Abandoning Buffalo Bill: Why a Serious Paraphilia Needs a Serious Name

This year’s London Pride featured convicted kidnapper and attempted murderer Sarah Jane Baker, known for cutting off and eating his own testicles. Baker called on the crowd to “punch a TERF”, and the audience of queer+ folx whooped in response. Sadly, the jubilant mood seemed to peter out a few hours later when Baker issued a call not to punch TERFs. Perhaps his euphoria had reached some form of climax, and more sober, legalistic thoughts filled the post-climactic lull. In any event, London Pride left a whole lot of mess to wipe up.

Baker is a cross-sex-ideated man with predatory and murderous intentions towards women — a more frequent phenomenon than you might think. From where I sit, I need only drive 45 minutes to reach Limerick women’s prison, where Alessandro Gentile (“Barbie Kardashian”) is incarcerated. Gentile’s crimes include an attempt to gouge out a woman’s eyes — something which, in the eyes of the Irish Republic, has no bearing on whether he should be housed in the female estate. Cross the North Channel to Scotland and you find Adam Graham (“Isla Bryant”). Travel south from there to England and you find Stephen Wood (“Karen White”). Et cetera. This is not a new problem: transvestic murderers like Umesh Reddy and Jerry Brudos committed their crimes long before the internet-driven surge in easy-access porn, or indeed the NGO-driven surge in caring about murderers’ pronoun preferences.

When described in the media, these heinous murders are nearly always presented as coincidental to the men’s desire to cross-dress, as if these two elements are entirely distinct and just happen to turn up in the same man. Such a response is no more psychologically insightful than “some killers are Sagittarians”. In truth, however, it is precisely the desire to appropriate the envied female body that both leads the transvestic killer to cross-dress and fuels his murderous rage. As my colleague Joe Burgo puts it, he both “admires and hates the woman he can never become.”

This reality is obscured when transgender identities are presented as though they are simply tangential to a crime. It’s deceptive, and it’s dangerous. It’s also unjustifiable on grounds of safety: the public is compassionate and intelligent enough to understand that the existence of such men does not imply anything whatsoever about the fabled “all trans people”, a stick used to beat back into silence those who dare to speak up. With the media flailing, it is only due to those like J.K. Rowling, Kate Colman, Genevieve Gluck, Anna Slatz, Shay Woulahan, Paddy O’Gorman, Graham Linehan, Kellie-Jay Keen and Róisín Michaux that this specific form of criminality is being discussed at all.

They say that you can’t solve a problem until you’ve named it, and, arguably, this problem already has a name: “Buffalo Bill Syndrome”. The antagonist of 1991’s The Silence of the Lambs (based on a 1988 novel of the same name), Buffalo Bill was a composite of many different murderers, some transvestic, some not, all convicted of crimes of horrifying cruelty. Yet despite depicting such men so precisely, the term “Buffalo Bill Syndrome” is used less often than you might expect.

This may be with good reason: Buffalo Bill was a fictional character. This makes it seem like you need imagination to conjure such men. You don’t: all you need is access to Reduxx, or Trans Crime UK, or Keep Prisons Single Sex, or Paddy’s Podcast to see that these men are real. Whether you are a women’s rights campaigner seeking to protect the female prison estate from infiltration by rapists or an employment tribunal lawyer defending a client who made a social media post about autogynaephilia, the last thing you want is for this phenomenon to sound made up.

And it does sound made up. Worse, it sounds like a joke. It sounds like Woody Woodpecker Syndrome, or Yogi Bear Syndrome, or Wile E. Coyote Syndrome. It sounds like Elmer Fudd is about to appear from behind a tree. It sounds flippant. Given the urgent need to speak honestly about these men, especially in the era of self-ID in prisons, this is not a problem that we can afford.

With that in mind, I propose that we abandon the term “Buffalo Bill Syndrome” altogether, and replace it with a new term: Gein Syndrome. Ed Gein (rhymes with “mean”) was one of the inspirations behind Buffalo Bill, and is probably the most infamous of transvestic killers. Among the “trophies” the authorities found when they searched his home were various female body parts: some mutilated to create clothing; some salted. Greater depravity is harder to imagine. I could give a lot more information about Gein, but most people reading this probably have a threshold for gore which an individual like Gein quickly surpasses.

Perhaps it won’t be Gein Syndrome, and some other term will arise instead. Let that term at least be something affords this topic the gravity it deserves. Men like Sarah Jane Baker aren’t cartoons. Let’s not talk about them in cartoon terms.