Thursday Essay: Meet the Monsters

We all have our blind spots, and a recent Thursday Essay brought one of mine into clear view.

"You Only Think the 'Trans' Crisis Is Over," looked at four categories of so-called transgender people: those who are genuinely gender dysphoric, male loser athletes who can only win against women and girls, un-closeted autogynophiliacs, and the sex predators taking advantage of the current political atmosphere to force their way into women's spaces — and worse. 

Even though I was mostly happy with that essay, there were two problems with it. The first is that I neglected to mention that there is often overlap between the four categories. It was in my notes, but I just flat-out missed including it. My bad.

The second problem is that my particular blind spot caused me to miss the fifth category: the monsters.

So today we'll talk about monsters — a little late for Halloween, I admit, but sometimes that's how these things work out — and that blind spot of mine. Before we get to those real-world monsters I missed, let's talk a bit about humanity's fascination with the make-believe ones, and why we might not want to wade too deep in those dark waters.

Even fictional monsters aren't to everyone's taste, but it's close. 

Monsters fill our folk tales, fairy tales, our literature, and particularly our motion pictures. 

Longtime Hollywood producer Roger Corman specialized in horror and other genre pictures, producing nearly 400 feature films during his decades-long run. Sure, Corman specialized in low-budget schlock — and pinched every penny along the way from script to the screen — but Hollywood insiders still take him seriously. Not only did he discover and nurture great talents, but “Corman never lost money on a picture," they say in awe.

That's not literally true, but it's close enough. Hundreds of movies and close to zero flops. 

And Another Thing: The directors Corman nurtured include Francis Ford Coppola (The Godfather), Martin Scorsese (Taxi Driver), Peter Bogdanovich (Paper Moon), Jonathan Demme (The Silence of the Lambs), and Joe Dante (Innerspace). Plus actors like Jack Nicholson, Dennis Hopper, Sylvester Stallone, Robert De Niro, and even William Shatner. He hired hungry unknowns, gave them creative freedom on tiny budgets, and let them prove themselves — and went on to win dozens of Oscars.

It's telling that the one film I know for sure Corman lost money on was 1962's The Intruder, which was critically acclaimed as a serious social drama, but a commercial flop. What the people really wanted was monsters, violence, and cleavage, and Corman gave his paying customers plenty of all three. Er, four, depending on how you count the generous frontal exposures. 

But I digress.

Personally, my obsession goes back to when I was three or four years old, and watching the original King Kong on a tiny black & white TV. Even then, though, horror rarely got under my skin. Instead, I enjoyed the wonderment of How did they do that?

I'd considered a career in special effects during my tween years, but could never develop the necessary artistic skills. My brain could come up with how to do it, but my hands could never make it look good enough.

And Another Thing: "Special effects" must now come with the "practical" qualifier. Without at all denigrating the artistry that goes into computer-generated effects, they just don't compare to the obsessive talent that goes into figuring out how to make something happen for real in front of a movie camera. No matter how photorealistic computer effects are, somewhere back in our lizard brains, we always know the difference. CGI often wows us, but it rarely moves us.

So imagine what a 10-year-old kid — really quite specifically me — already obsessed with sci-fi and classic Universal horror movies, thought when he saw the trailer for Alien in 1979. I had to see that movie.

I finally convinced Mom to let me see Alien, but there were two conditions: She had to see it first, and even if she thought it was OK, she still had to take me herself.

Even people who haven't seen it know the infamous dinner scene, when the alien chest-burster makes its bloody appearance right through John Hurt's ribs. Mom knew it was coming up, and put her hand on my leg to help keep me from getting too scared. But while she nearly jumped out of her seat — on her second viewing, mind you — 10-year-old me was delighted. How did they do that?

But soon after, I began to learn my limits.

My fascination with Alien led me to Swiss artist H.R. Giger, whose nightmarish works got him hired to co-create the movie's visual design, and who earned the sole credit for creating the alien, itself. 

20-mumble years ago, I finally bought a book of Giger's art, but I was careful to select just the right one. Instead of a large coffee-table book like you might expect, I found a smallish paperback from the Icon series of art books. It stays on the top shelf of our floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. I'll pull it down once every year or three, and not look through it very long before putting it back on its high shelf.

A man could get lost in Giger's dark world, but really ought not to. So I cultivate that blind spot. My fear isn't of monsters, real or imagined, but of getting too caught up in them. 

And Another Thing: The monster we love most might be Frankenstein's, with more than 200 feature film and TV takes on Mary Shelley's book, not including spoofs or loose "inspired by" takes. I highly recommend Guillermo Del Toro's Frankenstein, now streaming on Netflix. Like most of Del Toro's movies, this one is both flawed and visionary. That man rarely fails to put everything he's got onto the screen, and so the flaws are just an inevitable part of his visionary excess.

The point is that a well-written, well-researched piece of fiction can be informative in ways that plain old facts aren't. And there's something about the human mind that is both fascinated by fictional monsters and resistant to studying the real ones.

Thomas Harris, author of Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs, is one of those rare writers who understands the darkest corners of the human mind, and somehow makes them feel like places we want to revisit.

One reason Silence of the Lambs resonated then and still does — and I mean both the film and the novel — is because Harris's creation strikes a lovely balance between a strictly Hollywood monster (Dr. Hannibal Lecter) and an all-too-real one (Jame Gumb, aka Buffalo Bill).

Lecter is the kind of monster that probably exists only in fiction. He's charming, polite, engaging, and as his prison guard, Barney Matthews, told Clarice Starling in Hannibal, Lecter prefers to "eat the rude." Really, Lecter serves as the dream-outlet for our natural desire to absolutely murder the guy who just cut us off on the freeway, but with an elevated culinary expression.

Buffalo Bill, on the other hand, is the kind of creature you see on TikTok, X, and the evening news.

"Billy is not a real transsexual," Lecter tells Starling during one of their confabs in Silence. "But he thinks he is. He tries to be. He's tried to be a lot of things, I expect."

And that's where a decades-old book and film adaptation bring us right back to today's news.

When Harris wrote Silence in the 1980s, the screening process for so-called sex-change surgery — whatever you might think of its ethics or efficacy — was far more strict. In Jame Gumb's backstory, every sex-change clinic in the country turned him away. 

While Bill/Jame was fictional, that's really how clinicians handled things back then.

I'm about to take you into the weeds, but it's vital for people to understand just how much things have changed in recent years.

In the Dark Ages (I'm dripping with irony like Giger's alien dripped with goo) of the 20th century, the standards were high and the hoops were many.

Before hormones and surgery could even be considered, a person had to be diagnosed with "Gender Identity Disorder" by the then-current DSM-III (and later DSM-IV) standard. According to my paid personal research assistant, ChatGPT, that evaluation typically included:

• A full psychiatric history
• Childhood sexual development review
• Personality testing (MMPI was common)
• Screening for psychosis, schizophrenia, depression, and suicidality
• Family background and trauma history
• Sexual orientation questions (often intrusive)

Don't worry — I double-checked GPT's work.

But the sex-change determination work was hardly done. Once Gender Identity Disorder was diagnosed, then clinicians were instructed to determine whether the patient was truly gender dysphoric, or was instead:

• A homosexual
• A fetishistic transvestite
• Suffering from psychosis
• Reacting to trauma
• Seeking surgery for “secondary gain”

Falling into any of those categories, just like Harris's Buffalo Bill, generally excluded someone from treatment, and many early clinicians explicitly refused care to homosexual or bisexual patients unless they convinced the evaluator they were "straight in their target gender."

Even then, beginning with the first Standards of Care in 1979, and continuing throughout the '80s and '90s, patients had to complete one to two years of living full-time in their desired gender role. That meant:

• Dressing as the target gender
• Using that gender socially
• Changing legal documents (if possible)
• Functioning at work or school
• Demonstrating social stability

Patients were expected to prove they could function socially as the opposite sex before medical transition. But critics pointed out at the time that keeping a job and demonstrating social stability while cross-dressing and undergoing hormone treatments could amount to a Catch-22, locking patients out of the surgical treatment they believed they needed.

Yet there were still more hoops to jump through before moving from hormones to surgery. 

Getting sex-change surgery required a letter from a doctoral-level psychologist or psychiatrist, and a second letter from a therapist or another clinician, both affirming that the patient:

• Fully met criteria for Gender Identity Disorder
• Had no major untreated mental illness
• Completed RLE and hormone therapy
• Was stable, reliable, and understood risks
• Could live as their affirmed gender after surgery

Surgeons would not operate without these letters. Even then, the standards of care allowed surgeons to say "No" if someone was autistic, lacked family support, or was deemed either too masculine or too feminine to ever "pass" as their new sex.

Surgery is permanent, society could be hostile, and the patient had to prove they wouldn't regret doing the undoable.

Today, every major gatekeeping step from the older era has either been eliminated, shortened, or turned into a mere formality. But instead of taking you into another set of weeds, I'll just say this: a process that was once exclusionary due to the permanence of the result is now focused on medical affirmation of whatever social contagion happens by.

Also, Obamacare opened the financial floodgates. Something that was expensive and rare became much more common and was paid for with Other People's Money.

As a result, there are now surgeons happy to slice the healthy breast tissue from a teenage girl after little more than a consultation. There are clinicians who practically bully tomboys, awkward gay teens, or even the autistic into trendy "treatments" that leave them sterile and unable to enjoy complete sex lives. Worse, some state governments, like California's, serve as legal safe havens for this butchery.

The people who do these things are another kind of monster, aren't they?

But let's get back to the truly sick, the sociopaths and psychopaths who — like Jame Gumb — seek to become some kind of changeling. I don't pretend to know their reasons, or even that their reasons might be knowable. 

True serial killers are rare, thank goodness, but sad to say that the dangerously mentally ill are more common. And we've basically eliminated the screening process that once weeded them out.

We take those monsters, and instead of institutionalizing them, inject them with hormones, carve them up into a new variety of monster, and then weaponize them against society with laws and mores elevating mental illness — or even psychopathy — to a human right.

Monsters have always walked among us.

I cultivated my blind spot to avoid getting pulled into the darkness. Meanwhile, the real monsters slipped right past the people who were supposed to be society's gatekeepers.

Last Thursday: Kinetic Sanctions, Shadow Fleets, and the Long, Slow Bleeding of Russia