Finding Trans Community in Airport Security
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This is part of Traveling in Our Bodies, a four-part series that reflects on how women's bodies influence their movement through the world.
I already cry on planes. But few things make me more emotional at 30,000 feet these days than the increasingly common sight of another transgender woman sitting across the aisle. We don’t always clock each other. But when we do—to risk a stereotype—she is often locked into a Nintendo Switch game wearing absolutely enormous headphones. Just knowing that she, too, has made it through the gauntlet that is an American airport is enough to make me well up. Because when I first started “traveling while trans,” as it’s often referred to online, she wouldn’t have been such a reliable part of my flying experience.
In 2012, two years before Time magazine declared we had reached a “Transgender Tipping Point,” I came out and started transitioning. I felt safe in my bubble of fellow liberal arts students but before long, I got into a long-distance relationship that required me to fly at least once a month from Atlanta to New York and back again. That wasn’t fun, to put it mildly. A decade-plus ago, US airports felt purposefully designed to be hostile, if not entirely inaccessible, to trans people. Even more so than they are today.
Think about every step of the process to get inside an airport terminal: First, you need to book a ticket under your legal name, which if you’re trans, may not yet have been changed. Then you have to show an identity document at a TSA checkpoint, and those can be difficult to update, especially if you live in a state that requires proof of surgery to correct the gender marker on your driver’s license. Finally, you need to walk through a full-body scanner that, until June 2023, required a TSA agent to start the process by guessing your gender, simply by eyeballing you (hitting a pink or blue figure on their screen, per some observations), which would then determine if anomalies that were present (i.e., a crotch bulge, if the agent had selected female), thus calling for additional screening.
The closest thing I can compare all those hurdles to is the series of arduous trials Indiana Jones has to complete in The Last Crusade—except that, instead of finding the Holy Grail on the other side, you get to fly coach. And clearing those obstacles in the mid 2010s as a trans woman who had legally changed her name but couldn’t update the gender marker on her Georgia driver’s license was complicated and exhausting, especially given how frequently I had to do it.
First, I would book a ticket but had to select “male” as my legal gender. I would walk up to the TSA checkpoint with an ID that had a feminine-presenting photo and my name on it, but also an “M,” so I’d hand over a Disability Notification Card as well that explained my “health condition.” After that, I would opt out of the full-body scanner, which meant waiting upwards of 15 minutes for a TSA agent to give me a pat-down. I count myself lucky that I didn’t experience much of the harassment, abuse, and invasive searches so many trans people have gone through, though there were certainly a few uncomfortable encounters.
In those days, I considered it a miracle to see other trans people at the gate for my flight—especially trans women who, due to the effects of our initial puberty, are often more visually noticeable. Whenever it happened, I wanted to rush up to them and celebrate having made it through the hell that was airport security. Of course I didn’t, because the last thing either of us wanted in those moments was even more attention. Still, we were here, in the inner sanctum—a place we weren’t supposed to be. The thrill of it was almost enough to make up for those times I had a too-tight connection in Charlotte.
Travel got easier for me over time, in part due to my physical transition and in part due to political changes. I found out I could change the gender marker on my passport without surgery due to a little-known 2010 policy, which soon made presenting my ID a non-issue. And after I got bottom surgery in 2014, I took a deep breath and walked through a full-body scanner for the first time ever. Pat-downs are now, mercifully, a distant memory. Advocacy from trans travelers has since pressed the TSA to make even more changes, like introducing a gender-neutral algorithm for the full-body scanners in June 2023 (though reports of harassment and false alarms persist).
Even more so, spotting people like me at the airport has gone from being a once-in-a-blue-moon phenomenon to an ordinary and even expected occurrence. Hell, departing from my home airport of SEA-TAC in Seattle, I’ll sometimes find myself sitting next to a trans woman on my flight out, which feels surreal. She’s usually younger than me, and I hope she has had an easier time accessing airline travel than my history reflects, just like I faced fewer challenges than my trans forebears. Most of all, I hope she has fun playing Zelda.
Originally Appeared on Condé Nast Traveler
