Jame Gumb (known by the nickname "Buffalo Bill") is a fictional character and the main antagonist of Thomas Harris's 1988 novel The Silence of the Lambs and its 1991 film adaptation, in which he is played by Ted Levine.
In the film, Hannibal Lecter summarizes Gumb's life thus: "Our Billy wasn't born a criminal, Clarice.
He thinks of his victims as things rather than people, often calling them "it"—hence one of his most famous lines from the film, "It rubs the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again."
Gumb's modus operandi is to approach a woman while pretending to be injured, ask for help, then knock her out in a surprise attack and kidnap her.
He also inserts a Death's-head hawkmoth into the victim's throat because he is fascinated by the insect's metamorphosis, a process that he wants to undergo by becoming a woman.
Behavioral Science Unit Chief Jack Crawford assigns gifted trainee Clarice Starling to question incarcerated serial killer Hannibal Lecter about the case.
By this time, Crawford has already found out the killer's true identity and gone with a SWAT team to his house to arrest him, but they find that it is only a business address.
[5] Barbara Creed, writing in Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in the Hollywood Cinema, says that Buffalo Bill wants to become a woman "presumably because he sees femininity as a more desirable state, possibly a superior one".
[6] Jack 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 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."
[7] Filmmaker Lilly Wachowski, upon coming out as transgender to the Windy City Times in March 2016, singled out The Silence of the Lambs for "demonizing and vilifying" the transgender community in media through Buffalo Bill, alleging that Bill has served as a reference for anti-transgender attack ads portraying trans people as potential predators that target women's bathrooms.