One of the first thoughts I had when I was laid off this summer was thank God I won’t have to watch and engage with Ryan Murphy’s Monster: The Ed Gein Story. I’d already heard rumors that the show was not only going to tell Gein’s story but frame it alongside the films he inspired: Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and The Silence of the Lambs. As an expert on this work that popularized the trans killer trope and a filmmaker who literally made a movie about versions of Norman Bates and Buffalo Bill fucking I knew it would fall on me to write about the series. But since its announcement I felt exhausted by the prospect of having to watch and write about anything from Ryan Murphy’s current era.
While I was spared from having to watch the show, I wasn’t spared from having to hear about it from a friend. And I was surprised how upset a stupid TV show could still make me despite the many more horrible things happening right now. I guess I naively thought we’d at least moved beyond famous cis men playing serial killers in drag. Beyond perpetuating that imagery only to have an exposition scene that explains no no we’re good liberals and understand this is different than REAL transgenderism. Or if the culture at large wasn’t beyond that at least Ryan Murphy would fucking know better. It’s one thing to gain praise from Pose and then stop telling trans stories; it’s another to clock that “trans people are human beings” is no longer en vogue and return to the same transphobic bullshit that launched his career.
I don’t write about media I haven’t seen so I’m not here to write about Monster: The Ed Gein Story. But I do want to clarify a few misconceptions about Gein that the series supposedly perpetuates. Most importantly: there is zero proof that Gein ever crossdressed or wanted to be a woman or had any fascination with transsexuals including Christine Jorgensen. It’s everyone around Gein who was fascinated with us.
When I was researching for my movie, I wanted to learn more about the crossdressing element of Gein’s story and how it made its way to Psycho. I ended up on an internet loop where every article that claimed he dressed up in women’s body parts or wanted to be a woman led me to another shoddy website that led to another shoddy website. I couldn’t find any primary sources that actually held the information. What I finally discovered were quotations from psychologists at the time who saw that Gein liked to play with body parts and theorized he must be a transsexual deviant. The citations of citations of citations led back to theories put forth by transphobic and homophobic medical professionals from the mid-20th century. Dr. Edward Kelleher, the psychiatrist who is often cited as the first to comment on Gein’s possible transvestism, never even met Gein. He was just writing sensationalist newspaper articles to capitalize on the crime.
The only actual suggestion of any Buffalo Bill-style wearing women’s bodies to be a woman behavior was from an interview Gein did with a polygraph specialist. The specialist asks Gein if he did these behaviors and Gein basically says sure why not. The only problem is one of the doctors who carried out an actual psychiatric evaluation said that Gein would agree to pretty much anything. These leading questions prove nothing except the bias of the person asking them.
There’s a great article from Jump Cut magazine that discusses much of this (with proper citation) and it directly addresses the impossibility of the Christine Jorgensen obsession. While the show creators of Monster: The Ed Gein Story call Jorgensen one of Gein’s idols, that myth can be easily disproven. It comes from a shitty documentarian in the 80s whose work said that Gein had books about Jorgensen in his home. But the first book about Jorgensen (her memoir) wasn’t even published until a decade after Gein was caught. Again, this merely reveals the biases of this documentarian. It reveals nothing about Gein.
Alfred Hitchcock’s interests in a crossdressing killer date back to Murder!, a film released in 1930, years before anyone knew the name Ed Gein. With the myths around Gein and the book Psycho, Hitchcock found a conduit for a personal obsession he already had. Alas he’s so fucking good at making movies his personal obsessions often became global. But the reaction to Gein proves that the desire to link trans people and serial killers can’t be blamed on Hitchcock. While he may have popularized it on-screen, this impulse to link a woman happily returning from her European sex change and a man playing with the body parts of people he killed was pervasive in the culture. It still is.
Maybe the reason I got so upset about a Ryan Murphy show in 2025 — one I didn’t even watch! — is because recent weeks have been consumed with an effort to link trans people to violence. All it takes to blame an act of violence on a trans person is one member of law enforcement or one politician or one rightwing talking head. Whether or not the person was trans matters little once it’s been said and allowed to seep into the conversation. This is what happened with Gein and it’s starting to happen much more.
Insisting that real trans people aren’t violent is a losing argument. Some trans people do enact violence! Because trans people are people. While it’s not an epidemic like the violence of cis white men, it still does occur. I don’t know how we stop myths like Ed Gein crossdressed or the Charlie Kirk shooter was trans but insisting trans people are always non-violent can’t be the answer.
To quote the epigraphs that open my short film which at seven minutes is 436 fewer minutes than this season of Monster:
“Transsexuals are very passive.” – Clarice Starling
“We all go a little mad sometimes.” – Norman Bates
This essay originally appeared in Drew Burnett Gregory’s newsletter, In Development.
oy gvault. wasn’t on my list but i will definitely be passing on this after reading. ty for the context !
Ryan Murphy hasn’t been my go to for a long time, but good to clarify this. But what do you mean you were laid off! No!
As the saying goes, people can have fleas and lice. Not all trans people are automatically good people, just as they aren’t automatically bad people either. In my opinion, the series isn’t primarily about being trans, but rather about complex relationship dynamics and mental illness. But just as you only see red cars when you want to buy a red car, you only see trans people everywhere. If you’d actually watched the series, you might write differently about it
Omg this is such a rude comment
The article isn’t a tv show review, it’s critical media analysis, discussion of history and actual research, and a gentle plug for Drew’s short film. And guess what, when you have a marginalized and targeted identity of course there’s going to be some vigilance? Read the room.
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to suggest someone watch something before they critique it, though. Drew even makes statements at times which are incorrect due to not watching.
It is essentially a show where fact and fiction merge to the point we don’t know what’s real anymore, we just see the results based on what people thought was real. The focus is on the lineage of horror as modern entertainment post World War 2. It is quite fascinating and disturbing at times and also ridiculous at others – typical of Ryan Murphy Productions.
If Drew’s critique was based on viewing the show it would hold more weight, and that’s not meant to be an aggressive statement (at least, not from me), just an acknowledgment that that’s how things are.
“like the violence epidemic of cis white men”.. way to jump around the one and only thing almost all killers, rapists and other criminals have in common, regardless of race, religion, culture, political beliefs, class, gender, age, or anything else.
It’s always that *one* thing they all have in common, and that 100% of trans women also have in common with them: being male.
moderators please remove this comment