25
votes
US Transportation Security Administration workers who are trans forbidden from performing pat down searches
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- Title
- TSA Bars Transgender Officers From Airport Pat-Downs
- Published
- Feb 7 2025
- Word count
- 394 words
Obviously, us trans people simply cannot be trusted not to sexually assault you during your, uh… checks notes government-mandated nonconsensual groping of your body?
It reminds me of the old debate about allowing women to fight in the infantry. On the one hand, yeah, of course there shouldn’t be discrimination. But on the other, do I really want to argue for more people to be part of the American war machine killing brown people in military adventures around the world?
I’m 100% for trans rights… but I’d rather see the whole dehumanizing TSA nonsense security theater apparatus dismantled, than fight to keep the status quo (but make it marginally more equitable).
I'm really not sure where to put this article. Fuck this shit.
Is this a duty that is even segregated by gender? I've only been patted down twice, and from what I remember you have a few break points in the conversation on how you want to protect your privacy and dignity, but I was under the assumption that they used whatever TSA agent that was closest to you unless you specifically request a different one.
I travel quite a lot and if I am ever told to use the RapiScan machine, I opt out because I feel it is a severe violation of our bodily autonomy and civil liberties.
This results in an automatic pat down. Every single time the agent that I have told that I have opted out, will scream across the entire security area “we got a male opt out!!!” Or something to that effect, “we need a male pat down.”
There is no request. I cannot request a woman to pat me down even if you had legitimate reasons including something like severe anxiety from being touched by men for whatever reasons.
I will say most of the agents doing the patting do ask me if I want a private area to be screened, and if there are any areas of the body that are sensitive, but even when I said my privates and my pelvis , for medical reasons, they will also state to you they need to “meet resistance” aka karate chop your crotch. I have had tsa agents ask me to remove my leg brace and not provide anywhere for me to sit while they swab it and scan it etc. I have seen them ask 80year old people to get out of their wheelchairs, barely able to stand, and then make them attempt to hold their arms over their head to be able to get scanned by the machine and fail multiple times over and over just to then have them be pat down anyway.
Eventually I purchased tsa precheck and clear and globally entry and imagine that, suddenly air travel was like a completely different experience. Sometimes you just walk through without any interaction with anyone at all…but I digress…
Here’s what I’m curious about, since they only hate trans women and never talk about trans men, are we going to get into a situation where they require trans men to be pat down by cis women ? And who is to say then that cis men, claiming to be trans men, will not request a pat down by cis women? Where does the insanity end ?
Once I was in an airport security line and an angered customer finally yelled “do you just want me to strip down naked and this point !?! I will!!!”
Also as a complete aside, not directed at you, but it feels extremely disheartening to constantly hear people(even here) say “trans people are such a small percentage of the population so it’s okay to inconvenience them in a multitude of ‘little ways’ because they should really be saving their energy for the big fights”. Like I’m sorry maybe you don’t care if you’re told that every little part of your life you should just stop fighting for - don’t join the army, don’t play sports, don’t fly. Like what the fuck. People deserve to live the life they want to live…
So what's the dirt on RapiScan? They sell the data or something? I never even considered not doing it, because it seemed non invasive. Like walking through a metal detector.
Not who you asked but I hate rapiscan. (I used to call it rape scan and I wasn't the only one using that name.
I'm a cis woman and I opted out for a few years. I still hate it. I believe they might have later made the images more fuzzy and less explicit than they were when the machines were first adopted but there were definitely many cases of TSA agents ogling passengers through the machine.
Yeah, they long ago applied a filter so they just see a gray human outline with a yellow box where suspicious things are.
Good to know.
Wow, I hadn't considered that. However, I'd rather be ogled at than gropped. I had a TSA agent pat me once 6 years ago and I have to say, I'm a little traumatized still.
Oh, so it's really accurate then? I can see why people are not okay with that, but I'm not too bothered, as it's probably more painful for them than it is for me.
The RapiScan, and all of these scanning devices, have a host of problems.
It's been a long time since I researched them, but at the beginning of their inception some of these problems, included: gross conflicts of interest that resulted in several lawmakers profiting from their implementation, highly detailed images of users with methods of downloading or sharing the images (even though they said they would not be able to do this), refusal to allow independent analysis of the safety of their devices to ensure that the devices are safe and operating at safe levels at all times..
I will never forget the TSA agent who beat a co-worker over small penis jokes following a training they had where the employees themselves had to go through the devices.
Or how about these two TSA employees who plotted to grope people.
Or how about the (rampant iPad thefts)[https://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/abc-news-tracks-missing-ipad-florida-home-tsa/story?id=17331937]
I could go on and on about the TSA, but I digress, back to the devices.
I know a lot of people shrug off the RapiScan and TSA like they are a "necessary" evil or more of a "what can I do about it?" or even "I have nothing to hide, what's so bad?" But I encourage people to resist, if and when they can. While I agree that being patted down is not better than being scanned, I feel it's important to demonstrate resistance, if for nothing more than to let them know "no, I don't approve of this". Like I said, it's a privileged position to take to resist and make an authority figure's life inconvenient, I don't expect everyone to do it, and I realize that there is a huge burden to being an advocate, especially if you are the suffering group.
Because I am trans, I get patted down relatively often now. Every time, I would get patted down by a woman, even if that entailed waiting for one to come over. Presumably this is because I mostly read as a woman.
I would have sworn that I’ve been patted down by people who present as a different gender than my own.
But this text has remained unchanged on the TSA website since at least 2017:
I believe this is one of those things that's supposed to happen, but does not, and thus is a massive fucking problem because it really causes all sorts of issues, but the general vibe is "fine sue us" which many don't have the time or money to do.
Honestly, despite what i'm sure are hostile intentions behind this ruling, I don't think it's really that much of a problem. Given the extreme small % of the population that is going to be trans and working in the TSA, just saying "it's not worth the potential issues." makes sense?
All it's going to take is one case of a trans woman groping another woman, or even making that woman feel uncomfortable, to kick off a fucking shit storm, and in some edge cases I could agree with the person being searched that it was a problem.
No, the majority trans people are not like that, yes cis women grope other women, but again when you're dealing with such a small % and it's an extremely charged situation to begin with, why is this the fight to have?
Edit- Right cis. My bad.
@TheMeerkat addressed your incorrect word usage, so other than cosigning that comment
I'm going to point out that trans men exist and are completely ignored by this conversation every single time. Non-binary people also exist.
And, why is this "the fight to have?"
This is A fight to have. Because trans people have already been told their existence "conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle." Trans people have been banned from sports. Banned from public bathroom usage in multiple states. And now the country is attempting to ban them from receiving healthcare.
All of this is about pushing trans people out of public life, out of jobs, out of living, if they can. If they cannot be trusted, are a danger to children and women.... You can see where this rhetoric goes right?
Capitulating in advance is saying that trans people's rights are not worth the fight.
Absolutely, the fuck, not.
The situation that's going to end up in court, and in the news, is when a trans woman lays hands on a cis woman who does not want to be touched by the trans woman because she does not agree that the trans woman is in fact a woman. This is just how our society views things and that's a whooole other can of worms.
So, in your opinion, if a pat down of a cis woman is required, and they bring over a trans woman, and the cis woman says "i do not feel comfortable with this, please get a cis woman", is that ok?
If your answer is anything but "yes" you're already making a bad situation many times worse. And yes, it's going to wind up on the same pile as race with "well can you ask for a white woman?" and the answer to that currently is almost assuredly no, however:
You already have TSA members sexually assaulting the people they pat down.
You already have people getting pat down claiming to be sexually assaulted just to cause problems.
You already have people getting pat down feeling they were violated even if the TSA member was completely professional and did not do anything out of line by any standard.
You already have pat downs that suspiciously focus on racial minorities and attractive women.
You already have questions over if the TSA should even be allowed to pat you down, with additional questions on the effectiveness of the entire organization as a whole (and this comes from someone who could at least see the argument that maybe some of their best successes can't be publicized, and even then thinks it's a VAST violation of personal liberties.)
So in this already controversial hotbed of possible orwellian constitutional violating rights mess, we want to draw the line and say trans people should be allowed to wade into the most sensitive part of this too? Possibly in a such a way that should the person who is being pat down disagree with if they count as a member of the opposite gender, the answer will be, "fuck you, you're wrong".
This is just political suicide from every angle. This is the sort of shit I would try to get my enemy to do to undermine them. I understand the ethical point, but this feels like "well there should be a law to make sure trans people can join cop gangs notorious for horrible behavior". It's not quite as bad but dear god it's about as close as you can legally get.
Not every fight is worth having. Not all equality comes overnight. Doubly so if you actively double down on the hardest fights for the smallest gains. Fighting for your country and proving you are just as much of a solider has MASSIVELY different optics than the notoriously politically toxic TSA.
I have a question for you in this theoretical trans woman patting down cis woman situation.
Why and how does anyone know the genders of the individuals here unless you explicitly tell people ?
This reminds me of people who are like “I hate vegetables I can never eat them and they are terrible you can’t trick me”. Then they eat zucchini bread without knowing it’s zucchini bread and they love it and then you tell them “oh btw that was Zucchini bread” and they say “I knew some thing tasted weird I actually hated it”.
If she does not know the woman is trans, how is this any different from a cis woman patting her down ?
This policy also ignores the effect on the employee in the sense that you are outing them without their consent. If you’re the only tsa employee who can’t give patdowns hmmm I wonder why…
It isn't and thus isn't a problem because this is 100% about perception.
And yes, the inverse is also true, in that there are cis women who are accused of being trans, and that's also an issue, but for a variety of mostly political reasons, not as big of one.
I guess I don't understand your viewpoint overall, it seems like, "the TSA sucks for a myriad of reasons and this isn't that big of an inconvenience to trans employees for reasons including their small population, thus they should comply to avoid the optics that will ultimately make the situation worse".
I appreciate you being willing to express and discuss the topic and mean no personal attack towards you.
Yes that is basically my viewpoint with the added "why does anyone really want to fight for the right to abuse the rights of others?"
With the plethora of rights trans people are being denied, not having the equal opportunity to infringe on the rights of others seems like it should be very low on the list, especially when it's an easy easy area for accusations of sexual assault to get thrown around, and feed the fire of paranoia.
For what it's worth, I would gladly do away with the entire shoes and pat down ritual at airports.
And in the context of political campaigns, you make some valid points. But we are not in campaign season.
I thought it was worth raising awareness that the fed government was formally and explicitly excluding trans women for reasons that Definitelynotafae alluded to. Trans people are a scapegoat for the right and that in history has led to atrocities.
On a more general level, rape and sexual assault are both a huge problem women and some men suffer from predators but also a propaganda tool used by the right. Emmett Til
was lynched because of an unfounded sexual accusation, that happened in the context of fear and propaganda about the risk of black men raping white women.
And this prohibition is likely to make a trans tsa employees gender nonconformity top of mind to their coworkers and create friction in the work place. That can make it more likely that there will be bullying from coworkers or supervisors.
Our TSA process is a bad one. The solution to that isn't to ban trans employees from doing the same job in the name of following a discriminatory court order.
They are explicitly taking rights away from trans people and calling trans women in particular dangerous to the safety of cis women. "Equality doesn't come overnight" is bullshit, this is the revocation of equality, that we shouldn't be letting slide because you don't like their employer.
You made the comparison to requesting a white woman but ignored that you could make every single piece of your argument substituting black women for trans women, or hijabi women, or any number of categories. What about queer cis women, or gay men patting down their gender, people could get upset about that too!
This isn't about whether you start letting trans people do a thing, this is whether you should stop letting trans people do a thing they've been doing. Whether stripping a small number of people of equal treatment is "worth" arguing about because the "optics" are bad. You say being a soldier is different, but you could as easily that we're actually protecting trans people from participating in colonialist violence in inevitably invading a sovereign territory, killing civilians and migrants, and perpetuating American hegemony over the world? It sounds like we should "protect" women from that too, or so our Secretary of Defense thinks. But it's fine if cis men die apparently.
You are arguing that because society will persecute trans people as a group for the actions of one, we should pre-emptively punish them all, to what, protect trans women? Those trans employees are now outed to their coworkers and bosses, because they'll be in trouble if they don't identify themselves as someone who cannot do that task.
I can hate the loss of civil liberties that is the day to day of the TSA and also not support perpetuating transphobia (and sexism and racism, etc.) Trans people are not being targeted because of optics but because they're being considered a threat to cis women and children. That's an unacceptable reasoning, and you're buying into it. Which other groups do you feel it's a bad "fight" to protect their rights?
Women/Jews/Muslims shouldn't want to work for the TSA anyway because why would anyone fight for their right to participate in this horrible job?
Prisoners did do crimes after all, so we shouldn't care about their human rights? Trans prisoners should suck it up, because it just takes one to make a news story.
Can't Muslims just work in Muslim owned businesses; it only takes one of them to be a terrorist and so we shouldn't fight against religious discrimination.
Doesn't the back of the bus get there at the same time as the front?
I mean soon it'll have to be that trans people can't work, because they can't use a public toilet.
So, no, as I said, Absolutely, The Fuck, Not.
We don't brush off the outing of trans people, we don't sacrifice trans rights at the altar of "but what if," we don't argue that the job is bad so they shouldn't want to do it anyway as if we will do anything to eliminate the TSA. The speed at which trans people have been absolutely chucked under the bus by "allies" is disgusting and has, along with rampant ableism, been a warning signal for the present for years. This is not a thought exercise.
I’m not going to go into this other than to say I don’t think you’re fairly assessing my point.
I’m not saying this is fair or ok.
I’m saying of ALL the things to fight right now for trans rights, this is not the battle to take
I fully disagree with your point. Whether you think that's fair is your call to make not mine. But I think I fairly considered whether we should deny any rights to anyone because the TSA is bad.
I'm saying that we don't need to say "this isn't the battle to fight". We're not in court. We're not the ACLU. We're not Lamda Legal making decisions about what suit to file next and having to pick and choose (and frankly the TSA union should actually sue.) We can talk about multiple things that are bad.
We don't need to give an inch to them because we're not in that strategy. We're the voices that our friends see. That trans people on this site and in a Google search see. Trans folks don't need to see everyone else saying "it's fine to lose this right, because fighting over it is bad vibes, but I swear we'll care about the next one." Because they've lost multiple rights in the past 3 weeks. And because it's just wrong.
Even if this one impacts a small number of people, so did sports participation. And from the wrong point of view all trans folks are only a "small number" and that's why they're scapegoats and have been as this has ramped up over 8 years.
Because every single argument you made about trans women TSA officers could be made about queer people, Muslim people, Black people, in that same job. Would you make this same argument if that action was what was being banned? That's why I asked about trans prisoners or prisoners in general?
Because as a non-binary person I take both the argument that this is not a big deal and your use of "actual women" very personally. But I did "consider it fairly." My fair assessment is that it's a bad argument that cedes ground to people who will take every inch since they want to take it all. And I will not let the trans women in my life in particular catch me saying "not the worst" because I don't like the TSA.
If you're not going to engage with anything I actually say and just accuse me of bad faith, I'll maintain that you're not "fairly" considering my points either. But we should not be blasé about the revocation of any rights to anyone. Even if we can imagine a single TSA agent could maybe do something wrong and be a disaster. If you're in charge of a unified legal strategy for trans rights, I'd say probably stop talking about it online, but you'd maybe have a point in that very niche circumstance. It'd still be a shitty thing to post.
Fairly considered I remain, Absolutely, the fuck, not
The, uh, the word you’re looking for is cis. “Actual women” is not the… kindest way to communicate what you meant there.
Thank you
Apologies for the meta comment, but can we use sources that are at least somewhat more moderate? Browsing through the Wikipedia page for Newsmax should be proof enough of how right-wing they lean.
At the time I posted it, only far right sources were reporting it.
They were bragging to their readers, but it seemed important to share. If someone wants to substitute sources, that's their prerogative.
Unfortunately you are correct. I hope my comment didn't come off as aggressive or anything, I'd just rather not provide any ounce of support to these organizations. (In this case, through ads on their site and/or adding to their view metrics.)
Perhaps the best we can do is directly link to the "talking points" document that was linked in the Newsmax article (and is hosted by them).