Got A Flat?

Ever have a flat tire? Ever have a flat tire while crossdressed? Do you know the difference between the two? One is a hassle and the other could get you killed or arrested.

Being Transgender in Kuwait: “My Biggest Fear Is a Flat Tire”
Human Rights Watch
July 15, 2013
By Belkis Wille

On a warm evening in late April 2013, I was sitting at a Starbucks in Kuwait City across the table from a thirty-one year old woman. Even though “Reem” had undergone male-to-female surgery almost a decade earlier, legal barriers prevented her complete transition to womanhood.

Reem still wore a bulky suit and tie every day to her office to conceal the fact that she was now a woman. When she would go out as herself, she would have to borrow her sister’s ID; luckily, they have similar features.
[…]
While she [a friend of Reem] was driving home one night, Dalia had car trouble and had to pull over. A policeman pulled up and asked for her papers. On official documents, Dalia, like Reem, is a man—in Kuwait, transgendered people have no legal recourse to change the gender on their ID cards.

The policeman arrested Dalia for dressing as a woman. Ultimately, she spent eight days in prison, for the crime of imitating the opposite sex. Upon release, Dalia was ordered to pay a fine and banned from traveling abroad for seven months. “Now,” she told me, “my biggest fear is a flat tire.”
[…]
Thirty-nine of the forty transgender women who HRW interviewed for its report said they were arrested, some individuals as many as nine times. In the majority of cases, the criminal court either acquitted the individual or failed to reach a verdict.

Many of these transgender women claimed, however, that police forced them—by threat or physical violence—to sign declarations stating they would “never again imitate the opposite sex” before releasing them from prison.

Here in the U.S., many trans-people also fear having a flat, but it depends mainly where you live. Last year I had a flat tire in Massachusetts and a nice man stopped and changed the tire for me. Once before I transitioned I was going up to First Event in Boston, a transgender conference, when we had a flat tire on the Massachusetts’ Turnpike and I feared that a trucker or someone would stop and help us.


I know of trans-persons who have been pulled over for speeding and have been harassed by the police. In one case once the officer found out she was a crossdresser three other police cars arrived and all of the officers had to get a look at her. In another speeding case the officer wrote on the ticket that she was crossdressed. How many times have you heard of an officer writing down on a speeding ticket how you were dressed?

I know of someone who was crossdressed and their car caught fire one night. “He” was a volunteer fire fighter in that town and she was petrified that they would recognize her (which they didn’t); afterward we all have a good laugh over it, but at the time she was frighten that she would be the laughing stock of the town.