I’m Leaving On A Jet Plane... Nope.

Traveling while trans you never know what to expect, it run the whole gambit from total acceptance to total hate. It makes travel an adventure that many of us try to avoid.

T.S.A. Defends Treatment of Transgender Air Traveler
By Katie Rogers
September 22, 2015

The Transportation Security Administration defended its officers’ treatment of a transgender woman on Tuesday, a day after she says she was harassed and held for 40 minutes while passing through security in Orlando, Fla., causing her to miss a flight.

The transgender woman, Shadi Petosky, said Tuesday in an interview that T.S.A. officers at Orlando International Airport calibrated the full-body scanner for a woman, and the device flagged what officers called an “anomaly” in the groin area. Ms. Petosky, a writer and producer who had been traveling to Minneapolis on American Airlines, said that the officers did not appear to know what to do once the scanner flagged her even though she had explained that she was transgender.

“The T.S.A. agents were kind of arguing with each other about process,” she said.

One officer insisted that she be rescreened, telling her to “get back in the machine as a man or it was going to be a problem,” Ms. Petosky said, but another officer said that she could not be rescanned. Instead, she said she was held in a screening room for 40 minutes and told not to use her phone, while T.S.A. officials discussed what to do. During that time, she said, she was patted down twice and her luggage was searched.

It sounds like the T.S.A. didn’t even know the procedures and they were just winging it as they went along. According to the T.S.A. they did nothing wrong,

“After examining closed-circuit TV video and other available information, T.S.A. has determined that the evidence shows our officers followed T.S.A.’s strict guidelines,” he wrote. “Supervisory personnel and a passenger support specialist participated in the screening to ensure guidelines were met.”

But Ms. Petosky troubles didn’t end there; the airline then gave her a hard time to rebook her flight that she missed.

In Ms. Petosky’s case, she missed her flight. She said that airline employees were delayed in responding to her requests for a boarding pass, sold and refunded her an upgrade, and at one point asked the police to remove her from the airport.

“The police said ‘no,’ ” Ms. Petosky said. “The police said, ‘Give her a boarding pass,’ and then they did.”

An airline spokesman, Ross Feinstein, said in a statement that the “airline immediately rebooked Ms. Petosky on the next available flight — at no charge — to Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport.”

Thank goodness for the police officer who showed some common sense.

 The Transgender Law Center has some tips for traveling trans, which doesn’t offer much hope.

The new policy presents transgender travelers with a difficult choice between undergoing an invasive touching and or an imaging scan that reveals the intimate contours of the body. Unless and until the Transgender Law Center and our partners can get these unreasonable policies fixed, transgender passengers must submit to the indignity of these searches or not travel by air.

But for the immediate future it doesn’t look good for trans people who have all their documentation changed but do not need surgery.