Amidst the indefinite “war on terror” and the ever-expanding reach of the surveillance state, Toby Beauchamp's Going Stealth is a much-needed analysis into practices of state surveillance and its impact on the regulation of gender in the United States. Situating the text within both trans and surveillance studies, Beauchamp highlights the ways society—through the state—has constructed trans and gender nonconformity as a threat to neoliberal ideas of the nation. The text asks readers to consider not just transgender bodies as unintelligible (and therefore harmful) but also anybody who is not white, able-bodied, and upper middle-class. As a Black transmasculine person whose body has flagged an airport scanner more times than I can count, I found this book an essential exploration into the creation of legitimate bodies and the policing of deviant ones. The questions Beauchamp poses are likely familiar to most trans people, and the text is one of the few that attempts to posit both of those experiences within the confines of citizenship and national identity.Going Stealth uses a trans/crip surveillance studies framework to examine the various ways that trans/gender itself is produced, regulated, and contested by the state. Beauchamp argues that nonconforming genders are the ones that obtain the most visibility, not because of their beauty or desirability but because of the inability to place a nonconforming body into a specific category. He expands this notion beyond gender by calling attention to the ways that race and ability status further complicate the gendered subject. In highlighting the ways the state grants (in)visibility to certain bodies, Beauchamp begins to unpack how state subjects are socialized to accept the conditions of privacy. Led to believe that privacy is a human right, the state teaches citizens to sacrifice privacy in order to seek safety. At the same time, the state continues to mark transgender people as dangerous, owing to our/their inability to fit neatly into expected gender/sex categories. As a result, trans people lose any right to privacy, a move the nation-state supports through claims of enhancing public safety. The text draws attention to the terrifying position that US society continues to perpetuate—that it is normal for (trans) people to be watched by someone else (those deemed normal, in this case, the citizenry of the US nation-state, which is always imagined as nontrans). As such, an important contribution of the book is to engage the reader in asking themselves what it means for safety to be equated with legibility when so many of our bodies will never be legible to dominant systems of recognition.Each chapter overlaps the tensions of trans visibility and state surveillance in the shadow of a particular national security incident. In this process, Beauchamp illustrates the ways privacy and visibility are both interchangeable in seeking validation from the state. For example, in chapter 1, Beauchamp explains how the REAL ID Act simultaneously outlines how gender (and citizenship) are regulated by requiring proof of US birth, yet for so many trans people accessing changes to correct documentation is a financial hardship and state-mandated impossibility. A document mismatch then becomes a flaggable “offense” subject to inspection and requiring proof of gender and citizenship. Even the creation of nonbinary gender markers on state IDs, intended to alleviate some of these tensions, in fact validate the state absorption of gender by codifying the very binary that caused harm in the first place. Beauchamp situates this argument alongside critiques made by scholars such as Dean Spade, who have previously brought attention to the ways mainstream LGBT activists and organizations rely on participation in state surveillance as a way to construct “legitimate” citizenship.In subsequent chapters, Beauchamp situates airport X-ray scanners, so-called bathroom bills, and the imprisonment and subsequent trial of Chelsea Manning to arrive at similar conclusions regarding state interference. Going Stealth weaves analyses of gender, surveillance, and citizenship to problematize the very nature of “going stealth.” Going stealth is contingent on a continuous ability to be legible, and therefore illegibility and nonconformity become increasingly more dangerous to the individual and to the state's hold on gender. While Beauchamp acknowledges that there has been an increase in state surveillance practices since the origin of the work, the text did not go into as much detail on these forms of surveillance. A more expanded discussion around topics such as SESTA/FOSTA (Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act and Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act), Facebook tracking algorithms, and the placing of body cameras on police officers could have furthered the analysis of the relationship between gender, race, normativity, and surveillance.In this day and age, when the person peering into our pants isn't just the curious Transportation Security Administration agent, but the government we live under, I am grateful for a text that calls attention to the ways the structures of looking are at play. Going Stealth asks the reader to question not only notions of visibility but also the very desire of recognition itself.