Book Review: Terrorizing Gender

Fischer, Mia. Terrorizing Gender: Transgender Visibility and the Surveillance Practices of the U.S. Security State. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019. 282 pp. ISBN (hardback): 978-1-4962-0674-9, ISBN (paperback): 978-1-4962-3053-9.

By C.L. Quinan, University of Melbourne

Banner photo by Aiden Craver on Unsplash

Mia Fischer’s Terrorizing Gender: Transgender Visibility and the Surveillance Practices of the U.S. Security State analyzes how (some but not all) trans populations are regulated and scrutinized under the heading of state surveillance and securitization. Theoretically and methodologically, the book takes a transdisciplinary approach that combines trans and queer theory, media studies, critical race theory, and surveillance studies. Equally, it demonstrates a creative organizing framework in its use of scavenger methodology that finds valuable links between a broad range of primary sources, including news media, legal discourses, ethnography, reality television, and social media discourses.

The book is linked by three case studies, which Fischer astutely deploys to illustrate how certain gendered and racialized bodies are seen as “threats” and work to continuously construct the boundaries of “national security.” While the focus of the book is largely the United States, many of the findings can be extrapolated to other countries and regions throughout the Global North (e.g., Europe, Australia, etc.). This monograph makes an excellent contribution to a growing body of trans studies scholarship that complicates issues of visibility and challenges teleological narratives that suggest that we have somehow reached a “tipping point” that heralds in full acceptance and recognition of trans, non-binary, and gender-diverse people.

Fischer opens the book with the now-infamous Time magazine cover depicting a confident Laverne Cox and emblazoned with the words “The Transgender Tipping Point: America’s Next Civil Rights Frontier.” Now, ten years later, that 2014 magazine cover has, on one hand, proved quite naïve in its vision of a different world where trans folks are fully accepted in society. On the other hand, it has become emblematic in the field of transgender studies, with several scholars using it as the starting point for their own analysis and interrogation of teleological narratives that suggest we have somehow achieved equality and inclusion. Similarly, Fischer uses this example to illustrate the paradox that with increased visibility and representation of trans people in popular culture comes increased violence directed at trans populations, in particular black and brown trans women.

In the book’s introduction, entitled “A Transgender Tipping Point?”, Fischer lays out the stakes of the book’s broader argument that contrasts upticks in media representation of trans people with trans and gender diverse people’s everyday experiences, including how these media portrayals actually “(re)produce their surveillance and management” (6). The surveillance practices that Fischer refers to include policing, violence, and discrimination, amongst others. As Fischer writes, visibility actually creates a “double bind” and is connected to bio- and necropolitical regulation and management by the state (14).

Fischer offers a series of provocative questions that underpin the book’s argument and intervention: “What types of trans visibilities and identities are constituted as normative subjectivities deserving of national belonging and access to U.S. citizenship rights? Whose bodies and identities are rendered as deviant and thus undeserving and abject by media and state institutions?” (18). The book responds to these open-ended questions through three case studies that illustrate the dynamics upon which the book’s key arguments of visibility, media coverage, and state surveillance lie. Both Chapter 1 (“Pathologizing and Prosecuting a (Gender) Traitor”) and Chapter 2 (“Transpatriotism and Iterations of Empire”) are focalized around the case of former US Army intelligence analyst and whistleblower Chelsea Manning. After having been charged for leaking sensitive military documents and sentenced to thirty-five years in prison, Manning came out as transgender. Fischer’s concept of transpatriotism, which forms the core of the book’s second chapter, is an excellent intervention and a helpful supplement or corollary to Jasbir K. Puar’s articulation of both homonationalism and trans(homo)nationalism. Fischer’s furthering of these concepts helps us analyze who belongs and who does not, as well as who is considered a “proper” trans person and can therefore be integrated into the national imaginary.

Chapters 3 and 4 (“Blind(ing) (In)justice and the Disposability of Black Life” and “Materializing Hashtag Activism and the #FreeCeCe Campaign”) home in on the story of CeCe McDonald, who was sent to prison for manslaughter after killing the man who had assaulted McDonald and her friends. Fischer combines ethnography and social media analysis to analyze how the media colludes in state surveillance and exacerbates the daily violence experienced by trans women of color. Chapter 5, entitled “Sex Work, Securitainment, and the Transgender Terrorist,” turns to Monica Jones, an American sex worker activist who was deported from Australia because she was perceived as a threat to national security. The chapter examines how the Australian reality television show Border Security worked with customs officials at the Sydney airport to make a spectacle of Jones, effectively showing that being a trans person of color is itself perceived as a “national security threat.”

The stories of these three women are, sadly, not exceptional but instead reflect how, as Fischer writes, “certain racialized others are always already criminal” (13). Taken together they also effectively highlight how media coverage is itself part and parcel of state surveillance. Fischer provides a clear rationale for why the book centers on trans women specifically. Nonetheless, it is my hope that this approach also lays the groundwork for future research on how (and to what extent) trans masculine folks and non-binary populations may (or may not) illustrate similar and different tensions between visibility, representation, and violence.

The book ends with a short coda that returns to provocations similar to those in the Introduction, asking: “How can trans lives be seen and recognized as deserving of protections with the ability to live fully but without subjection to violent state intervention processes? How do we conceive of different modes of recognition and collectivity without falling into the traps of the visual, of bio- and necropolitical systems of valuation and economic extraction?” (179) These critical questions remind us that this work – both academic and activist – is and must be ongoing. Even in the short time since Terrorizing Gender was published, drastic and unprecedented changes (both in the US and internationally) have occurred that seek to restrict trans people’s access to healthcare, sports, the military, and education, effectively damaging the livelihood and survivability of trans and non-binary communities. By the most recent count, in the US 83 anti-trans bills have passed, with an additional 359 active bills. While 32 national anti-trans bills have also been introduced, the majority of successful bills have occurred at the state level and tend to be concentrated in right-leaning states with conservative politicians and legislators. That said, by no means should we assume this anti-trans approach will be relegated to red states, particularly with a contentious 2024 presidential election currently taking shape.

Mia Fischer’s Terrorizing Gender makes a significant contribution to a topical and urgent issue. It takes us beyond simple progress-oriented narratives that suggest we have arrived at that mythical transgender tipping point or civil rights frontier that would have heralded in social and legal equality. This approach follows in the vein of monographs like Toby Beauchamp’s Going Stealth: Transgender Politics and U.S. Surveillance Practices (2019), Eric Stanley’s Atmospheres of Violence (2021), and Aren Aizura’s Mobile Subjects: Transnational Imaginaries of Gender Reassignment (2018). Fischer’s book makes a valuable addition to scholarship on (the failures of) assimilationist and rights-based LGBT political movements. It also intervenes in broader social and cultural debates about the politics of inclusion and the politics of visibility, with the chosen case studies offering a vital counterpoint to progress-oriented narratives. It promises appeal to gender and sexuality studies scholars and students working in media studies, cultural studies, critical race studies, and surveillance studies.