The increased visibility of transgender people in mainstream media,
exemplified by Time magazine's declaration that 2014 marked a
"transgender tipping point," was widely believed to signal a civil
rights breakthrough for trans communities in the United States. In
Terrorizing Gender Mia Fischer challenges this narrative of
progress, bringing together transgender, queer, critical race,
legal, surveillance, and media studies to analyze the cases of
Chelsea Manning, CeCe McDonald, and Monica Jones. Tracing how media
and state actors collude in the violent disciplining of these trans
women, Fischer exposes the traps of visibility by illustrating that
dominant representations of trans people as deceptive, deviant, and
threatening are integral to justifying, normalizing, and
reinforcing the state-sanctioned violence enacted against them. The
heightened visibility of transgender people, Fischer argues, has
actually occasioned a conservative backlash characterized by the
increased surveillance of trans people by the security state,
evident in debates over bathroom access laws, the trans
military ban, and the rescission of federal protections for
transgender students and workers. Terrorizing Gender concludes that
the current moment of trans visibility constitutes a contingent
cultural and national belonging, given the gendered and racialized
violence that the state continues to enact against trans
communities, particularly those of color.