Editors note: Spoiler warnings for “Monster: The Ed Gein Story,” “Psycho” (1960), and “Dressed to Kill” (1980).

The recently released “Monster: The Ed Gein Story” acts as a well-shot horror initiative, but uses poor taste imagery and anti-trans horror tropes to semi-inaccurately tell the story of the notorious murderer’s life.

The show was released on Oct. 3 with eight episodes as part of the Netflix anthology series “Monster”, according to an article released on the same day from Tudum by Netflix.

It debuted with high viewership at 12.2 million views in the first weekend release, according to an Oct. 7 article from The Independent. 

The promotion showed similarities to horror and thriller movies like “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” “The Silence of the Lambs” and “Psycho,” which made sense considering Ed Gein was the inspiration for the main movie characters, according to a Time article from Oct. 3, 2025. 

Across right-wing social media boards, some people have made false connections to gun violence and trans-identity, according to a July 10 article from The Trace.

It’s important to note that although cross-dressing is portrayed as a form of transness, it is not the same as being trans. 

Cross-dressing is when a person wears clothes associated with the opposite gender, while identifying as trans refers to gender identity and expression, according to an article by Grade Med.

Despite the evidence showing that transgender or nonbinary mass shooters make up less than 0.1% of defined mass shootings since 2013, according to a Sept. 17 Fact Check article.

Terms like “trans-terrorism” stem from the far right’s anti-trans trope of “Transgender Ideology-Inspired Violence and Extremism,” according to a GLAAD article.

This puts an assumption that those experimenting and queerly expressing their gender and sexuality are killers, terrorists and extremists with little evidence to back it up. 

The term and its surrounding anti-trans rhetoric are harmful to anyone who’s a part of the LGBTQIA+ community. 

 The commentary from individuals like Donald Trump, Jr. demonizes trans and nonbinary folks as perpetrators and extremists, and feeds into ignorantly made tropes about who killers are. 

According to a Sept. 22 GLAAD article, Trump, Jr. said, “I can’t name, including probably like Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, a group that is more violent per capita than the radical trans movement.”

Comments like this are certainly not shut down with shows like The Ed Gein Story continuing to add to it, although not with that intention.

Within the first minutes of the show, Gein stood wearing his mother’s clothes, masturbating.

The first thought that came to my mind was whether or not the portrayal of Gein’s cross-dressing was accurate and this continued as I proceeded to watch the show.

Cross-dressing has been around for centuries, with photography and events dating as far as the 1500s, and progressing further in comedic skits, performances, and in film and television, according to an article by The Wave on Apr 22, 2022, a student news organization of Marco Island Academy.

Gein never explicitly confirmed if he was trans or of his own gender identity or expression during police confession interviews, according to a July 2000 research essay from media journal Jump Cut. 

Gein’s portrayal was later exploited with Alfred Hitchcock’s thriller, “Psycho” (1960), in which one of the main characters, Norman Bates, dresses up as his deceased mother and adopts her mannerisms, according to a CSUMB analysis on Psycho and transgender representation in film from May 2022. 

Before “Psycho” (1960), Hitchcock had previously directed the film Murder! (1930), which also incorporated a negative portrayal of queer sexuality and expression through the use of cross-dressing, according to an essay by a student at the University of Lincoln. 

It is later revealed in the film that Bates keeps the actual corpse of his mother in the basement of a house, according to the same essay.

“The Ed Gein Story” show in Episode 2 introduces the initial pitch that Hitchcock made to the actor, Anthony Perkins, who played Norman Bates, with the scene showing the horror-oriented perspective that Hitchcock had in mind, according to the Oct 3, 2025 deep dive article published on Netflix’s website, Tudum. 

The issue isn’t particularly with how the show presented “Psycho” (1960) or brought up the theory of Gein’s experience with cross-dressing, but rather how it fed into a trope that those who cross-dress or identify as trans are killers and later helped birth films of the same sentiment. 

Director Brian De Palma’s 1980 serial killer film, “Dressed to Kill,” presents a closeted trans woman with split personalities who was denied medical transition, who then kills women out of rage and misplaced blame for her inability to transition, as said by a Crooked Marquee article from July 21, 2020. 

Between both films, Psycho and Dressed to Kill, the portrayal of trans identity and cross-dressing is honestly just one that comes off in poor taste to me, considering the current treatment towards those who are trans and nonbinary. 

The Ed Gein Story show does eventually make note that Gein thought about his gender identity after hallucinating that he was in conversation with Christine Jorgensen, an American actress and vocal artist, known for her sex reassignment surgery in the 1950s, according to the website Women & The American Story.

She tells Gein that what he is experiencing is not transness, but rather gynephilic, a man’s sexual attraction to women and or femininity, but in a more extreme manner so that he wants to be inside it, as shown with the collection of women’s skin and body parts, according to the Oct 3, 2025 deep dive article published on Netflix’s website, Tudum. 

This scene, although important in showing the attempt to dissolve the “trans killer” trope, felt to me as more of a cop out for the presentation of Gein cross-dressing, which ultimately is still a part of that trope. 

Although the show certainly told truths, the outdated and overdone trope of being a cross-dressing killer is still damaging, considering current social and political views of trans and nonbinary communities.