In re: TERF Wizard Lady and her new "adult" book, in re: "Silence of the Lambs," as a person who consumes a lot of serial-killer-centric media: it is striking, by which I mean fucked up, how much of that is a feature of fiction when it basically never happened RL.

Like, your basic "serial killer who wants to be a woman" model is Ed Gein, and he...didn't, really. He wanted to specifically be *his mom*, who had also taught him that men were horrible lustful evil creatures. For Reasons (by which I mean transphobia/misogyny)...

...fiction, especially 80s/90s serial killer fiction, expanded this to generic "wants to be a woman and look pretty" bullshit a la Jaime Gumb.

Note: Bloch, despite his own blind spots and the standards of the time toning down the adaptation considerably from the real case, came a lot closer to the actual thing going on with Gein than Harris did.

Also, Gein, by the standards of serial killers--certainly by the standards of the time when Lambs was written, especially certainly by today's standards--was...not that bad? Known body count is 2, plus some graverobbing. No torture or necrophilia.

By 1988 standards--we'd had Bundy and Kemper and Ramirez by then, not to mention little Chuckie Manson--there were way worse out there. Hell, Jack the Ripper did worse to more women before either Gein or his fucked-up mom were born, and a century before Lambs was written.

(Also: ALBERT FISH OH MY GOD.) The fact that three separate fiction writers seized on this particular, fairly low-rent serial killer as inspiration, and the fact that they chose the "dresses up as a woman" aspect of his crimes rather than the, IDK, chairs made of people...

...says a lot about the biases of our society.

But Harris, compared to Bloch/Hitchcock/Hooper, really made the trope grosser and more generic. (Bates, as per above, focused more on the Mom thing, and few people even remember that bit of Leatherface.)

I enjoyed reading "Lambs," though wow did Harris ever then go up his own ass about Hannibal, and the book is more thoughtful/nuanced than the movie, but yeah, that trope absolutely deserves critique, even 30 years later.

Reviving it in 2020 just makes TERFY Wizard Lady even more horrible, and also shows that she knows both jack and shit as a crime writer, in addition to generally being a transphobic trashfire.

This has been Izzy Knows Too Much About Serial Killers, Episode 67. Have a good evening.