Flying While Trans

Flying is stressful. You’re leaving the house and you need worry about if you have your passports, money, tickets and your phone charger. It is a taxing procedure with the added trusting of your life to the flight crew with a giant metal flying machine. Although there is now another worry added to our lives post 9-11, airport security and the TSA. Did you remember to bring plastic baggies? What about that scissors in the bottom of the bag. And heaven forbid bottle of water you forgot to throw in the trash.

With new procedures and demands of security comes more and more things to worry about. These are meant to target certain bodies that are deemed “unsafe” ultimately scrutinizing non-white, non-cisgender bodies. So the TSA creates new technology to instill fear in flyers. With added technology there are now giant scanners through which passengers enter and it tells a lot about what an individual is wearing, but also their “biological sex” (Airport Security, 2015). This brings an important question to the forefront, how do transgender bodies interact with this? When the machine wants to put bodies into only two categories of “male” and “female”, how do bodies that do not conform to this binary exist in these spaces. This situation is all too common for non-binary frequent flyers, like myself. Throughout the course, Gender and Culture, I have been reading pieces that try to understand gender in different lights. I will be using these sources in order to understand my experiences as a trans person. While there are few pieces that discuss the idea of “non-binary” there is an element which intersectionality and theory work to help understand the situation my body is in.

I am still figuring out my gender identity because it is complex to me as a trans person. I am an assigned female at birth non-binary transgender person. I have very broad shoulders and have very short colourful hair. This leads to me being mistaken for a cisgender man very often. Though “passing” might seem like an asset in this situation, it is not. As someone who does not have their name legally changed, or access to a way of indicating my gender on a legal document, I am thus a conundrum to airport security.

Whenever I travel, I have to go through an extra process of preparing myself. I often get caught up in what to wear for flying. Usually I wear something form fitting, like jeans, to emphasize my body and my secondary sexual characteristics. I want to read as female because it easier for when TSA agents look at my ID or passport that says I am biologically female and for me to present as female. I wear sorority sweaters because it in a way genders me. At Beloit, my sorority is open to non-binary people. Outside of Beloit, a sorority sweater is read as female. This is useful because hopefully the flowers on my shirt will help me be read as female. Also as a trans-masculine person, I refuse to wear a dress to airports or outside of Beloit for that matter. I would be read as female, the dysphoria of that experience would be much worse than the pain TSA agents bring to me in those short moments of security.

What it Means to Be Gendered Me was a piece that demonstrates similar feelings of presentation and gender identity. Lucal describes her experience as a cisgender masculine presenting woman. She talks about the idea that western culture only thinks about gender in forms of a binary: masculine and feminine (Lucal, 1999).

Gender is a social construct society created in order to make social interaction easy for people. Gender is not only how people identify in western culture, but also how people dress, talk, act and perform. When these binaries are followed and the polar norms associated with presentation are too, there is an ease of how conversation can go and what the power dynamics are at play. This can make it hard for people who can’t or do not wish to to follow these gender norms. Instead of being placed in a third box, Lucal explains that people are instead forced into a category that is second best based on how people are performing gender (Lucal, 1999).

For those like me who are often in the middle, I am often forced into a box depending on what I am wearing or where I am. In the airport, the minute the machine goes off saying there is an anomaly, the TSA agent has to place me in one of those categories in order to get the right agent to pat me down . Asking for my name is the first thing often tried because my legal name, which is “Sarah”, is gendered female. If the agent doesn’t ask me for my name, it is often them looking at my clothing to see if they can get an indication of my gender. After the agents make a decision and start patting me down, they check the areas often associated with biological sex. They pat near my beasts and my crotch to see if they can find something to indicate biological sex, which would place me into a category (Airport Security, 2015) because of the basic cultural understanding of biological sex is objective (Fausto-Sterling, 1993).

This is what happens everytime I go through the body scanner in the United States. There are some instances that stick with me, like the female agent who got assigned to pat me down who just looked at me and said “THIS?” and looked at me in disgust and refused to do the pat down and caused a scene. It was frightening and uncomfortable, but regular for me when traveling. There is a narrative of safety that leads to all of the measures that TSA puts out every year. Though safety is often viewed as a good thing in order to keep society safe, there is an automatic danger to how safety can be a form of exclusion or a way to alienate people. In fact safety is built on the basis of fearing a person or a body. When my body goes through the machine, the TSA is looking for specific indicators to see if I am a threat to safety. The TSA is trying to identify threats. My whiteness protects me. I am not seen as the threat they are looking for, I am not a Muslim or a person of colour that makes the white TSA agents think I am a threat to national security. It is an interesting dynamic of how my race interacts with my gender.

There is this idea of disgust and fear. This is how I interpret how my body is viewed by TSA. When agents are looking at who should pat me down in order to identify me, there is a look of confusion. The time the lady just refused to pat me down, that was a reaction of disgust. It is her job to protect, and if she feared me, she would not have walked away, she would of done her job. But she refused because my body is not typical or “normal” in her eyes. That was a reaction of disgust. My whiteness casts away the idea of fear. While Brown bodies are seen to be feared. Our media and national security casts its target as the Brown body and the Muslim body. Disgust comes from the inability to place me into a box, I break the rule for society and that upsets the social norm (Lucal, 1999). My body is not a threat to safety but a threat to the social code. I think there is a difference here when I tell my story and how my whiteness impacts the outcome for me.

It is interesting to compare how the narrative of safety and the perpetrator of danger is similar to the Davis piece Rape, Racism and the Myth of the Black Rapist. Society casts a view of who is the perfect victim and also who is the perfect perpetrator. In the Davis piece, the perfect victim is the white woman, while the perfect perpetrator is the Black man, and this is according to how the white American justice system works (Davis, 1983). With this it makes it seem like the police are doing their job while taking advantage of Black bodies and is a way of still oppressing people after slavery “ended” (Davis, 1983).

Thinking about airports, the perfect perpetrator is the brown body. The reason the US has the hype around security is because of terrorist attacks that get amplified by the media, and paint the terrorist as a middle eastern Islamic man, The media is not looking at whiteness as a form of danger. Thus, while the main target of TSA is not white people. I think this is important to keep in mind when thinking of my story because the agents could be crueler, I could be forced into the “backroom” and my body would not be seen with just disgust, but also fear and this could bar me from flying and take away my rights as a citizen and flyer. The narrative of safety is one designed to protect a certain body and that is the white body.

Flying is hard, flying while trans is a traumatizing experience. There is little recognition for trans people when flying and it can make these microaggressions invisible to the public. There is a different treatment of trans bodies when they go through these machines and through security. My narrative is not the only one that exists and it is not the dominant one above others. Different aspects of my identity play into how easy or hard it is for me to go through airport security. Not only does my gender interact and intersect, but so does my race. I will always be prepared when flying for the extra stages I have to go through when flying in American airports and prepare myself for the experience that is flying while trans.

Bibliography

"Airport Security." National Center for Transgender Equality, 2015. Accessed November 20,

2016. http://www.transequality.org/know-your-rights/airport-security.

Davis, Angela Y. Women, Race & Class. New York: Vintage Books, 1983.

Lucal, B. "WHAT IT MEANS TO BE GENDERED ME: Life on the Boundaries of a Dichotomous Gender System." Gender & Society 13, no. 6 (1999): 781-97. Accessed October 16, 2016. doi:10.1177/089124399013006006.

Fausto-Sterling, Anne. "The Five Sexes." The Sciences 33, no. 2 (1993): 20-24. Accessed

October 16, 2016. doi:10.1002/j.2326-1951.1993.tb03081.x.