transsexuality/transvestism typically became attributed to improper mothering - either too much affection or too little.”
“improper mothering not only provided an explanation for the etiology of sexual deviance but also for the origins of anti-social behavior or psychosis. Mid-century United States, reeling from the effects of the Kinsey report, obsessed not only about proper masculinity and the threat of homosexuality but also about the relation of failed mothering and homosexuality to crime.”
Men are never responsible for their own actions. jfc.
“However, as a culture we are so unable to admit or recognize the connection between our dominant forms of masculinity and "violent misogynistic crimes" that we must attribute some other kind of motive to them besides masculinity. Instead, motive is attributed to perceived gender deviance, in particular, to men coveting or assuming the mantle of femininity through gender identification or homosexual object choice. Thus, murderous rage is queered, and queerness becomes the privileged signifier for psychotic violence.”
“Gein still reflects/embodies our cultural anxieties about proper masculinity, motherhood, and non-heteronormative sexuality.”
*most serial killers are men. 8.6% are women so over 90% are men.
Most are straight men (in pants).
When there is a sexual component to their crimes they kill women.
women accounted for 70% of the 1,398 known victims of serial killers during the 1985 to 2010 time frame - Serial Killer Myth #5 by Dr. Scott A Bonn.
Of the gay serial killers I could find 3 [Jeffery Dahmer, John Wayne Gacy, Albert Fish] - they killed MEN! (or one killed girls (not women) but… let’s move on)
In the video I touch on a few specific cases that I'm not detailing here.
Other important stats:
Transgender people are over four times more likely than cisgender people to be victims of violent crime - UCLA. link.
Less than 2M people in the US identify as trans.
In the United States In 2019, there were 16,425 homicides recorded in the United States. With an estimated 4,000 to 5,000 more murders in 2020. That’s a huge number that creates an average of 18,675 homicides per year, for the last two years. Given the population of over 333 million, it means 0.005% (or 1 in 200) of them will, unfortunately, become victims.
However, according to the FBI, serial murders make up less than 1% of all murders in any given year. If we estimate using just 1% it reduces your chances of being murdered randomly by a serial killer to… 1 in 17,824. Link.
Individuals with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are responsible for approximately 10% of all homicides in the US. For mass killings, the percent is approximately 33%. - Serious Mental Illness and Mass Homicide
The Pattern:
“Overall, horror views the transfeminine body as the perpetrator of violence, a thing that produces and replicates violence on “innocent” cis women to achieve its intended femininity. By contrast, the cultural fear of transmasculinity centers around the transmasculine body as an unintentional victim of gendered violence.” - Monstrous Transgressions by Evelyn Nelson and Sasha Carney. link.
Referencing Mrs. Doubtfire, Tootsie, Bosom Buddies, and Some Like it Hot; “the guise of femininity ultimately promotes both his "masculine power" and his heterosexuality, and the joke of the film is on another male character who cannot read the protagonist's "true" Nature.
The second version of transvestism in contemporary media also involves discovery about the "truth" of a character's body. Such revelation, however, is not comic but horrific. Here the guise of femininity does not hide or empower a clever heterosexual man but reveals a monstrous gender- and sexual-deviant: a man in "gender distress."'
If a character has a transgender body, this detail usually is tied to some dark and horrible secret in the narrative, and the revelation about the "truth" of the body" - that a woman has a penis or a man is a transvestite/ transsexual - typically is revealed simultaneously with the revelation of another "secret" - that the person is a killer. Indeed, monstrosity or deviance almost exclusively mark images of transgender individuals, allowing for little if any sympathy from spectators.”
-‘Ed Gein and the figure of the transgendered serial killer’ by K.E. Sullivan. link.
DID/mentally Ill: Psycho. Dressed to Kill. House End St. A Blade in the Dark. | Raising Cain. Glass.
Child abuse: Unhinged. Sleepaway Camp. Deadly Blessing? Reflection of Fear. Insidious ch2. Private Parts. Homicidal…
Crossdressing: Silence of the Lambs. Cherry Falls?
Hiding/obscuring crime: Murder! Terror Train. Stripped to Kill. Fatal Games. Mrs. Doubtfire. Ace Ventura. Scooby Doo 2.
Actually Trans: Buddy Boy. Soapdish. BIT. Dr Jykell/Sister Hyde? Incubus?
*THE REST IS JUST MY BULLET POINT NOTES AND QUOTES*
The mentally ill, cross-dressing, serial killer-slasher:
Why is it when they have DID is it the “female side” that’s the killer? .
Why are we SO afraid of trans women? Misogyny
People overlook issues in ‘good’/well made movies while often ignoring sincerity in ‘bad’ movies - ie Ed Wood vs Glen/Glenda.
Psycho - Norman Bates - is mother - queer coded?, abusive mother, mentally ill DID… but at the end the audience sees a man in a dress and WIG.
Dressed to Kill - Dr. Robert Elliot/Bobbi played by Michael Cain - is a trans killer with DID? in a dress and WIG
So Bobbi, the “female aspect”, is dressing up in feminine clothing and a wig and killing women that get her sexually aroused.
Ok just a heads up transfem lesbians exist. Thanks!
Anyway she’s killing because… what’s the opposite of… erection dysphoria?
I think what’s most problematic is that Bobbi is killing explicitly because she is trans.
It’s called DRESSED to kill… as in she, a person with a penis, dawns a dress, heels, and wig to kill.
House at the End of the Street - Ryan - is sister (Carrie Anne) - abusive parents. WIG
A Blade in the Dark? WIG
DID: Glass and Raising Cain.
Child Abuse:
Reflection of Fear - Marguerite with abusive mom/grandma - mentally ill? DID?
She kills people and probably doesn’t remember. She thinks her male ‘imaginary friend’ is doing it. After we learn she was AMAB she doesn’t have any dialogue but is reduced to crying on the floor making weird, almost wild animalistic noises.
Sleepaway Camp - Angela Baker - Angela is abused by their Aunt Martha
It is a bit of a ‘good for her horror’ - Angela killed a-holes.
Can have a transmasc read if you eliminate the sequels.
*The reveal = “she’s a boy” not a killer, not Paul’s dead, not omg… SHOCK.
There’s a lot of objectification of trans bodies for shock value. You don’t need to strip Michael Myers to ‘show’ he’s insane and the killer. It;s dehumanizing her - taking away her autonomy, personality, and voice - reducing her only to her body parts.
This happens a lot in this trope and what I’m dubbing the ‘disappointments room’ (mutant) trope. Where when we learn the killer is not the gender we assumed (or are deformed) they often don’t have another line of dialogue. They are literally robbed of their voice after being essentially outed.
“To the uninformed, the fear of there being a killer is usurped by the killer being a woman who is “lying” about being a woman. That queer panic becomes the new central fear and this equates trans people to a grab bag of destructive assumptions. The trans panic becomes more scary than the threat of death.” - Bloody Disgusting by Harmony Colangelo. Link.
Insidious ch2 - Parker Crane - abusive mother… or possessed by her? WIG
The Bride in Black (aka Parker Crane) killer in a dress and wig who was severely abused by their mother Michelle (the Woman in White).
Parker might not have killed anyone of his own volition? I really don’t know for sure.
It might have a transmasc read but there is the castration part and I’m not sure if Parker did that or Mother (Michelle) did… which is horrifying.
“Something not right about a man in a dress.” - Insidious ch2 interviews
Unhinged - Marion Penrose - abusive mother - actually talks + expresses dysphoria!
Definitely has a transmasc read. Marion is a man forced to live as a woman. literally.
“Do you think its been easy all these years? Do you? Do you think its been easy trying to take care of my brother? Trying to keep my secret from my mother? Fighting to keep my own secrets locked up inside? When I told you about Carl, I thought you would understand. I thought you would be different from all the rest! But oh no. You wouldn't believe me. You're just the same as all the others! All those years of trying to protect my brother. And that was the only thing that really mattered! But now... I am the strong! And you are the weak! Now I see you where you really belong! Subservient! Groveling! Subhuman, as I was all those years! Now we're finding out who stands where, aren't we! You, you putrid scum! Fowling the air with your very presence! Now we're finding out, aren't we? Aren't we? AREN'T WE?” - quote from film.
"Unhinged portrays the society of women as monstrous, perverse abhorrence which corrupts the make and, ironically, consumes itself. The killer, whose aggressive gaze is coded as masculine, considers such young women groveling, subhuman figures, and his crimes are in part expressions of the person he has been forced to become, and the gender he has been forced to adopt. It is self-hatred and gender confusion as much as it is misogyny." - Serial Killer in Cinema: An Analytical Filmography with an Introduction (2003). Robert Cettl.
Deadly Blessing- Faith? a AMAB forced to live as a girl/woman by their abusive man hating mother.
Private Parts - hey transmasc!
Homicidal - abusive family - for money?
M+F = the female aspect is the killer why?
Why is there fear and hate for transfem people?
Cross dressing challenges the basic assumption that biological sex predetermines gender, which constitutes the basis of compulsory heterosexuality. In addition female to male transvestism challenges patriarchal order. - Citation?
Crossdressing:
Rocky Horror Picture Show?
his reveal as ‘crossdresser’ is not linked to him as a killer, or with his reveal as a killer. He’s not hiding it - there’s no secret. So the film doesn’t equate ‘crossdressing’ with killing (or other deviant behavior).
Cherry Falls: Leonard Marliston - revenge for mother (lora lee?)? WIG
(similar to Roman in Scream 3)
Silence of the Lambs: Jame Gumb - trans? diagnosis? crossdressing? Autonomy! WIG
The Film Flamers: A Horror Movie Podcast: “A rookie FBI detective with childhood trauma tries to imprison a misunderstood trans dog lover by routinely harassing a famous chef.”
Clarice: “There’s no correlation in literature between transsexualism and violence. Transsexuals are very passive.”
Lecter: “Look for severe childhood disturbances associated with violence. Our Billy wasn’t born a criminal, Clarice — he was made one through years of systematic abuse. Our Billy hates his own identity, you see. He always has, and he thinks that makes him a transsexual. But his pathology is a thousand times more savage and more terrifying.” - The Silence of the Lambs, 1991.
“The movie and the 1988 novel by the same name posit that there are good psychopathic killers and bad psychopathic killers; some are seductive, attractive and therefore, helpful, and others merely monstrous. In contrast, the film presents the other serial killer as deviant, as monstrously horrific. Buffalo Bill is coded as hideously queer, a gay man who lisps and cavorts around his dungeon basement, carrying a fluffy poodle named Precious.”
“The main narrative revelation, then, hinges on showing both Bill's motivation for killing (he wants to fashion a "woman suit") and the details of his transgendered body. The narrative suggests that he is monstrous not so much through his killing (after all, Lecter kills, too), but because he is a man who sews, wears makeup and desires a sex change operation. In this sense, then, the terms monster and transsexual collapse; the latter becomes a privileged signifier for the former.”
“what is horrible about Bill is not that he kills women but that he wants to dress up as a woman. (Lecter's cannibalism, typically a horrible prospect, in effect becomes effaced by this narrative structure.)”
- ‘Ed Gein and the figure of the transgendered serial killer’ by K.E. Sullivan. link.
“The filmmakers did go out of their way to make Hannibal heterosexual, he’s the ‘good’ villain. The bad villain, the serial murderer of women, is depicted as a transvestite or a gay transvestite, even though most people who kill women, by far, are straight men in pants….” - Ron Vawter quoted in Psycho-Sexual: Male Desire in Hitchcock, De Palma, Scorsese, and Friedkin by David Greven.
“Despite insistence in the film and novel that Bill is not actually trans, the damage this character has done for public opinion of trans people cannot be understated. Especially when all of the coding in both versions of this story entirely present the character as trans.”
“Clarice points out that there is no correlation between trans people and violence. However you cannot then respond to that by shooting your own “Bill isn’t a transexual, Clarice” argument in the foot by having a cis character, written by a cis author, decide that a character isn’t trans just so they can exonerate themselves from actually villainizing the trans community whilst benefiting from trans panic and describing what a trans person is and common discriminations they face.”
- Bloody Disgusting by Harmony Colangelo. link.
We see a lot of Doctors/Psychiatrists define and diagnose not only mental illness which is totally fine and what they have an authority on but also transness. More than that they are used to say who is and more often is not trans. It’s used to distance the film from having trans representation which they have regardless in all these examples -.- due to coding. They are capitalizing on transphobia and an audience’s fear of Other.
For me the issue is the assertion is that it’s stated that Jame “believes” they are trans… like they are hallucinating tran-ness? More to the point the book/movie don’t give you anything else - even with Norman in Psycho we get ‘no he’s not Trans he has DID’. They don’t sub out GNC/trans for anything else. And to be clear, even subbing out trans for mental illness also is loaded with problems of ableism that are harmful narrative and also false. *sigh*.
It almost says that if one is “insane” then they cannot be trans… but like no. OR worse it says that trans ‘presenting’ people, who aren’t ‘really trans’ are just mentally ill men who are violent and deceptive.
Deceptive is an interesting note that I just noted there. We see Jame deceiving the girl by pretending to have a broken arm… much like Ted Bundy. Jame also dumps the bodies in a river. Jame is clearly thought out and planned. They are covering up their crimes. In the US, they probably would NOT get an insanity defense. In fact serial killers rarely ever do because by the fact that they are killing multiple people over a time span… they are probably covering up said crimes… serial killers are strategic, planned out, organized.
I can only name two - Ed Gein and David Berkowitz who were able to claim insanity.
So how can you say Jame is too ill to understand and have autonomy over their own body and identity while also showing an organized killer who is fully capable of committing and covering up their crimes…
The textual evidence says that Jame is not trans. Ok. But the audience is still left with a very queer coded, gender non-conforming character… who is killing women because they want to be a woman… which that last part sounds kinda trans to me… -.-
But like I’m not a psychiatrist in the 20th century, I can’t properly diagnose an identity lol!
Hiding to get away with crime:
Using female form to gain access to female spaces. A TERF’s dream…
Murder! -
Fatal Games: …Olympics
Terror Train: Kenny is a guy who is disguised as David Copperfield's sexy lady assistant in order to sneak onto a train and kill people for revenge...
Stripped to Kill: a man kills his sister and poses as her to get away with the crime.
Scooby Doo 2: mask?... Alicia Silverstone is playing a male villain behind a mask...
Mrs. Doubtfire: I'm just saying they could have made Robin Williams an old man...
Incubus - Laura Kincaide is a woman and also a demon with a giant penis...
Ace Ventura: “Einhorn is Finkle, Finkle is Einhorn.” The Public outing. The faux-vomiting actually was sadly common post The Crying Game in 1992. This film even goes so far as to have The Crying Game by Boy George playing during the revelation… f*cking really?
Joined the Dolphins in 1982. Lost the Superbowl. Went home and was harassed to high hell. Was then institutionalized by 1984. In 1984 learned of Lois Einhorn and assumed her identity - and went so far as to have surgical (hormonal?) reassignment surgery.
“"Einhorn" joined the Miami-Dade Police Department. By way of seduction and sexual manipulation, "she" climbed all the way up to a Lieutenant rank in just a matter of years.” - Fandom wiki. Link.
It seems like transfem characters have the same negative stereotype as bisexuals - in that they are depicted so often as hypersexual. There is an extreme emphasis on sex when it comes to people who are not heteronormative or gender-normative (is that a thing?). That’s why there is a distancing from the terms Homosexual and Transexual to de-emphasis the sex aspect as well as their connections to psychiatric terminology. In fact transexual originated from the medical community not the trans/GNC community (according to GLAAD).
More on the faux-vomit. Ok we see this a lot and I think it started with The Crying Game. SO a dude is interested in a woman. Finds out they were AMAB. Begin spit, vomit, shower, rinse, repeat. Why? Because they are confronted with their own sexuality? Because they are disgusted by someone else’s gender identity?
Are they so horrified by the very idea they could be attracted to someone who maybe used to have a penis? Are men afraid of penises…? I get the sense they are. Screw castration anxiety, and that joke about erection dysphoria, straight men have phallophobia.
Cough cough trans panic defense.
More than that the depiction on screen is overwhelmingly pre-op trans women - by that I mean it’s someone who looks outwardly very feminine except they have a penis.
Actually Trans?
BIT - Nicole Maines is a vampire!
Wild Zero - I cannot explain this Japanese ilm... but it has a positive message!
Buddy Boy - Sal played by Susan Tyrrell… Sal is a transwoman actually played by a chick
Soapdish - Montana Moorehead played by Cathy Moriarty
David begins gagging when it is revealed that Montana is actually a man named Milton. It's hinted strongly at the end that David was coming to terms with his own sexuality. - TV Tropes.com under Unsettling Gender Reveal
Soapdish, Ace Ventura - trope of vomiting after learning you kissed a trans woman.
Deadnaming… and using their identity to out them and ‘win’.
Transperson as villain for no reason…
Seed of Chucky - Glen/Glenda is kinda the victim and does kinda snap but that’s after their serial killer parents f*ck them up… their gender identity is a separate matter.
Omg tangent on Ed Wood. *deep breath* ok I thought JD’s portrayal was actually like Ed Wood then I watched Glen/Glenda and omfg. See this is what happens when you have a guy who constantly talks about being different but is really a cis-het white middle-class dude from Burbank who has only had success or failed up. Where is he different? When he depicts who is Other, someone who is truly not only different but could legally not be themselves, he does it in a way that comes off as mocking. Smh.
All that to say, hey, watch Glen/Glenda… and see someone in that Hays’ Code era trying to be themselves and work through their identity in an era where they literally didn’t have the language or lens to really have any deep level of introspection… only negative catharsis. (hey this isn’t ok, it’s illegal and wrong… but it makes me happy).
DUDE Ode to Billy Joe!
Doctor Jekyll / Sister Hyde - also they’re Jack the Ripper… not the first time.
The key to the formula for long life is estrogen, similar to Frankenhooker. In this case when Dr. Jekyll transforms, he becomes a woman… Hyde. And more than that the transformation is not shown as monstrous but euphoric. At first Jekyll is the killer then Hyde becomes the killer so she can remain a woman. It’s not only shown as sympathetic but she has ownership and integrity. She isn’t the final killer Jekyll is or tries to be. Though it is a gendered death, Jekyll is climbing a wall and transforms into Hyde who doesn’t have the upper body strength to hold on and falls to their death… its unintentionally kind of progressive.
Death Spa - ghost possession?
In Death Spa, David has taken to dressing as his dead sister Catherine, although not entirely voluntarily. - TV Tropes.com under Creepy Crossdresser
Freaky - body swapping
Gremlins 2: Gretta Gremlin!
Psycho Beach Party - a unique version of “man in a dress” that is progressive? It’s a 2000 movie and very Cherry Falls. So there is a killer who is killing people who are different… one might say Other (ie girl in a wheelchair, a guy who was down a body part, a dude with psoriasis, ect).
There’s a girl with DID but she’s not the killer, she’s almost a victim. It can be done!
The police officer investigating the crime is a man in drag but clearly meant to be AFAB but they are the creator of the play/screenplay and many of these roles were originally played by men in drag similar to RHPS. It’s not played for a laugh or as uncanny valley.
There are some instances when men are cast to play women for the purpose of looking visually unusual or uncanny like Zelda in Pet Semetary or Agnus in Black Christmas (2006).
But the killer is a cis-het white dude… killing people who are Other, because they are Other. That’s realistic!
Lessons:
Who are we willing to see as a victim and who do we see as a monster… who do we villainize and demonize regardless of their behavior…? But just for existing.
“the idea that a person is too mentally unstable to know themselves is an argument used against transgender and other LGBT people continually. Mental illness does not negate a person’s transness, and yet it is a talking point brought up constantly to try and convince others that trans people don’t actually know what we’re talking about.” - A Timeline of Transgender Horror by Logan Ashley Kisner. link.
These films frame trans-ness as stemming from abuse, men hating mothers, and/or as a split personality… which it is not. At all.
It reinforces negative stereotypes
It’s a trope used for shock value
Movie makers want to distance themselves from trans identity… But in doing so they remove the autonomy and identity (voice) from trans people. Doctors diagnose and analyze them - They rarely get to define themselves. And when they do, that identity is denied.
The film industry is perpetuating transphobic misinformation. It’s working as a propaganda machine for capitalism, profiting off fear of Other and a desire to maintain normative gender roles… to maintain the status quo and distance themselves from their responsibility in creating a villain who simply does not exist.
“The most notable thing about this list is a lack of evolution. It feels rare to say that a film made in 1930 has nearly identical politics to a film made in 1991 or 2012, and yet it is hard to discern any real difference between the way transgender people are depicted throughout this list. Gender is nearly always the twist, the last-minute shocker meant to solidify the film in your mind.” - A Timeline of Transgender Horror by Logan Ashley Kisner. link.
Movies that couldn’t be made today vs shouldn’t be made today.
They can cause real world harm by showing a minority in a negative light which does not reflect reality but influences how they are viewed by the audience in the real world. Thus, they are effectively helping to vilify and make folk-devils out of a harmed group.
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