When does a story about evil become evil itself? On Oct. 3 of this year, Netflix released the third season of its Monster series, which also includes “Monster: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story” and “Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story.” This most recent release follows the life story of infamous serial killer Ed Gein (Charlie Hunnam, “The Gentlemen”), who is notorious for having dug people up from their graves and skinned human corpses to fashion furniture. Gein grew up under the influence of a mother who taught him that the world was full of sin, but idolized her in spite of these harsh lessons. Upon her death, Gein stayed holed up in the farmhouse that they shared, and, inspired by his obsession with her, he began creating a skin suit to quasi-resurrect and, according to the show, “become” her. The series took this unconfirmed fact and ran with it, portraying Gein as a cross-dressing, transgender woman and indirectly suggesting that this was a main motivator for his crimes.
The opening scene of the season displays Gein dancing around his house, donning a skin suit, a dress and heels. The show also often depicts Gein pleasuring himself while wearing women’s undergarments, as if he is aroused by his own femininity. In the fourth episode, Gein even has sex with a woman in exchange for being allowed to wear her bra and underwear. I almost pitied him, assuming he was transgender and coping with untreated mental illness, raised by a family that didn’t support him in either transitioning or seeking psychiatric support — but I was soon proven wrong. In real life, there is absolutely zero evidence suggesting that Gein ever engaged in cross-dressing, which is a major plot point in the series. The emphasis the show places on Gein’s cross-dressing was absolutely unnecessary, then, and clearly done to dramatize Gein’s life in a way that weaponizes the transgender community.
What makes this choice even stranger is how blatantly it contradicts the show’s claim to tell the “true story” of Ed Gein. If a series markets itself as rooted in fact, fabricating such a central detail crosses from dramatization into outright deception. There is no historical record, witness account or police report suggesting that Gein ever wore women’s clothing, yet the show builds entire scenes — and its opening image — around this falsehood. It’s not just inaccurate, it’s irresponsible, especially when audiences have been told that what they’re watching reflects reality.
On the whole, the show seemed to be attempting to foster audience sympathy for Gein’s actions. He is depicted as being very weak-minded and easily influenced, taking inspiration from everything he reads and every word spoken to him. He also has a childish voice and vocabulary, which allows his character to play the “child card” and attempt to validate his immaturity. Hunnam’s acting was admittedly high-quality, but he is also a conventionally attractive man, which, historically, has only heightened the audience’s tendency to sympathize with Monster protagonists. Lyle Menendez (Nicholas Alexander Chavez, “General Hospital”), Erik Menendez (Cooper Koch, “Power Book II: Ghost”) and Jeffrey Dahmer (Evan Peters, “American Horror Story”) were also all played by conventionally attractive men in the other additions to this Monsters series, causing both the shows and featured murderers to gain popularity as people’s outlooks on these criminals became overwhelmingly more positive.
I understand that the goal of the series is to dramatize Gein’s story, as was done with every other season. Considering the gruesomeness of Gein’s crimes, however, this sympathy was an unnecessary addition to the drama. Many of the fabricated storylines not only distorted the truth but also portrayed Gein as a more morally ambiguous and sympathetic figure than he ever was, ultimately weakening the impact of his real-life atrocities. The show would have been significantly better if Gein’s acts were treated as horrible crimes and the drama came from the shock factor of his actions, as opposed to relying on half-hearted attempts to humanize him for the audience.
When a director chooses to create a series about someone who has caused so much pain and committed so many gruesome acts, it’s extremely important to neither induce sympathy for the killer over the victims nor to suggest that these actions were a result of the killer being part of a marginalized group. “Monster: The Ed Gein Story” fails on both counts. There is one singular scene in the entirety of the show that rebukes the idea of Gein being transgender: In the second-to-last episode, Gein hallucinates talking to Christine Jorgensen (Alanna Darby, “RZR”), the first woman in the United States who was widely known to have had gender-affirming surgery. He tells her he thinks he could be transgender, and she tells him that his actions were rooted in misogyny rather than gender identity. However, this was, again, a hallucination, not to mention the opinion of one singular woman — who wasn’t even actually there. This does not excuse the show’s unsubstantiated depiction of Gein as transgender, or its suggestion that his actions were tied to this identity.
When shows like “Monster: The Ed Gein Story” blur the line between transgender identity and psychosis, the consequences reach far beyond Netflix. By implying that Gein’s violence was linked to gender expression, the series reinforces a dangerous stereotype that trans and gender-nonconforming people are unstable or threatening. This portrayal doesn’t exist in a vacuum, but instead enters a world where trans people already face disproportionate levels of violence, harassment and political scrutiny. This series doesn’t just feed into existing transphobia and give viewers an easy scapegoat for their potential discomfort around gender variance, though, it also distracts from the real roots of Gein’s crimes: deep misogyny learned from his mother, isolation from the world within his farmhouse and untreated mental illness. When misrepresentation like this is openly broadcast to every Netflix watcher, it actively endangers transgender people in the present by perpetuating myths that justify their discrimination. Netflix had the opportunity to correct decades of transphobic horror tropes (two examples that comes to mind are “Psycho” and “The Silence of the Lambs,” both loosely based on Ed Gein’s crimes); instead, it revived them under the guise of “true” crime.
Ultimately, “Monster: The Ed Gein Story” highlights a recurring flaw in true crime dramatizations: the desire to entertain over the duty to inform. While it’s understandable that filmmakers seek to humanize their subjects to heighten emotional impact, doing so can distort reality and minimize the severity of the crimes depicted. By prioritizing sensationalism and sympathy over the promised accuracy, the show risks turning real suffering into a weaponized spectacle.
If Netflix truly wants to explore the psychology of evil, it should do two things: respect the victims of these crimes and ensure that marginalized communities aren’t portrayed as violent in a setting where this is simply not the case. Perhaps the true origin of modern horror is our fascination with perpetuating damaging narratives as a way to hide from the truth.
Daily Arts Contributor Lola Post can be reached at lolapost@umich.edu.
