This dissertation argues that fascism fixes on gender and particularly on transgenderpeople because of the special role that gender plays in social reproduction. Chapter onedemonstrates the problems with thinking of gender as an ahistorical and stable ontologicalcategory.

Chapter two argues for a rejection of pathological models of understanding genderdifference and looks at the US legislative pushes targeting transgender subjects. Chapter threeargues that celebratory gender practices like the gender reveal operate on a kind of gendernationalism, and that the violent accidents they produce are secondary to the violence of genderin general.

Chapter four shifts focus from gender to the apocalyptic and reads apocalypticnarrative as a type of instructive text. I argue that since gender happens historically, it iscurrently happening in an apocalyptic context: whether it be capitalism or life on earth, ourongoing environmental catastrophe increasingly insists that something must go.

Because fascismrises in defense of capitalism, fascists insist that transgender people are that "something. "Transgender people exert agency in how our social being unfolds.

Activities, events, andforms of life that destabilize the appearance that capitalist social relations are determined bystable and eternal constitutive categories pose a threat to capitalism. I argue that we embrace ourcapacity to threaten a profoundly destructive way of relating to others and to our world, and thattransgender ways of living and knowing can help us negotiate the apocalyptic present and formmore intentional relationships with the creative and social processes of fashioning a self.

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