My second favorite thing to do at airports besides opting out of all biometric theft and facial recognition is thwarting TSA security’s binary gender system.
Because of an entire problem they themselves created, the system has decided that they need to determine your gender for you to go through security.
In some cases, it is because the body scanner literally has pink (“female”) and blue (“male”) buttons the agents have to press to scan you because the machines aren’t sophisticated enough to understand body parts.
Sometimes they want to know because they have decided that a cis woman can only pat down other people they’ve decided are women. Again, a whole entire gender problem due to sexism, homophobia, and transphobia that the system created.
The first agent receiving the bags is often tasked with determining the gender of the passenger. When they spot me, I can almost feel the immediate sweat emanating from their palms.
First they stare at my chest and crotch to make decisions. Of course they cannot ascertain either way, since that is not how one determines one’s gender. They do all of this as if they’re being subtle or slick. Instead, it is so blatant, ableist, and transphobic.
It is comical and dehumanizing at the same time.
I always just shake my head without saying a word and then the agents stumble because now they still don’t know my gender. They sometimes ask other completely unnecessary questions to see if they can get me to speak. And I just don’t speak. 🙂↕️🙂↔️
Many times I have witnessed the first agent make hand signals to the second pat down or body scanner agent like holding up two fingers to mean, “It’s a woman” while nodding at me to mean, “This one.”
And then when they are still befuddled because YOU CAN’T DETERMINE SOMEONE’S GENDER BY LOOKING AT THEM OR FOR THEM, they then decide that voice is how one determines gender.
A question TSA agents ask partially for them to decide what my gender is, “Do you have anything in your pockets?” Again, not slick. While sometimes they genuinely ask, I can always tell when it’s solely to hear my voice.
Remember, this is all for federal security and they are scrambling over their own gender trap.
If they are truly concerned about security, which clearly they aren’t, they could create technology that doesn’t look for genitals. They have only just begun moving toward a “gender neutral” scanning system with one button. But they’re still in a trap because of the pat-down system they have.
If they really always have two agents for pat-downs, they could start asking people if they have a pat-down preference. Or better yet, ASK FOR MY CONSENT.
And if you really still need to know someone’s gender for some reason (there is no reason this is necessary), STOP trying to get people to talk or reveal their bodies so you can gawk and guess. JUST ASK. And I still won’t tell. BECAUSE YOU DON’T NEED TO KNOW.
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