As the film goes on, Bill’s actions make it clear that she was not diagnosed as a “true” transexual because she’s in the category of autogynephile. This includes making a woman suit, an act of fetishizing the idea of having a female body. Hannibal tells Clarice the key to Bill’s pathology is to look at what he “covets:” the female body. The biggest confirmation, though, comes when Bill dances in front of a mirror to Goodbye Horses, wearing the scalp of one of her victims and a women’s robe that she removes to reveal her nude body, tattoos loaded with transformational symbolism, and finally that she has tucked her penis between her legs, the ultimate visualization – even more than the skin suit – of her perversion. “Would you fuck me?” Bill asks her reflection. “I’d fuck me. I’d fuck me hard. I’d fuck me so hard.” The text of the film actively paints Bill as an autogynephile, sexually aroused by the idea of herself as a woman, one of the key reasons she was rejected by gatekeepers when trying to access medical transition. And, it seems, one of those gatekeepers was Hannibal Lecter – can you even imagine?
Far from a “dodge [of] the transphobia inherent in the character,” Bill’s diagnosis is based in homophobic transmisogyny. Bill doesn’t just represent the pathologizing of trans women, but the specific pathologizing and ungendering of non-straight trans women. To accept the film’s dismissal of Bill as not really trans — and take this as an argument against the film’s transmisogyny — is to also accept that many trans women – include bi trans women and trans dykes like myself – are not really trans.
While the category of autogynephile is a construct of the medical establishment, Bill’s disturbing violence is very much representative of bigoted and hateful ideas about trans women advanced in the name of feminism. In Janice Raymond’s seminal work of transmisogynistic feminism, the book The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male (written under the supervision of influential feminist Mary Daly) she argues, “”All transsexuals [she means transsexual women] rape women’s bodies by reducing the real female form to an artifact, appropriating this body for themselves …. Transsexuals merely cut off the most obvious means of invading women, so that they seem non-invasive.” Raymond classified trans women’s very existence as an act of sexual violence against cis women, which supported the transmisogynistic feminist argument that trans women were violent men invading women’s spaces. These ideas were used by feminists to successfully exclude trans women from accessing women’s shelters and to successfully lobby to put legal healthcare exclusions in place. It is in no way an overstatement to say this work – which we have only very recently been successful in fighting – has led to the deaths of trans women.
Bill’s woman suit is Raymond’s idea that, simply by existing, trans women “rape [cis] women’s bodies” made gruesome flesh. Silence of the Lambs functions as a myth or fairy tale, telling a story that is specifically about gendered archetypes. And this tale deploys a feminist idea of trans women as the ultimate representation of male violence.
