I guess they just don't know if they are packing heat or packing meat...Department of Homeland Security documents obtained last month reveal
details of incidents in which transgender travelers were subjected to
heightened scrutiny when passing through airport security checkpoints.
Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests netted civil rights
complaints, incident reports and internal memos and emails from the
DHS's Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties and the Transportation
Security Administration. They show that trans people have been required
to undergo pat-down searches by officers of the opposite gender, reveal
or remove items such as chest binders and prosthetic penises and defend
challenges to their gender identities and their right to opt out of
body scans, among other problems.
The screening problems chronicled in the documents confirm concerns
long held by transgender people and their supporters, like Portland,
Oregon, resident Joy, who asked that her last name be withheld. Last
year she took a long-awaited trip to Europe without her partner because
he had fears about going through security. “Since he has not had bottom
surgery,” she said, “I think the fear was, ‘What’s going to happen when I
don’t have all the body parts that they expect?’ I got home, and I
thought, he cannot be the only person that is concerned about this.”
The firsthand accounts in the TSA records include a complaint from a
trans passenger who was searched by an officer of the opposite gender at
Las Vegas’ McCarran Airport in August 2012; the traveler called the
incident “one of the most uncomfortable and terrifying experiences of my
life.”
At Louisville International Airport in Kentucky the same month, a
trans man who wore a brace around his chest missed his flight after
being selected for a pat-down screening that the subsequent complaint
described as inappropriate and exaggerated. At LAX, also in 2012,
another trans man wearing a strap-on was required to remove it and put
it through the X-ray machine despite his telling the TSA officer that
“this item is as much a part of her [sic] as a prosthetic leg or arm
would be to an amputee,” according to an email the officer wrote to the
airport’s TSA customer-service manager.
In an incident described by an LAX transportation security manager in
a July 2011 memo, another passenger at LAX told the manager she
identified as female and “if he [sic] was to be screened by a male he
would feel violated.” The manager insisted three times that the
passenger’s gender presentation was male; the passenger was ultimately
screened by a male.Feinstein said all TSA screening officers receive sensitivity training,
though it does not generally include content specific to transgender
passengers. In fact, the NCTE offered to conduct training geared toward
trans passengers for TSA officials for years but was rebuffed. Finally,
in March, Tobin began doing Web-based training for 500 to 1,000 of the
TSA’s roughly 2,600 passenger-support specialists. She expects to
complete it this summer. Travelers who would like help getting through
security may request assistance from a specialist at the checkpoint or
by calling the TSA Cares hotline 72 hours before their trip
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