in Her

Shoes You Must First Wear Her Skin

Written and Illustrated by Christopher Ikonomou

Content Warning: violence, rape/sexual assault

The horror genre has a transphobia problem.

I’m an avid horror fan whose apartment requires a warning to enter with all the horror villains plastered to my walls. I am also a transgender person who knows that negative depictions of my community, however unintentionally harmful, do have an impact. To understand these consequences, I will be discussing four horror films that feature transmisogynist tropes and explore how their portrayal causes real harm to the trans community.

Spoiler alert “Sleepaway Camp” (1983), “Insidious 2” (2013), “Terrifier” (2016), and “Silence of the Lambs” (1991)!

One way to discuss the effect of media on our real lives is through cultivation theory, the idea that we learn things from entertainment that we take to be reality, and as a result they inform our reality.1 For example, research such as a 2016 study found the portrayal of gender norms and rape myths (such as victim blaming) in sitcoms like “Parks and Recreation” perpetuated participants’ real attitudes towards abortion and contraceptives, especially for those who already held some misogynistic beliefs.2

So why do fictional portrayals of trans people matter? Simply put: because they’re killing us. Violence against trans people, particularly trans women, has been rising steadily for years, while hundreds of anti-trans laws are being proposed across the United States. If media has the opportunity to influence attitudes towards a marginalized group, I’d rather it didn’t equate non-cisheteronormative gender expression with mass murderers. Perhaps the most famous analogy to transness in horror is the character Buffalo Bill in “Silence of the Lambs.” Buffalo Bill is a serial killer who kidnaps and tortures women before killing them and wearing their skin. I went into this film with an open mind, only to cringe when the word “transsexual” is used several times. In addition, Hannibal Lecter, an institutionalized cannibal psychiatrist, mentions how Bill requested and was refused hormone replacement therapy and sex reassignment surgery several times. However, Dr. Lecter insists that Buffalo Bill is not “truly transsexual,” a point that’s affirmed by most horror fans when this topic comes up. If Bill’s gender is unimportant, then why is transness directly referenced in the film? Why do we watch the serial killer dance around wearing women’s clothes and makeup? If you ask those same fans, they’ll answer that it’s a detail to show how deranged Bill is, but the idea that “men dressing as women” are unhinged does not exist in a vacuum; it woman’s scalp and cut-off breasts while dancing around in an absurd performance of femininity. Why? Because men performing femininity is weird and disturbing! You’d think we could forgo the morbid drag and be convinced of implicitly links trans behavior to violence and perpetuates preexisting transphobic beliefs past the point of fiction. We’ve seen this idea come to life in cases like Sabrina Prater, a trans woman whose viral TikTok of her dancing in a run-down house led to murder accusations, Buffalo Bill comparisons, and doxxing. This transmisogyny is present in many popular horror films. In “Terrifier,” an infamous grindhouse film, killer Art the Clown wears a his irredeemability when he saws a woman in half from vulva to skull.

In less literal depictions (and by that I mean no one’s wearing anyone’s skin), there are films like the cult classic “Sleepaway Camp.” The story follows a teen named Angela at summer camp. The audience learns that she lost her family at a young age, so she doesn’t talk much. She then experiences attempted rape by a pedophile, constant bullying from fellow campers and counselors, and repeated sexual coercion by a boy, Paul. One by one, each of the perpetrators are killed in grotesque ways (‘penetration with a hot curling iron’ grotesque). At this point in the film, I’m rooting for the killer; many queer people are attracted to the horror genre because we see ourselves in the monsters, and this was a perfect example. In the final scene, Angela forced her to secretly transition because she had always wanted a daughter. (A woman who goes crazy after a man leaves and then defiles a little boy with femininity? It’s a twofer!)

Yet another example comes from the supernatural flick “Insidious 2.” In the previous installment, the leading man Josh saves his son Dalton from the film’s demon/ghost dimension decapitates Paul, but the “big” plot twist is… that she has a penis. A shocked counselor gasps, “She’s a boy!”, addressing the “head” that had fallen in her lap (but not the right one in my opinion, pun intended). We learn that her divorced adoptive mother and becomes possessed by an old woman’s spirit. We learn that this ghost is not a woman at all, but a man named Parker Crane, a serial killer who murdered 15 women. The only times we see Crane, other than as a scary ghost, are when he’s hospitalized for attempting to castrate himself and in scattered close-ups of him putting on a black wedding dress and lipstick in front of a kidnapped future victim. Similar to the plot of “Sleepaway Camp,” we learn that he grew up with an abusive mother who forced him to be a girl. It’s also implied that Crane gains sexual gratification from this ritual of crossdressing and murder (similar to Buffalo Bill). How does a boy who hated being a girl become a man who dresses up as a woman to kill women for sadistic, sexual purposes? If you think too hard, the aforementioned idea that transfemininity and crossdressing are inherently horrifying rears its ugly head.

In the end, transness is demonized. The issue becomes a positive feedback loop: writers infuse their implicit, transmisogynistic biases into their work, so viewers begin to associate transness with those negative tropes, strengthening the link between transfemininity and horror and inspiring future writers to begin the cycle again. We perpetuate the idea that trans women are predatory men wearing a woman’s appearance (her skin), like a disguise for nefarious purposes. This terror bleeds into reality, and real trans women pay the price. A 2012 study by GLAAD found that in shows with trans representation aired in the previous decade, trans characters were cast as villains or killers in 21% of episodes on every major broadcast network and seven cable networks.3

Experts like Brennan Suen from Media Matters for America trace responsibility for transphobic attacks largely to media portrayals of trans people, stating, “When you ‘otherize’ them, villainize them and portray them as criminals, it does get ingrained in the culture.”

So, horror writers, please stop using our identities as your next scare factor. If the only way you can think to make your character unnerving is making him a man in a dress, maybe go back to the drawing board.

1: Stuart Soroka, “Cultivation Theory,” (Lecture, UCLA, October 12, 2021).

2: Nathaniel Swigger, “The Effect of Gender Norms in Sitcoms on Support for Access to Abortion and Contraception,” American Politics Research Volume 45, 1 (2016), https://doi. org/10.1177/1532673X16651615

3: GLAAD, “Victims or Villains: Examining Ten Years of Transgender Images on Television,” GLAAD, 2012, https://www.glaad.org/ publications/victims-or-villains-examining-ten-years-transgender-images-television

Ronald Reagan and Creating the Conditions for Satanic Panic

Written by Mia Riedel

Graphic by Christopher Ikonomou

The Satanic Panic almost perfectly coincides with former-President Reagan’s term, beginning in 1980 and dying out by the early 1990s while Reagan’s presidency lasted from 1981 to 1989. While Reagan himself did not acknowledge the moral panic, he created the perfect conditions for it and knew how to champion himself as its hero.

Moral panics are something most people have had the misfor- tune of seeing before, especially after Donald Trump’s presidency. A familiar contemporary moral panic is the current transgender panic sweeping through the United States, one which has conservative leaders in a chokehold. This moral quandry with gender, demonstrated through such things as asking soon-to-be Supreme Court justice Ketanji Brown “what is a woman?” in her interview with Congress and the Florida Board of

Medicine voting to ban gender-affirming care for minors, exemplifies a hyperfocus on minute “issues” that are deemed out of control and in need of correction. By deciding what people can and cannot be, conservatives push an agenda of correcting what they perceive as deviant in society, forcing people to assimilate into traditional American values. One thing the political right worries so much about is these values, and of course, that worry is not unique to our current time. Reagan didn’t start the talk about gender, but he did let a disease do the talking for him, as he kept silent about the AIDS crisis until 1987, when it had already killed nearly 28,000 Americans. By willfully ignoring a disease that effected the citizens he was supposed to represent, Reagan created an ‘us’ and a ‘them’ where intrinsic qualities of a person could be the deciding factor in whether or not they were included in American ideals. Also, it’s important to remember that gay and trans liberation cannot be divorced from one another; an attack on one group means there’s soon to be an attack on the other, as both groups are viewed as sexual deviants. Facing different issues does not negate a common enemy. Nowadays, this common enemy takes the form of the rising evangelical Christian right. Of course, there has always been evangelical Christians in the United States, but social progress in the United States is typically — and unfortunately — followed by a harsh conservative backlash.

During the 1980s, the Christian right emerged alongside the Moral Majority, a conservative Evangelical lobbying group that mobilized conservatives in America, facilitating the creation of the political right we know today.

They endorsed Reagan and are largely to blame for his election, as the Moral Majority created a dichotomy between two Americas: the one they envisioned, with Reagan as a hero correcting the deviants of society, and the one without him where deviants became Americans.

Reagan rose to power at a time when white Americans felt insecure about their social status in the United States. The late 1950s to early 1970s were marked by a time of social progress; civil rights, queer rights, and women’s rights groups had made tremendous strides, such as banning racial segregation, securing the right to contraceptives, and doing away with sodomy laws. These rights not only meant the United States acknowledged the existence of marginalized groups, but that these groups were starting to become a part of American values. Through these legislative changes that improved the lives of disenfranchised Americans, conservative Americans felt as though their standing in the country had been threatened; they believed they needed to weed out what they saw as non-American values, rather than expand them to include marginalized groups.

Since these marginalized groups were encroaching on their conservative lives, they needed gan focused on crack in order to place the blame of drug abuse on people of color; white Americans used the same drug (also called cocaine), but were not equally targeted by this legislation. Believers in the Satanic Panic applied this stigma behind drug usage to their children, fearing that drugs would cause their children to fall astray from American values, becoming like the racist caricatures Reagan waged war against.

While the Moral Majority never spoke on the Satanic Panic itself, they frequently attributed American values to Reagan’s policies and condemned the same to dealt with. And that’s where Reagan Satan came in, with fears of loud music, drugs, and hippies (all considered deviant), those who conservatives, especially the Moral Majority, took it upon themselves to correct.

For example, Reagan’s unsuccessful war on drugs was mirrored by the Satanic Panic’s fear of children abusing drugs. The war on drugs became a time of racially profiling people of color and queer people with little actual progress in curbing drug addiction, as the policies of the war focused less on rehabilitation and more on criminalization. Rea- groups of people that the panic implicitly criticized. The Moral Majority opposed queer liberation and the Equal Rights Amendment (that guarenteed rights regardless of sex), thus alienating queer people and feminists, casting them into the other America — the America of the deviant minority, the sinful America. Through picking and choosing which groups to include in their morality and endorsing Reagan in their campaigns, the Moral Majority made Ronald Reagan out to be a hero that would save America, keeping it as ‘great’ as conservatives believed it once was.