As it happens, I rewatched The Silence of the Lambs last month. It seems to be one of those stories that's having it both ways:

The dialogue explicitly says the serial killer isn't transgender, but the visuals show someone male-bodied, wearing make-up, and tucking, in a way clearly intended to exploit (and therefore inadvertently reinforce) the audience's pre-existing fear of trans women.

You could say it's Cinenarratively Dissonant. Or trying to have its cake and eat it.

The people involved tried to justify this as art imitating life, based on Ed Gein, but Gein wasn't transgender. He didn't wear make-up. He didn't tuck. They clearly didn't base their character on him as much as on a group of people who :checks notes: aren't serial killers.

So what you get is a story that panders to people's existing fears of a minority group by showing a fictional character who's a serial killer who's also acting like he's in this minority group, and like his being in that group is *why* he's a serial killer.

Bear in mind most people still don't know anyone in this minority group in real life, and certainly didn't know someone who was out as such in the 90s, so this might be the first time they've seen such a person, and him being fictional won't viscerally stick in their memory.

Most people don't seem to remember those few lines of dialogue about the antagonist not being trans, but they do remember finding him scary, not just because of what he did to his victims, but because his appearance was designed to superficially resemble a trans woman's.

Incidentally, there were protests against the film's representation when it came out. What with LGBT conflation still being pretty strong then, they were protesting the antagonist appearing to be a gay man rather than a trans woman, but still.

The protesters wrote articulate leaflets, the director read them, he agreed with them, and his next film was Philadelphia.

The takehome message here is definitely not "well this guy got away with a transphobic cliché 30 years ago and no-one complained then". People did complain. He listened to those people asking him to be better. He became better. Please, become better.

Lana Wachowski said it best, and responded appropriately by co-creating one of the first positive depictions of LGBT people in mainstream movies, one of my favourite films, Bound: