Going Stealth: Transgender Politics and U.S. Surveillance Practices by Toby Beauchamp

Reviewed by: Going Stealth: Transgender Politics and U.S. Surveillance Practices by Toby Beauchamp Finn Johnson (bio) Going Stealth: Transgender Politics and U.S. Surveillance Practices Toby Beauchamp. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2019, 196 pp., $24.95 paper. In 2015, I was interviewed by The Guardian for an exposé entitled "TSA Agents Who Flag Trans People Cause Trauma and Don't Make Us Safer," by Zach Stafford. In this piece, I was asked to retell my experience with TSA-related transphobia in the Portland International Airport in 2014. For transparency, I identify as a white, transgender, disabled, queer man. I was subjected to increased security screening in this TSA interaction after the millimeter-wave scanner detected an "anomaly" on my body. I was then forced to stand behind a tiny screen and remove my gender-affirming items in front of two TSA agents. In the United States, people who are seen as threats to national security based on their race, gender, disability, primary language, or bodily presentation are subjected to increased surveillance and scrutiny by the state. Such interactions with the neoliberal security state have become so quotidian for many that they no longer question the rationale of surveillance. Surveillance practices are framed as being rooted in the interest of national security and safety; however, they fuel xenophobic, ableist, racist, transphobic, and homophobic notions of citizenship and belonging. The experience with TSA was just one of many for me, and it was undoubtedly disturbing and embarrassing, but being subjected to surveillance practices is not uncommon for marginalized populations. In Going Stealth: Transgender Politics and U.S. Surveillance Practices, Toby Beauchamp pointedly argues that we must view these disturbing but seemingly quotidian (and expected) interactions with surveillance as instances that "should prompt critical analysis of the ways that gender deviance is produced, coded, and monitored not only in these spectacular moments but also in the every day" (Beauchamp 5). Through a discussion of identification documents, TSA procedures, policymaking, and Chelsea Manning's trial, Going Stealth investigates the United States' neoliberal security practices. Beauchamp's analysis of surveillance practices places race at the center of the framework through which the reader should understand how interactions with the surveillance state are usually gendered but always racialized. Going Stealth is a groundbreaking text in transgender studies and illustrates the urgent need for scholarship within transgender studies to engage with intersectional texts that center race. In Chapter 1, "Deceptive Documents," Beauchamp draws attention to a U.S. Department of Homeland Security memo where DHS uses fears of the gender transgressing terrorist to bolster their push to increase surveillance measures at airports. Fears of gender deception are so great in this country that it is impossible to view gender deception as not directly tied to notions of citizenship, belonging, and national security. Going Stealth argues that fears of gender transgression affect transgender and cisgender people alike. Drawing from Joy [End Page 220] James, Beauchamp notes that "state practices of surveillance and discipline read sexual and social deviance through racialization processes" (39). In this chapter, he uses examples of voter fraud ads, the trans panic defense, and medicalized racism to outline how fears of gender deception are not only rooted in transphobia but are deeply connected to xenophobia and racism. Hypervisibility is a crucial factor in maintaining a neoliberal security state. Critical of visibility politics, Going Stealth argues that transparency and hypervisibility from all citizens maintains the neoliberal security state and the boundary between deviant/nonconforming and good, compliant citizens. In the first chapter, Beauchamp highlights the difficulty trans people encounter navigating state by state variations in ID laws and restrictions, pointing out that notions of universalized national security are often disrupted by individual state policy. Drawing connections between the racialized history of ID documentation in the United States, for example, how ID documents were used to enforce slave patrols and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, Beauchamp illustrates how "state power might use formal identity documents to produce free or unfree subjects: documents generate a certain truth about individuals, and so they do not merely attest to one's identity but also create it" (25). Thus, the United States not only regulates but also...