This dissertation argues that fascism fixes on gender and particularly on transgender
people because of the special role that gender plays in social reproduction. Chapter one
demonstrates the problems with thinking of gender as an ahistorical and stable ontological
category. Chapter two argues for a rejection of pathological models of understanding gender
difference and looks at the US legislative pushes targeting transgender subjects. Chapter three
argues that celebratory gender practices like the gender reveal operate on a kind of gender
nationalism, and that the violent accidents they produce are secondary to the violence of gender
in general. Chapter four shifts focus from gender to the apocalyptic and reads apocalyptic
narrative as a type of instructive text. I argue that since gender happens historically, it is
currently happening in an apocalyptic context: whether it be capitalism or life on earth, our
ongoing environmental catastrophe increasingly insists that something must go. Because fascism
rises in defense of capitalism, fascists insist that transgender people are that "something."
Transgender people exert agency in how our social being unfolds. Activities, events, and
forms of life that destabilize the appearance that capitalist social relations are determined by
stable and eternal constitutive categories pose a threat to capitalism. I argue that we embrace our
capacity to threaten a profoundly destructive way of relating to others and to our world, and that
transgender ways of living and knowing can help us negotiate the apocalyptic present and form
more intentional relationships with the creative and social processes of fashioning a self.
