<P> Judith Halberstam, author of Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters, writes, "The cause for Buffalo Bill's extreme violence against women lies not in his gender confusion or his sexual orientation but in his humanist presumption that his sex and his gender and his orientation must all match - up to a mythic norm of white heterosexual masculinity ." Halberstam says Buffalo Bill symbolizes a lack of ease with one's skin . She writes that the character is also a combination of Victor Frankenstein and his monster in how he is the creator gathering body parts and experimenting with his own body . Halberstam writes, "He does not understand gender as inherent, innate; he reads it only as a surface effect, a representation, an external attribute engineered into identity ." Buffalo Bill challenges "the interiority of gender" by taking skin and remaking it into a costume . </P> <P> The film adaptation of Silence of the Lambs was criticized by some gay rights groups for its portrayal of Gumb as bisexual and transgender . A Johns Hopkins sex - reassignment surgeon, present in the book but not the film (his scene was deleted and is found in bonus materials on the DVD), protests exactly the same thing . FBI Director Jack Crawford pacifies him by repeating that Gumb is not in fact transsexual, but merely believes himself to be . In the film, a similar scene is shown with Starling and Lecter in the same roles as the surgeon and Crawford, respectively . In the director's commentary for the 1991 film, director Jonathan Demme draws attention to various Polaroids taken of Buffalo Bill in the company of strippers; these are visible in Gumb's basement in the film . </P>

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