Thread by @NussbaumAbigail

So JK Rowling’s latest Cormoran Strike book (which is 900 pages long! WTF!) is apparently about a trans serial killer. I think we all knew this was coming, though I personally thought that lead times would put this plotline off until book 6.

This has caused people to bring up The Silence of the Lambs, which feels like an excuse to talk about my increasingly complicated feelings towards it.

(This discussion is of the book, not the film, which is a faithful adaptation but misses the book’s point in several key ways.)

Silence has been one of my favorite books since I was a young girl, but it is undeniably transphobic, unfortunately in ways that can’t be disentangled from its core theme and strong feminist subtext.

What’s interesting, though, is that Thomas Harris clearly realized that his story – a serial killer who is so desperate to be a woman that he kills women and uses their skin to make a “woman suit” – could easily be taken as transphobic.

He sets about trying to disarm that interpretation in several ways, which is not bad for the early 80s. But at the same time, his approach is rooted in the assumption that transness is something that cis people get to define and set boundaries on.

Almost as soon as Silence introduces the notion that Buffalo Bill wants to be a woman, it makes the assertion – through the mouth of Doctor Lecter, its most astute observer of human nature – that despite this fact, he is not “really” a trans person.

We’ll to get to how the book reinforces that distinction in a minute, but it’s also worth noting that in our glimpses of Bill’s own thought processes, his motivations for his horrific acts, and what he hopes to get out of them, he can only be described as dysphoric.

The woman suit is, to Bill’s thinking, his ticket to becoming attractive. He explicitly ties his pursuit of attractiveness to his desire for physical intimacy. His last words to Starling are “how does it feel to be so beautiful?”

I’m sorry, that’s dysphoria.

And while dysphoria doesn’t have to equal transness, it’s telling that the one insight we get into Bill’s psyche just happens to be the one that many trans people report. Which makes it impossible to distinguish Bill from a “real” trans person, despite Harris’s insistence.

So how do we get around that? By appeals to authority! One of Lecter’s arguments for Bill not being “really” trans is that he would have been rejected as a candidate for gender confirmation surgery. He even gives examples of the psychological tests he would have failed.

On one level, you can see what Harris is going for with this. If transness is something that you can test for, create quantifiable criteria that people either pass or fail, then it’s a legitimate condition that deserves treatment, not a dysfunction.

But not only is that not at all how it works, it puts the power to define transness in the hands of a medical institution that, in the real world, has used its hard and fast criteria to reject trans people’s requests for treatment, or force them to jump through arbitrary hoops.

When we meet a doctor who provides gender confirmation services, he is a cis man. He’s sympathetic to his trans patients – he will not, for example, cooperate with Jack Crawford’s investigation because he fears validating an anti-trans stigma – but from a position of power.

It’s this doctor who, clearly acting as Harris’s mouthpiece, makes the point that there’s no correlation between transness and violence. But he does so in such pitying, condescending terms, stressing trans people’s unhappiness, that he almost does more harm than good.

I wish I could say that you can detach these problems from Silence as a whole, but unfortunately the distinction the book draws between Bill, the fake aspirant woman, and the real women in its story, is key to the point it’s trying to make.

Silence is about the challenges of being a woman in the world. None of its female characters are comfortable in their own skin. Starling is constantly aware of how she’s looked at and judged for her attractiveness. Bill’s victims are oppressed by their unattractiveness.

Against them, we have Bill, who is convinced that he can become a woman by slipping on a woman’s skin, without understanding the challenges that women actually face – while being, in fact, the most extreme of those challenges.

I don’t think Harris intended this, but nevertheless, the connection to the transphobic argument that trans women are cosplaying womanhood, without understanding the true meaning and difficulties of being a woman, all but makes itself.

To bring this back to Rowling, one of the reasons I was surprised when she started making TERFy noises was that there had already been a subplot about a trans person in one of the Strike novels, The Silkworm, which was problematic but felt, to me, well-intended.

People have – rightly – fixated on the scene in which Strike threatens a young trans woman with being sent to jail with men, and that is definitely not OK. But on the whole the handling of this character recognizes her right to affirmation and respect.

This character, who is 19-20, is estranged from her family, and had found a surrogate father in the book’s murder victim. Then she finds out that he’s written a roman-a-clef in which a thinly-veiled version of her is described as a grotesque and a fake woman.

This is treated, by everyone who learns about it including Strike, as a gross betrayal and violation. No excuse is made for it. The victim isn’t rehabilitated from it. And at the end of the book, the girl has made a new family and is happy and supported.

For all its issues, I couldn’t understand how a person could go from this story to where JKR is now. Then I remembered its profound sense of noblesse oblige. As if Strike (and by extension, Rowling) were only granting this girl the dignity of her gender out of politeness.

This is the connection I see between what Harris did in Silence of the Lambs, and Rowling’s attitude towards trans people, in The Silkworm and today. The idea that it’s cis people’s privilege to dole out acceptance to trans people, and draw the limits of that acceptance.

Rowling’s descent into full-on transphobia, and now this new book, feel not at all unlike the storyline she gave the victim in The Silkworm. Like him, she’s written a brick of a novel with the express purpose of settling scores and revealing her ugliest prejudices.

It seems revealing of the degree to which transphobia has eaten Rowling’s brain that she doesn’t seem to have realized how her own book had skewered and exposed the very behavior she’s now engaging in.

And the trigger for this transformation seems to have been the fact that she’s not allowed to be the arbiter of transness, of where the limits of trans people’s gender identification lie. That affirmation isn’t something she gives as a gift, but something demanded from her.