Today, I am a man.
Jul. 4th, 2009 01:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
timThe scene: Midway Airport, about 1:20 PM on Independence Day 2009.
I walk up to the TSA worker in the "Expert Traveler" line and show my driver's license and boarding pass. She shines the little purple light on it that presumably lights up with the letters "tErRoRiSt" at appropriate times. She hesitates.
She calls one of her colleagues over and they turn away from me, holding my ID and boarding pass and whispering.
I know what it's about. It's never happened to me before, but for a year and a half, my license has said "Chevalier, Timothy Jan" underneath the picture and "F" underneath where it says "sex". It was just a matter of time. I hear one of them whispering to the other "it's one of the things they tell us to look for..." and the other says "...but we're not allowed to ask them..."
She asks me to step over to the desk on the side. A third guy comes up and asks me whether I prefer "Mr." or "Mrs." Choosing for now not to point out the incompleteness of his list, I said "Mr." He looks almost as if he's expecting me to explain, but I don't think I need to explain anything. "But it says here..." I may have cocked an eyebrow at this point. "Is it an error?" "No." [pause] "It's my legal sex." (In retrospect, I shouldn't even have volunteered that.)
"Do you have a previous name you used?" he asks me. I was on the verge of answering, and then the voice in my head said, "Fuck, you don't have to answer that question." I asked "Are you allowed to ask that question?" He said they had to verify my ID. I asked if there was a supervisor I could talk to. He said he was the supervisor -- wrong answer.
After asking me how I say my middle name, he asked me to sit on the window ledge while they waited for a fourth person to come. He asked me if I had another ID. I gave him my Portland State ID.
Fourth person came. "Is it an error?" "It's not an error." "Well, because it says 'F' but you said you prefer 'Mister'..." (Well, what? I think.) I didn't say anything. She and the "supervisor" looked at each other. She said "I think it's okay" and shrugged. She walked away.
The "supervisor" gave me back my IDs. He asked me whether I'd ever had a problem before. I said "no", truthfully. He said "well, you should have that error corrected." (I'd said it wasn't an error, twice.) I said that legally, it was impossible for me to change it. I'm not sure what he thought. He let me go through security.
I was lying when I said it was impossible -- in Oregon, your driver's license can have whatever gender marker you like (as long as it's "M" or "F") as long as you get a letter from a DMV-approved therapist affirming that your gender is really what you think it is.
Read that again: "DMV-approved therapist".
I don't want to give my tacit approval to a system that says it's the state (and its approved therapists), not me, that knows what sex my brain expects my body to be. If I don't change my mind about that, I'd better start budgeting an extra half an hour when I go to the airport.
I think it's important to stand up for your rights. I like an opportunity to kick ass and take names as much as any other guy does. That doesn't mean I relish the threat of public humiliation. I was shaking when I got to the place for taking my boots off and my laptop out.
I have multiple friends (some who are trans, some who are cis) who've been strip-searched for less.
I'm going to Europe in two months. Getting the gender marker on your passport changed is more difficult than getting an Oregon driver's license changed. To change it, I would have to submit a letter that says that I have "completed sex reassignment surgery". Many cissexual women have breast reduction surgery; the surgery that I just had is substantially similar to breast reduction. It's unclear whether the US Passport administration would consider my surgery "sex reassignment surgery", and there are no clear published guidelines that suggest either that they would, or that they wouldn't. Passport change evaluation is opaque.
This is what my boarding pass looked like after the four TSA workers got done with it. I guess the initials "AS" mean "we checked this person's gender and determined they weren't a terrorist based on that."
If you travel by air, do you feel safer after reading this story?
I walk up to the TSA worker in the "Expert Traveler" line and show my driver's license and boarding pass. She shines the little purple light on it that presumably lights up with the letters "tErRoRiSt" at appropriate times. She hesitates.
She calls one of her colleagues over and they turn away from me, holding my ID and boarding pass and whispering.
I know what it's about. It's never happened to me before, but for a year and a half, my license has said "Chevalier, Timothy Jan" underneath the picture and "F" underneath where it says "sex". It was just a matter of time. I hear one of them whispering to the other "it's one of the things they tell us to look for..." and the other says "...but we're not allowed to ask them..."
She asks me to step over to the desk on the side. A third guy comes up and asks me whether I prefer "Mr." or "Mrs." Choosing for now not to point out the incompleteness of his list, I said "Mr." He looks almost as if he's expecting me to explain, but I don't think I need to explain anything. "But it says here..." I may have cocked an eyebrow at this point. "Is it an error?" "No." [pause] "It's my legal sex." (In retrospect, I shouldn't even have volunteered that.)
"Do you have a previous name you used?" he asks me. I was on the verge of answering, and then the voice in my head said, "Fuck, you don't have to answer that question." I asked "Are you allowed to ask that question?" He said they had to verify my ID. I asked if there was a supervisor I could talk to. He said he was the supervisor -- wrong answer.
After asking me how I say my middle name, he asked me to sit on the window ledge while they waited for a fourth person to come. He asked me if I had another ID. I gave him my Portland State ID.
Fourth person came. "Is it an error?" "It's not an error." "Well, because it says 'F' but you said you prefer 'Mister'..." (Well, what? I think.) I didn't say anything. She and the "supervisor" looked at each other. She said "I think it's okay" and shrugged. She walked away.
The "supervisor" gave me back my IDs. He asked me whether I'd ever had a problem before. I said "no", truthfully. He said "well, you should have that error corrected." (I'd said it wasn't an error, twice.) I said that legally, it was impossible for me to change it. I'm not sure what he thought. He let me go through security.
I was lying when I said it was impossible -- in Oregon, your driver's license can have whatever gender marker you like (as long as it's "M" or "F") as long as you get a letter from a DMV-approved therapist affirming that your gender is really what you think it is.
Read that again: "DMV-approved therapist".
I don't want to give my tacit approval to a system that says it's the state (and its approved therapists), not me, that knows what sex my brain expects my body to be. If I don't change my mind about that, I'd better start budgeting an extra half an hour when I go to the airport.
I think it's important to stand up for your rights. I like an opportunity to kick ass and take names as much as any other guy does. That doesn't mean I relish the threat of public humiliation. I was shaking when I got to the place for taking my boots off and my laptop out.
I have multiple friends (some who are trans, some who are cis) who've been strip-searched for less.
I'm going to Europe in two months. Getting the gender marker on your passport changed is more difficult than getting an Oregon driver's license changed. To change it, I would have to submit a letter that says that I have "completed sex reassignment surgery". Many cissexual women have breast reduction surgery; the surgery that I just had is substantially similar to breast reduction. It's unclear whether the US Passport administration would consider my surgery "sex reassignment surgery", and there are no clear published guidelines that suggest either that they would, or that they wouldn't. Passport change evaluation is opaque.
This is what my boarding pass looked like after the four TSA workers got done with it. I guess the initials "AS" mean "we checked this person's gender and determined they weren't a terrorist based on that."
If you travel by air, do you feel safer after reading this story?
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-05 02:48 am (UTC)No. I guess I think the first TSA screener was doing a good job in that she noticed it, knew it was something she was supposed to look for as part of her job, and also made the judgment that it was probably okay in this case.
Did you feel like it would have been a bad move to volunteer more information (because it might lead to something bad happening to you), or was it more that you didn't want to give more information because you should have the right not to? I guess I ask because my inclination would usually be just to be as friendly and cooperative as possible, with the hope that it would make things easier. I tend to choose perceived convenience over standing up for my rights fairly often though. :-/
Also, kind of off-topic, but I was under the impression that Quakers didn't use titles. If that applied to you, I guess it would've made things even more confusing for the TSA screeners.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-05 05:35 am (UTC)Discrimination issues aside, it doesn't inspire a whole lot of confidence in me, not that I had any in the first place. If it's really the TSA's mission to keep terrorists from getting on planes, do you really want to leave it up to someone looking at a passenger, shrugging, and saying "it's probably okay" when an anomaly gets pointed out?
I suspect you'll find that for most members of social and ethnic groups that get profiled, "be friendly and cooperative" is not a popular strategy when dealing with law enforcement. I think when I volunteer information to people who have no clear agenda and probably don't particularly have my best interests in mind, I'm putting myself in a position of weakness and tacitly agreeing with them that I owe them an explanation.
Also, kind of off-topic, but I was under the impression that Quakers didn't use titles. If that applied to you, I guess it would've made things even more confusing for the TSA screeners.
Heh, I'm only a dilettante-level Quaker, but if it did apply to me, that would have been an opportunity to provoke further hilarity. I strongly suspected that they had been told not to ask certain questions and thus were asking roundabout ones (like what form of address you prefer) instead, and hoping that I would volunteer the information they weren't supposed to ask for. The "title" question seemed really inappropriate to me because, y'know, it's not like there's any legal requirement to prefer the title that goes with your legal and/or self-identified gender. I also wonder what would have happened if I'd said "Dr."...