Wasn’t there a huge moral panic about serial killers being trans back in the day?
Specifically male mentally ill cross dressers. They would not have differentiated between that and being trans at that point in time, but I will absolutely make the distinction now. As far as I can tell, the trope is all based on a single killer who neither fit the typical profile of a serial killer nor seemed to crossdress for gender identity reasons. Hard to say posthumously, but the evidence that he was trans is flimsy at best. His name was Ed Gein.
CW murder, gore
He “only” murdered 3 people, which is a lot, but not a lot compared to most serial killers and not a lot compared to the number of bodies he dug up and used for taxidermy and sewing materials. When they caught him, his apartment was in squalor, aside from his mother’s bedroom, which hadn’t been disturbed since she died.
The narratives that were built around him really gained legs in movies, though, and the cross dressing aspect was played up. Buffalo Bill, Leatherface, and Norman Bates were some of the most infamous fictional characters based off of him. These characters played up the cross dressing as sexual deviancy. And that let them integrate fears from other serial killers who happened to be queer in some way. They could kind of throw it all into one basket and act like it was causal and typical. Jeffrey Dahner and John Wayne Gacey come to mind.
John Wayne Gacey in particular called himself bisexual. He was married to a woman with children and stated that he’d never had romantic feelings for men. His victims were exclusively men/boys under the age of 25, many of which were gay and had run away from home. I’ve seen arguments that that pattern was more based around these boys being from a vulnerable population, which is a reasonable thing to point out.
So yeah the moral panic was constructed whole cloth by movies who understood neither queerness nor serial killers and continues to this day with books like JK Rowling’s adult mystery series.
Specifically male mentally ill cross dressers. They would not have differentiated between that and being trans at that point in time, but I will absolutely make the distinction now. As far as I can tell, the trope is all based on a single killer who neither fit the typical profile of a serial killer nor seemed to crossdress for gender identity reasons. Hard to say posthumously, but the evidence that he was trans is flimsy at best. His name was Ed Gein.
CW murder, gore
He “only” murdered 3 people, which is a lot, but not a lot compared to most serial killers and not a lot compared to the number of bodies he dug up and used for taxidermy and sewing materials. When they caught him, his apartment was in squalor, aside from his mother’s bedroom, which hadn’t been disturbed since she died.
The narratives that were built around him really gained legs in movies, though, and the cross dressing aspect was played up. Buffalo Bill, Leatherface, and Norman Bates were some of the most infamous fictional characters based off of him. These characters played up the cross dressing as sexual deviancy. And that let them integrate fears from other serial killers who happened to be queer in some way. They could kind of throw it all into one basket and act like it was causal and typical. Jeffrey Dahner and John Wayne Gacey come to mind.
John Wayne Gacey in particular called himself bisexual. He was married to a woman with children and stated that he’d never had romantic feelings for men. His victims were exclusively men/boys under the age of 25, many of which were gay and had run away from home. I’ve seen arguments that that pattern was more based around these boys being from a vulnerable population, which is a reasonable thing to point out.
So yeah the moral panic was constructed whole cloth by movies who understood neither queerness nor serial killers and continues to this day with books like JK Rowling’s adult mystery series.