Abstract
From 2015, at a time when the control of the borders around and within the EU was intensified as a reaction to the increase of refugees, I started to experience being scrutinized more frequently than before. For example, it took border guards at passport control in Belgrade airport more than an hour to determine whether the passport was mine. The same happened when crossing the Hungarian border by train from Serbia at the time refugees started to travel the ‘Balkan route’ and security measures were heightened. Additionally, my passport became a problem for a short while at the checkpoint in Copenhagen, after an identity check for rail passengers to Sweden had been enforced for the first time in 50 years. What they initially had doubts about each time was my gender – due to the combination of my gender presentation, my Norwegian passport and my Swedish ID-card, which represented me as female with a male name. While gender can cause trouble in everyday life, the trouble became more acute at the border. However, it was not gender the officers were at work to control. After the scrutinizing gaze had been directed at me, my ethnicity became ambiguous in relation to the imaginary of ‘the Scandinavian’: ‘You do not look particularly Scandinavian’, I was told at the Hungarian border. Doubts about my gender led to questions about the validity of my passport, which led to doubts about nationality and ethnicity. Nonetheless, I was not stopped from crossing. After examination and negotiation, it was concluded that I was, after all, the holder of some of the most privileged identity documents in the world.
During times of perceived crisis Europe has become more mistrustful. More exclusionary migration politics have become entwined with increased surveillance measures. Resting on homonationalist progress narratives (Puar, 2007), LGBTQ rights and protections are assumed to be integral to (West) European values and are held up against alleged foreign threats, especially the perceived Muslim threat. The borders I crossed were not intended to prevent European transgender individuals from travelling. Yet at the same time, hostility and violence toward LGBTQ people in Europe are increasing, especially in Eastern Europe, but in Western Europe also.
Understanding how suspicion attaches to gender-nonconformity requires historical and contemporary conceptualizations. Toby Beauchamp’s monograph Going Stealth: Transgender Politics and U.S. Surveillance Practices is a significant contribution in this regard. It brings the changing intersections of racial, gender, sexual, national, classist and ableist categories of exclusion to the centre of the analysis of surveillance. While it focuses on the US context, the analysis of how gender-noncompliance is marked and known through other mutually constitutive categories has methodological and substantive relevance for studying other geographies.
The introduction starts with examples of how gender-nonconformity can justify heightened security from both security personnel and the general public. Beauchamp then sets out to explore how the monitoring of gender in specific moments is related to history as well as contemporary everyday practices. Furthermore, he demonstrates how practices of surveillance produce figures of gender deviance, not limited to the transgender-identified, showing that transgender people are not a bounded population.
The main body of Going Stealth is organized into four chapters, each a case study: US government regulation of identification documents; airport security, particularly the X-ray scanner; the public bathroom; and Chelsea Manning’s trial in the US for serious security breaches. Weaving together a multifaceted exploration of surveillance, Beauchamp shows how scrutiny of gender-nonconformity is linked to histories of structural oppression. Amongst others, he builds on the work of Simone Browne to show that contemporary surveillance originates in the history of technologies used to monitor racial blackness and subjugate people of colour.
A theme running throughout the chapters is how sometimes surveillance measures cite the transgender-identified while manipulating that focus to scrutinize other population categories. In other cases, the category of transgender is not explicitly named, but individuals transgressing normative gender are particularly subjected to surveillance. For example, in Chapter 1, ‘Deceptive Documents’, Beauchamp shows how the threat of terrorism in disguise was fused with gender transgression when security personnel were warned by the US Department of Homeland Security that terrorists might travel as men dressed as women. In this case, transgender-identified people were not an explicit target of the advisories.
Related to the fear of terrorism, security standards for identification documents at airports and other federally-regulated facilities in the US were heightened. Requirements of proving singular identities disadvantage transgender people. Due to administrative processes, having the same gender marker on all documents is impossible for many. Therefore, altered gender status must be evidenced with additional documents, resulting in the visibility of transgender status. Beauchamp discusses how the border between concealment and disclosure is ambiguous, amongst other things because medical and legal processes aimed at normalizing gender-nonconformity simultaneously make medical information available to state agencies. There is, then, no final escape in ‘going stealth’ – a phrase used to describe not disclosing one’s transgender status.
Responding to the effects of heightened security some transgender advocacy organizations aimed to produce legible transgender identities. Others suggested compliance by making oneself visible as transgender in order not to be mistaken as a dangerous traveller. By seeking to negotiate surveillance systems as best as possible, these activists, Beauchamp argues, failed to attend to the broader construction of illegible others. Producing the category of the safe transgender traveller relies on whiteness, economic privilege, able-bodiedness and heterosexuality. However, Beauchamp also shows how alternative transgender organizations instead of aspiring for assimilation, problematized the very way in which surveillance systems operate. For example, the Audre Lorde Project and the Sylvia Rivera Law Project based their resistance on a broader criticism of surveillance measures, including violence and racial profiling practices, positioning these issues as central to trans struggles. Beauchamp’s focus on different activist responses to heightened security ties into his overall critical examination of visibility and identity politics. The book is thus fruitfully positioned between academic and activist conversations.
Chapter 2, ‘Flying under the Radar’, roots the analysis in history by outlining how the X-ray emerged as a technology used both to harm and to heal. The interplay of race, gender and disability is examined in relation to advanced imaging technology used at airports. Beauchamp critically discusses efforts to distinguish bodies worthy of care from harmful bodies – for example disability and transgender advocates’ efforts to distinguish prosthetic genitals from the potentially ‘explosive genitals’ of the foreigner who might be the terrorist hiding a weapon in his underwear.
The focus on the relation between race and gender is continued in Chapter 3, ‘Bathrooms, Borders, and Biometrics’. Attending to the racist history of public bathrooms, the chapter outlines how gender segregation was initially introduced to protect white women. Bathrooms labelled ‘colored’ were not gender specific. The chapter discusses contemporary legislative struggles over gendered bathrooms and shows how anxieties around the transgender figure, and the criminalization of entering the ‘wrong’ bathroom, made transgender signify ‘not only the deviant or deluded transgender-identified person, but also the perverse and threatening non-transgender perpetrator’ (p. 79). The chapter shows how bathroom struggles interlink with state struggles over citizens and noncitizens, for example because of the Bathroom Bill’s focus on documentation of birth gender with birth certificate. In addition, Beauchamp looks at bathroom surveillance in the context of biometric surveillance and questions ideas derived from science about the unambiguous truth of the physical body.
Throughout, the book attends to how targeting different groups, including, but not limited to the transgender-identified, is rationalized. Regarding bathrooms, security measures are rationalized by casting some groups as endangered in the general public space, while others are cast as threats to public safety. In other words, privacy and protection for some are entwined with loss of the same for others.
Chapter 4, ‘Sensitive Information in the Manning Case’, examines how the legal defence during Manning’s trial connected her ‘gender secrets’ to her inability to live with the moral weight of keeping state violence a secret – as if the weight of being transgender had led her to ‘naïve, but good-intentioned actions’ (p. 118). However, linking the secrecy of her gender to the secrecy of her whistle-blower actions also assisted the prosecution in positioning Manning as deceptive, tapping into ideas about transgender as inherently deceptive and a threat to national security. Beauchamp scrutinizes how the structure of the trial directed attention towards revealing the ‘truth’ about Manning, which contributed to moving attention away from the crimes of the US state. Additionally, it justified surveillance over Manning through brutal treatment when she was incarcerated.
Manning’s gender identity became linked to the public portrayal of her both as criminal and hero. Drawing on scholars such as C Riley Snorton and Jin Haritaworn, Beauchamp attends to how becoming an exceptional individual was made possible by a combination of the cultural narrative of transgender identity and Manning’s whiteness. Her status as exceptional, Beauchamp argues, contributed to drawing attention away from the large, nameless group of people targeted and harmed by the US state violence that Manning herself sought to expose: ‘Guantánamo detainees, prisoners on death row in the United States, and those enduring armed conflict with the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan’ (p. 127). While Manning was portrayed as exceptional, the previous chapters have attended to how some transgender people more easily than other transgender people can occupy the role of ‘good’ and ‘safe’, because ‘good’ and ‘safe’ is related to what is understood as proper masculinity and femininity, which is grounded in ideas of whiteness, class privilege, able-bodiedness and heterosexuality.
The title Going Stealth speaks to the book’s overall focus on the relationship between various forms of visibility, protection and surveillance measures. In the conclusion Beauchamp continues to follow trajectories of surveillance into the moment of the publishing of the book, for example by discussing how intensified government repression during the Trump administration should be understood as a continuation of the xenophobia through which US borders and surveillance have always been constructed.
The book is hard to summarize due to its manifold perspectives and detailed analysis. When a topic has been examined from several angles, there are always further perspectives to bring into view. This quality makes the text dialogical, engaging the reader in reflection. One problem to contemplate is the relationship between practical politics and academic analysis, and what transgender politics could look like if it was less concerned with transgender visibility. Perhaps there are no uncomplicated answers. But the book asks us to consider how to ‘pursue new avenues of political solidarity that address the ways that legibility facilitates surveillance programs’ efficacy and demands differentiation from illegible others’ (p. 139).
Going Stealth has shown how transgender aspirations for recognition within surveillance systems do not end ongoing surveillance and often suppose that the transgender-identified are not also racialized or otherwise perceived as potentially dangerous. I finished reading the book right after travelling to Serbia in 2019. Now I had passed the passport control without any trouble. Perhaps white gender-nonconformity appeared less questionable this time, at this border, for this passport control officer. Or perhaps I was simply passing as an unambiguously white and otherwise unmarked Norwegian citizen, seemingly irrelevant to the continuous anti-immigrant and anti-refugee politics and sentiments in Europe.
Beauchamp has made clear how the production and surveillance of transgender is inseparable from the production and regulation of other categories. However, he has also shown the importance of taking transgender into account when analysing surveillance. On the topic of historical and contemporary intersections between race and trans, violence and legislation, another book particularity interesting to read together with Going Stealth is C Riley Snorton’s Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (2017). Together with this and other newly published work, Going Stealth is written into scholarship that moves transgender studies beyond concentration on identity. Moreover, it is a significant contribution to research at the juncture between gender, sexuality, race, disability and surveillance studies. Going Stealth should appeal to any scholar in cultural studies, sociology and border studies.