The Slippery Slope and the desire for progress

This is the fourth in a series of posts discussing the Slippery Slope, how it works, and how you might be able to avoid sliding down it if you don’t want to. You can read the first installment here. I have already written the entire article in long form, if you want to read the whole thing right away.

A major factor in the ratchet mechanism is a desire for some kind of progress in our gender expression. Some trans women have a routine that they repeat over and over again in exactly the same way for years, but many of us like progress. Doing the same thing over and over again can get boring. Like the model train collector who is always buying new pieces of equipment, or the singer who is always learning new songs, we like to achieve things.

What counts as an achievement is entirely personal, and specific to the circumstances at the time. Sometimes it’s a new purchase, like clothing, shoes, makeup, wigs or padding. For those further down the slippery slope it can be a new body modification. It can also be a milestone in the development of a skill, or a social event like a support group, party or date.

These significant gender events are the most difficult part of navigating the slippery slope. Without them we can feel like we’re denying and repressing ourselves, which can lead to resentment and rebellion. But each significant gender event contributes to building the feminine identity. It also comes with a temporary increase in dysphoria, and often with the short-term impaired decision making known as the “pink fog.” The investment in our feminine identity and the increased dysphoria can in turn increase the desire for more frequent transgender expression.

This concludes the fourth installment of the Slippery Slope. You can read the next installment, or read on in the full article. On this topic, you can also read “Sunk costs and the non-transitioner” and “A Sundress for Sisyphus.”

The silence of the transvestites

Someone named AntBreach tweeted a post by Jos Truitt on Silence of the Lambs, a response to a Bitch post by Sarah Marshall. Marshall makes some reasonable points about the movie, while criticizing the essential device driving the plot: the villain, Buffalo Bill, murders women for “women suits” in an effort to satisfy his transgender desire. Truitt acknowledges and expands on Marshall’s critique, but then takes an unexpected turn, talking about beginning to “reclaim” the character of Buffalo Bill and questioning Marshall’s claim that the heroine of the book, Clarice Starling, “is, simply, good.”

AntBreach is baffled by this. He reiterates the claim made by Hannibal Lecter in Thomas Harris’s original novel (and the film) that “Billy’s not a transsexual,” a claim repeated by Marshall. He then wonders, “If you want to reduce stigma against trans people, why would you insist one of cinema’s most gruesome horror villains was trans all along?”

At this point I have to make a confession: I have never watched the entire Silence of the Lambs. Shortly after it came out, when I was still in the closet, I was invited to join some friends who were watching it on video, but after the first half hour or so when I figured out it was going to be an unrealistic fantasy about transgender actions, I made some excuses and left. I don’t care if you like the cinematography or the storytelling or the acting or any of that. I’ve never liked horror movies, and on top of that I have very little patience for hateful fiction that distorts and belittles my experience or that of my people. So fuck The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, fuck Deliverance, and fuck Silence of the Lambs.

Because I haven’t seen the movie or read the book, I’m basing this post on what other people have written. If you think any of my source information is incorrect, feel free to let me know.

The answer to AntBreach’s question is that Lecter never said Buffalo Bill wasn’t trans. He said that Bill wasn’t a transsexual – and if he wasn’t a transsexual, he was a transvestite. As Truitt points out, this is the same gatekeeping technique – sheep go to heaven, goats go to hell – developed by Harry Benjamin and practiced by the medical establishment for over fifty years. It is contemptuous and inhuman whether it is coming from Hannibal Lecter, or Ray Blanchard, or Clarice Starling.

As a transvestite myself, I am not at all comforted by the idea that Buffalo Bill wasn’t a transsexual. Transphobia isn’t the hatred of transsexuals, it’s the hatred of all of us. Marshall makes this core point by saying that Lecter’s statement “doesn’t change the fact that Buffalo Bill is depicted as a character whose queerness is inextricably bound up in murderous desire.” I wish that Marshall had also accepted that Buffalo Bill was trans, not just some unspecified form of queer.

But I’m pretty sure that Marshall is not a transvestite, and neither are Truitt or AntBreach, or for that matter Harris or director Jonathan Demme, or Lecter, or Starling, or Benjamin or Blanchard. And this gets to the problem that I have with so many of these articles: people who aren’t transvestites pontificating on who we are, what we feel, and what we do and why – or even using us as an insult to demean each other. Even Truitt’s article is problematic in this regard, reproducing essentialist narratives of gender.

This discussion raised other questions: is that really the way to deal with stigma? What should trans people do about all these horror movies? I’ll tackle them in future posts.

In the meantime, do me a favor: next time you’re tempted to write something about transvestites, try to talk to at least one transvestite and find out what we think. You can ask me, but I’m not the only one out there. And no, transitioned trans people don’t count. If you think you don’t know any transvestites, think about how many writers thought they didn’t know any gay men or lesbians fifty years ago.