Monster creators have reignited the ‘Ed Gein was trans’ myth, whether they wanted to or not

Ryan Murphy and the team behind Monster: The Ed Gein Story, the third in Netflix’s headline-dominating true crime anthology series, were keen not to add fuel to the ‘Ed Gein was trans’ dumpster fire.

In episode seven of the new series, which dramatises (beyond recognition, some would argue) Gein’s monstrous crimes – including his conviction of killing two women, his suspected involvement in multiple other murders, and his fascination with grave-robbing, bodily mutilation, and fashioning garments and furniture out of skin – Murphy and his team make their bid to stomp out age-old suggestions that Gein was trans.

They do so through an imagined, never-actually-happened conversation between Gein and Christine Jorgensen, the first woman in the US to undergo gender reassignment surgery. “I don’t think you and I are alike at all,” Jorgensen tells Gein, following up with this didactic note: “The transexual is rarely the perpetrator of violence, Mr. Gein. We are far more likely to be the victims of violence.”

The well-intentioned aim with the scene is clear: draw a line under the narrative that has plagued both news media and entertainment media for decades, which have depicted Gein as a trans fanatical cross-dresser, and linked trans people with violence through Gein-inspired films like Psycho and The Silence of the Lambs. As a Tudum article recently phrased it, Netflix wanted to put paid to this, presenting Gein as “gynephilic — a man who’s so aroused by the female body that he wants to be inside it” rather than trans. Hence him sporting women’s skin in the trailer.

“It was really important for us to make that distinction, for us to say, ‘Look, these are two very different things,’” the show’s co-creator Brennan recently told Tudum. “And it was cool to be able to put it in the mouth of Christine Jorgensen. For him to be told that through her in his mind was a really cool moment.”

By this point in the series though, it’s all a little too late. By this point, Gein, according to Monster: The Ed Gein Story, was besotted with cross-dressing, jumping around and masturbating in lingerie owned by his mother, whom he had a complex and twisted relationship with. By this point, Jorgensen, according to Monster: The Ed Gein Story, was one of Gein’s numerous idols. For the average phone-scrolling, Netflix binger on their fifth true crime series of the week, their brains pummelled daily, with the trans = violent myth by conservative mouthpieces, the concrete has already set: Gein was what the media has painted him as since the 1950s.

It only takes one little search on the world’s hotbed of misery X, formerly Twitter, to see that this is the case. The platform, a breeding ground for right-wing, anti-trans misinformation, is full of it post Monsters. At a time where trans people are already being incorrectly demonised for the violence of cisgender men – most recently, the shooting of Turning Point founder Charlie Kirk – the colliding narratives are concerning.

“I‘m watching Monster: The Ed Gein Story on Netflix and it turns out that this serial killer did exactly what all the trans people are doing now,” writes one user. “It was all coming together that these stories are wildly related to a trans experience and I did not expect that,” adds another. A third: “Doesn’t every trans-identified male begin his ‘journey’ by jerking off into his female relatives’ panties like Ed Gein?”

Some have turned on Murphy and co for “running [with] the whole trans thing”, prompting them to turn Monsters off. Others are praising the series as “seriously ballsy” for its apparent “foregrounding dark trans themes”. Others, with a little more sense, historical context and undeniable fatigue, are fighting against the narratives Monster has unleashed, however unwillingly: “You do realize in no way shape or form was Ed Gein trans right? He didn’t cross dress. He didn’t have a fetish for women’s undergarments. None of that nonsense.”

In dramatising Gein’s story, Monsters has strayed far enough from the facts it is attempting to rectify that the water is muddier than ever.

The mythical words from Jorgensen attempt to distance Gein from trans women, but instead perpetuate the idea that he was ever interested in them to begin with. As K.E. Sullivan writes in Jump Cut magazine, via Autostraddle, the persistent idea that Gein was fascinated with Jorgensen – according to the ‘80s documentary Ed Gein: American Maniac, Gein had Jorgensen’s autobiography in his home – is greatly called into question considering Jorgensen’s autobiography was released in 1967, and Gein was apprehended a decade prior.

Even records indicating that Gein enjoyed wearing women’s attire are flimsy: a polygraph recording of Gein saying it “could be” true that he had a penchant for women’s clothes has been called into question, considering doctors reported Gein as concurring with whatever suggestions were put to him.  

So, sure, maybe Murphy and Netflix did their very best at trying to dispel the long-standing myth that Ed Gein was trans. Did it succeed? Scouring social media, that answer is probably not. Could they have done anything else to detract from the myth? We’re 70 years into it at this point, so again, that answer is probably not. One final question: given the grim social context, did any of this need to be dragged up right now?