also a million other characters, but i saw someone arguing silence of the lambs wasn’t transphobic the other day so that’s on my mind
Yeah I wish Silence of the Lambs had a different antagonist. From what I’ve heard, the writers didn’t intend for the movie to be transphobic because “”Buffalo Bill isn’t actually a trans woman”” or w/e, but they fucked up anyway. Clearly they did not consult any trans women during the process, or if they did then they totally ignored what they said.
Love Hannibal Lecter though. As far as I’m concerned, that movie is about him and him alone. Were there any other serial killers in the movie? I don’t remember them.
further comments redacted for being too thirstythe writers didn’t intend for the movie to be transphobic because “”Buffalo Bill isn’t actually a trans woman””
I don’t get why people even on this site have such a hard time understanding that this makes the movie a hundred times more transphobic. The portrayal of the killer is bad enough as it is, i have serious trauma from this shit, but piling all this transmedicalism on top of it, having Hannibal misgender the killer and claim that “he” actually just has some weird fetish instead of being a TRVE TRANSSEXVAL is at the very core of what makes this garbage the transphobe’s version of Birth of a Nation. What’s so hard to understand about that? Why does Hexbear have such a hard time recognizing and calling out transmedicalism?
Just in case my comment didn’t make it clear enough, I agree with you
SOTL is one of my favorite movies of all time, even with the questionable transphobic bits. The tension between Foster and Hopkins made that movie something really fucking special
Hopkins was amazing
Author Thomas Harris has come out and tried to do damage control about it, but none of his bs holds water.
I watch Red Dragon for my Hannibal fix ngl.
Its wild to me that this exists. I’ve never seen Silence of the Lambs and made the apparently foolish guess that the serial killer that eats people would me the main badguy. Shame on me.
Buffalo Bill is like if someone made a version of planet of the apes were the humans and apes team up to defeat a new dangerous mutant ape that is literally just a black dude and liberals tripped over themselves to disvow this obviously black guy’s race and call you a racist idiot for tainting black people with this monster’s sins because “they did a dna test and he was 100% ape so shut the fuck up and let me have this racist loophole.”
Relevent clip. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1QKyB_0P0E
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
The director apologized when it was criticized for being transphobic and acknowledged it was and he genuinely didn’t know better and it was the early 90s so chances are he didnt
he did stop making sense so i can forgive him
There’s whole ass youtube channels where the only thing they talk about is the transphobia that seemed to be manadatorily added to one or more episodes of every TV show series, ever.
I thought this was about the football team and got very confused
I popped into my lemmy.ml account the other day and saw three buffalo bill ‘memes’ almost immediately, one was about voting for Biden or getting trump again too, that was lovely
shoutout to the cistem
I recently lost a friend over her similar discourse around a trans woman in the persona games. And the way she talked about trans people at all if they had to do with Japan.
augh i’m sorry. which trans character, do you remember? because i don’t remember any big trans women in persona, i mostly just remember naoto (who is the rare transmasc character who gets treated as poorly as transfem characters often do)
Specifically about the trans girl in persona 3. She has a very short moment in it. And the new trans not trans girl from the new JoJos. Me “this is bad trans representation” my ex friend: well he’s not even trans, he’s just a man who dressed up like a woman to prey on children.
ohhh yeah. that really transphobic bit sucks and it brings my enjoyment of the whole game down. like the similar (but worse!) bit in the cowboy bebop movie. at least dragona in jojo’s isn’t as bad as that, but that’s a low bar. dragona is just like “ohhh this cishet guy is just getting injections to give themself boobs and help them pass as a woman because they like it in a normal cisgender way! and they get assaulted by a cop in an explicitly transphobic way, but that doesn’t make them trans!”
Right. And this ex friend just sides with the dominant narrative on those rather than listen to my lived experiences as a trans woman.
Idk sometimes I think the lack of media literacy is on purpose to help make them not have to question their preconceived biases.
yeah, if a cis person doesn’t realize it’s transphobic before it’s pointed out that’s sus, but i can maybe accept that they just never thought about it. but if they try and argue with a trans person about it, it has to be willful ignorance
It wasn’t her bad beliefs that made me stop being her friend. It was definitely that fighting and arguing that did it.
Didn’t look at the sub and clicked this expecting reactions to the Buffalo Bills playoff loss to Kansas City.
I was educating The Cis about this film on the anniversary of its stupid release. Was the valentines release date a joke?
Red Dragon has a better story and a better killer. But Michael Mann had already made the excellent film adaptation “Manhunter” so they had to go with the inferior sequel.
DO YOU SEE?
Oh shit that’s where that’s from. Was Ralph Fiennes in one of them?
In Red Dragon (2002).
I watched silence of the lambs when I was in high-school and the moment I got to the scene where Buffalo Bill puts on the skin suit I was so inexplicably disturbed I immediately shut the movie off. Looking back now thay my egg has cracked, I feel like part of why I was so uncomfortable was my own inherent transness and how perverse that scene was designed to be.
Do you see?
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a couple points:
- by this logic it is psychiatrists who get to decide who is or is not trans, not trans people themselves
- the in-universe context does not erase a male actor standing in front of a mirror in a dress saying “would you fuck me? i’d fuck me.”
- regardless of what the movie or book says buffalo bill is clearly a caricature of a trans woman. it doesn’t matter that they say buffalo bill isn’t trans, every cis person who watches the movie reads buffalo bill as trans except when they want to argue the movie isn’t transphobic
- i can’t speak for every trans woman, but i can say with confidence that a whole lot of us were fucked up by this, both because of harassment and because of internalizing the and no amount of “oh actually buffalo bill is cis and just has a fetish” will fix that. in fact, in many cases it makes it worse! transphobes generally think ALL trans woman don’t exist and just have a fetish! the idea that cis people are out there trying to get srs and must be stopped, so we need to make double extra sure that everyone who wants gender affirming care is gatekept for months or years until the all-knowing medical community lays down judgement is transphobic
regardless of if it was INTENDED to be transphobic it is undeniably incredibly transphobic, and both incredibly detrimental to public perceptions and damaging to self perception of transfem people
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why is it important that cis people not get srs? who cares? they mostly don’t want it, and if they do they should also be allowed to have it. who give a shit
Sorry, in the last point I meant to say I can’t be a judge on the process, since I don’t belong to the medical field. I hope it gets as good as possible, if that means to give surgery to anyone who asks for it, so be it, I don’t know enough to to decide.
You for FUCKING SURE do not belong in the medical field. This is the only correct thing you have said you awful fuck
Sorry, in the last point I meant to say I can’t be a judge on the process, since I don’t belong to the medical field.
Most people in the medical field know fuck all about trans people. That’s exactly the point here: Your ignorant cissie ass assumes that transphobic quacks who happen to have a degree from some clown college and still believe in pseudosciene that was debunked 20 years ago can make better judgments about our gender than us. That’s the reality of doctors making judgements about our transness instead of providing the care we request, and that very idea is transphobic to the core, you dumb fuck.
psychological assessment in several clinics where he went intending to get sex reassignment surgery determined that he isn’t trans
Clearly no trans person has ever experienced this lol
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the character still perpetuates negative image of transgender people, the intent of the author is irrelevant.
it’s literally an evil man dressing in womans clothing and killing women out of jealously. it’s basically the plot of Psycho
it’s also heavily suggesting that a doctor is the only person who can determine if someone is transgender, and not the individual themself, which might have been the prominent scientific thought at the time, but it’s a slimey feeling now considering how many trans people are gatekept from transition and dismissed because they’re faking it
Yeah, that’s why I said that part. Also, a point that is stronger in the book might just be unnoticed in the film, which is what most people know.
The part about the doctors is not that they determine being trans, but that sex reassignment surgery is not done on a whim and doctors have to be convinced that the person is trans and will not regret the decision at a later point. At least for me it gave a glimpse on the process and made a clear distinction: whatever he is or does has nothing to do with being trans.
Even a good will from the author might completely backfire, so I can’t judge about the result. I just thought his intentions do count towards judging him, separated from the character he created.
imo good will doesn’t matter when the result is so harmful
good will arguments are always such a privileged take to me
like, its incredibly important that we don’t judge the creator for the results of their work for some reason? like there’s this great need to make sure no one has the wrong idea about this particular person who just so happens to be more relatable to the commenter than the groups affected by their work? i genuinely don’t understand the motivation behind arguments like that other than because you want to re-assure yourself that if, in the future, you end up offending somebody or furthering the hurt of a minority group, you can wash your hands by saying you didn’t intend it
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no one has argued we should beat the author to death, and in fact you were the one who started defending his honor. i don’t know why you’re acting like we tried to cancel him. the final product is incredibly transphobic regardless of intent and quibbling about whether the author is a transphobic piece of shit or not (he was! it was the 80s, lots of people were!) is ignoring the actual issue at hand, which is the material harm caused by the book and its adaptation
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They explicitly state that he’s not trans in the movie as well, but yes that movie was a lot of peoples first or only exposure to the idea of gender transition and that’s probably done a lot of harm.
Explicitly claiming that a trans person isn’t trans, but instead has a weird fetish is already transphobic as fuck, it’s an integral part of what makes Silence of the Lambs the 20th century’s most transphobic work of art.
They mention it in the movie too but only briefly.
