Your Papers Please

I like flying but I don’t like flying when you're packed liked sardines and I don’t like having to go through the TSA screening.

Flying While Trans
The T.S.A. subjects transgender passengers like me to humiliating and dehumanizing treatment.
The New York Times
By Alex Marzano-Lesnevich
April 17, 2019

Flying while transgender — a term that increasingly includes not just those who are male or female but also those who identify as both or neither, like me — is undeniably improving. Last month, United Airlines expanded its gender options: Passengers can select male, female, undisclosed or unspecified, and can choose the honorific “Mx.” “Fly how you identify,” the airline touted in its feel-good tweet — and American Airlines, Southwest Airlines, Delta Air Lines and Alaska Airlines quickly promised they’d make similar changes.

But it’s not actually possible to “fly as you identify” as long as the Transportation Security Administration screening process relies on the idea of binary gender. As the T.S.A.’s own guidelines state, “When you enter the imaging portal, the T.S.A. agent presses a button designating a gender (male/female) based on how you present yourself” — that is, how the agent perceives you as presenting yourself. This selection triggers expectations that guide the screening process. If, for example, an agent presses the pink “female” button for someone wearing boxers, an alarm will be triggered on the scanner, because loose fabric around the crotch of a female body is considered unexpectedly gender nonconforming. A compression shirt on the chest of someone for whom an agent presses the blue “male” button can do the same.
[…]
My cisgender friends did not know that T.S.A. agents judged their bodies and presentation every time they flew. They’ve never had to know. But among my gender-nonconforming and transgender friends, experiences like mine are common. In 2015, a survey of transgender passengers revealed that 43 percent had negative experiences with T.S.A. screening in the previous year.

As more states recognize a third gender will the TSA and Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) officers will they recognize the state IDs?

Look what happened down in California to a trans girl.

9-Year-Old U.S. Citizen Detained for 32 Hours After Crossing the Border to Go to School
Time
By Suyin Haynes
 March 22, 2019

A 9-year-old U.S. citizen was accused of lying about her identity and was detained for more than 30 hours by Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) officers when she tried to cross the U.S.-Mexico border earlier this week, her family said.

Julia Isabel Amparo Medina was stopped on the routine journey from her home in Tijuana, Mexico to her school just over the border in San Ysidro, California, her mother Thelma Galaxia told local news outlet NBC 7 San Diego. Medina was being driven by a family friend, Michelle Cardenas, along with her 14-year-old brother and two other children.

Medina and her brother are both U.S. citizens with American passports.

But that wasn’t good enough for the CBP officers, they could figure out that she was trans for over a day.

After questioning, Medina was detained overnight and was only released and reunited with her mother roughly 32 hours later after CBP had verified her identification.

Why did they detain her?

A CBP spokesperson told TIME that Medina had provided “inconsistent information” during her inspection,” and that she was taken into custody “to perform due diligence in confirming her identity and citizenship.” The spokesperson added that, “It’s important that CBP officials positively confirm the identity of a child traveling without a parent or legal guardian. Some specifics of our techniques for determining the true identity of a person crossing the border are law enforcement sensitive information.”

Why did it take over a day for them to figure out she is trans?

This seems to me like blatant harassment and discrimination.

And you wonder why many trans people don’t like to travel.