"I am being held by the TSA in Orlando
because of an "anomaly" (my penis)...
I am finding out this is completely routine
for so many trans people."
Shadi Petosky
because of an "anomaly" (my penis)...
I am finding out this is completely routine
for so many trans people."
Shadi Petosky
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Gatekeeping
"So why do you wear these?" asked a TSA agent as she held up a pair of my panties for anyone walking through the airport to see. Matching word to deed, the Orlando, Florida airport worker was pitching a barrage of prying questions as she prying through my personal belongings. She had just finished a thorough pat down, including multiple gropings of my genitals and ass. I was in the process of returning from a conference where I had given a talk on social discrimination experienced by the transgender and disability community. As I went through airport security, I experienced this gatekeeping first hand. After I passed through the body scanner and been groped by the TSA staff, they had pulled me aside to tell me that they would need to do a more thorough examination. It was then that I was brought to a semi-private area (a short wall that most people could easily see over or around) where a team of ciswomen unzipped my bag and proceeded to interrogate me on the contents. They had firmly silenced me throughout the unwanted touching of my body and the public display of my intimates through implicit suggestions that I was being considered as a potential terror threat. Immediately it became evident, however, that their questions had nothing to do with me being a potential threat to the general sense of security but me being an actual threat to the general sense of gender. My small bottles of fluids (sunscreen, toothpaste, etc.) did not gain any attention but my underwear, swim suits, and make-up were each questioned in turn. Each article seemed to be equally a puzzle and an assault to her because I owned them. What would have been a natural element of her life, as a cisgender woman, seemed out of place in my life, as a transgender woman. The implicit statement was not so much that she did not understand these instruments of femme life but that she was using them as an avenue to critique me.
"Do you date men?" she asked, beginning a line of questioning about my sexuality. "I have a girlfriend," I informed her. This seemed to make things worse, although it was hard to tell what I could say that would end this invasive situation in which she held me. "But if you date women," she continued, "why do you dress like a woman?" She was still fingering through my dresses and intimate apparel while she pushed me on my relationships. "Because I am a woman," I explained simply, "and they like to date women." The need to state the obvious facts of my life made it all the more clear to me that I was not only being targeted for being transgender but for being queer. Her fixation on my sexuality made it clear that she did not understand lesbians anymore than she understood transwomen in general. Nor could she discern the difference between gender and sexuality. "But wearing women's clothes, don't you get more attention from men?" she pushed. "Yes, I get attention from men, women, everybody," I confirmed. She did not catch my double meaning when I said "everybody." Despite her implicit trans- and homophobia, clearly she had found me in some ways overwhelmingly interesting. Had I felt free to push her back, I would have asked if she did not find her groping hands on my genitals, her thumbing through my panties, and her probing interrogation on my sexual habits to be a form of perverse eroticism. Could I make her understand that the targeting and treatment of transgender persons by the TSA constituted a kind of systematic sexual abuse and sexism.
Sexual abusers are not always so oblivious that what they are doing may be wrong. Throughout the TSA agent's investigation, her partner remained next to her, silent but evidently disturbed by the levels her associate was taking her invasion of my personal life. At certain questions she would roll her eyes or make a face, mostly for my benefit because her partner was not paying her any mind. When she started in on my sexuality, the silent TSA agent did make some disapproving noises. But the investigator would wave her off with dismissive phrases, "I'm just asking her a question," or "I just want to know." While the gestures from the other TSA agent were perhaps made to comfort me with signs of alliance, in many respects it only showed that what was happening was worse than mere ignorant curiosity. First, the TSA knew what they were doing was beyond the stated goals and methods for which the agency was founded. They have been called out by the trans community and by their own agents yet they continued to extend their reach. Second, not only was the TSA agent using her position of power to hold me still and silent but even someone who had a greater degree of power in the situation, another cisgender TSA agent, could not stop the invasive probing. Whatever the exact nature of the personal and professional pressure that came along with the questioner's dismissal of her co-worker, it was clear that there was a system of oppression backing up the abuse. Beyond the personal intents or pleasures of the agent, the TSA ideological gatekeeping machine not only permitted but used this agent as an instrument to enact anti-trans, anti-queer agendas. This was one way of showing the transgender community that an adversarial cisgender community maintains direct power over their bodies, possessions, and stories.
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The Case of Shadi Petosky
A couple years later, another trans woman, Shadi Petosky, was pulled aside by the TSA at Orlando Airport. While I had been silenced during my isolation and probing, Petosky took to twitter to live-stream events as they quickly escalated. Like me, the situation began with the body scanner, which signaled that it had caught a trans body, resulting in her being brought away by the TSA. "I am being held by the TSA in Orlando because of an "anomaly" (my penis)," reported Petosky at the start of her series of tweets. "I didn't know how to spell anomaly until today," she later admitted. Next, Petosky found herself brought to a private cell for containment. "The TSA has left me in a room alone. There is an officer holding the door," wrote Petosky. Once the TSA had her alone, they began directly policing her gender, insisting that she submit to their diagnosis of her sex as male. "TSA agent Bramlet told me to get back in the machine as a man or it was going to be a problem," continued Petosky's report. When Petosky refused to gender herself as male, the TSA then escalated the event by calling in a police officer who continued to press her to disclose her genital sex. "Cop asked me what sex I was. I told him I wasn't going to answer that question. I am complying but come on," wrote Petosky. Finally, but momentary, Petosky was released from the TSA but her trip and her possessions were totally undone. "I am through. It was about 40 minutes, 2 full body pat downs, fully disassembled luggage. I missed my flight," wrote Petosky. Having missed her flight because of the TSA, the agents returned to remover her. "A TSA agent is telling me to leave the airport," tweets Petosky while she resists, insisting to speaking to management. After being escorted out of Orlando Airport, security continues to berate her for complaining about her treatment. "They told me to get myself together, I am sobbing, not belligerent," she insisted. The airline eventually got a hold of her with a new flight but said that they were going to charge her $955 because she had missed her previous flight. "My point of listing the prices is not to get money. It's to show cost when the TSA detains trans bodies (Plus time, denigration)," Petosky later explained to twitter. While she eventually got on a standby flight, Petosky could not escape further disciplining from airport and airline authorities. "I literally want to no lectures from American Airlines on how to travel while trans. I want the same privileges as cis people," concluded Petosky.
While Petosky's case with the Orlando TSA and airport staff became immediate news, largely because of her detailed and comprehensive documenting, nonetheless, her situation was not uncommon. "I am finding out this is completely routine for so many trans people," she admitted some time into the incident. Indeed, even the TSA responded stating that the event followed fairly standard protocol for handling such a transgender person. “After examining closed-circuit TV video and other available information, T.S.A. has determined that the evidence shows our officers followed T.S.A.’s strict guidelines,” wrote TSA spokesman, Mike England, in a press release. The Petosky case documents a system that is in place to mark and manage transgender persons as "anomalies." This language is weighted in many ways. Significantly, the TSA's primary purpose in the public eye is to stop and detain terrorists. By treating transgender persons in such a way, the TSA implicitly marks the transgender individual as in some way like a terrorist. By repeat enactment of these policies, the TSA effectively associates transgender with terrorism. Thus, the TSA calling the trans body an "anomaly" is a way to at once defuse and differentiate them for "terrorists" but to justify treating them as though they are or might be terrorists. Furthermore, through repeat use on transgender persons, the TSA teaches them and others to understand themselves as "anomalies." This is another way of calling transgender people, "freaks," "queer," "sick," "crazy," or "monstrous" but in a way that has not yet been deemed politically incorrect. Indeed, an effect of politically correct language is not the reforming of sexist or transphobic people and organizations but a mandate that they find new ways to enact marginalization in code or silence. While the TSA eventually admitted that "anomaly" might be an offensive term to use for a transgender person, in my experience its use has not stopped up until the current day. As with the agent who gaze discouraging looks to her partner, a few dissenting voices in the TSA is not enough to dismantle an enormous system of hate and oppression.
The violence against the transgender community at airports is not something that can be changed individual by individual because it is written into the very technology and practice of gatekeeping. TSA body scanners embody the systematizing and dehumanizing of gender. The mechanisms no longer see particular humans but see the body as a normative (non-queer) normate (non-disabled) white figure that fits into one of two binary genders: the pink female mode and the blue male mode. The change from a more detailed body image was made to give its subjects a greater degree of privacy (i.e. so every tuck and fold wouldn't be visible to the TSA). Because of this loss of particularity, however, all bodies have been more overtly placed under what is supposed to be a universal representation of humanity. The TSA would likely argue that the choice of a binpedal figure is not meant to be ableist, that the choice of a white figure is not meant to be racist, that the more masculine figure is not meant to be sexist but all are meant to represent a neutral undifferentiated humanity. Of course, the presumption that a white cisgender ablebodied man is the standard and that all non-white, trans, disabled, non-male persons are divergent is the foundation of most racism, sexism, ableism, and transphobia. It is the goal of neutrality as the norm and the norm as neutrality that encourages hate more than systems that acknowledge the infinite diversity of bodies. Indeed, the binary reflected by the machine's two gender modes is just a reflection of this drive toward the universal singularity of man. Language itself evidences how wo-man is marked as the alternative to the standard man, the fe-male as the alternative to the standard male. The marking of transgender, intersex, and crip body as unacceptable anomylies is a direct extension of a system that marks the fe-male body as the acceptable anomyly of the male body. This manifold discrimination is evident in the TSA protocol that uses a cisgender woman to interrogate a queer woman for being transgender and a lesbian.
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The Real Cost of Travel
"I could cry from relief," I texted my fiance. "Yeah!!!" she replies with an expression of shared elation. Both of us felt the release of tension that built up each time I went through airport security. Some nights before a trip I would have trouble sleeping. The anxiety I felt was not for a single anticipated groping but the kindled flame of a nerve that had been scraped raw time after time. The fear I experienced was not so much of a future event that I would pass through but of a cycle wherein past traumas became a chronic present from which I felt unable to escape. As a result, I felt the pain before the TSA agents even touched me because it was not just their hands that I felt but the hands of dozens (or was it now hundreds?) that had repeated the same exercise of power across my body. Yet this day, for the first time in years, I had passed through the TSA security without getting pulled aside for genital groping. This privilege (as I had come to regard the freedom from assault) was not a matter of luck or a system that had learned its lesson. Rather, I had scrounged up the money to pay the system off. In what amounted to an authorized bribe of the TSA, I had sent the US government a substantial payment and submitted myself to a background check as part of signing up for the TSA Pre-Check system. The status came with several perks, including a shorter line, the ability to keep my shoes on through security, and the freedom to keep my laptop in its bag as it was x-rayed. But the most important benefit of making the payment to the TSA was that I would no longer have to go through body scanners. Because I generally pass as a cisgender woman on first and second glance, I can walk through a metal detector without the TSA agents ever knowing I am transgender. Without the body scanner to tip them off or trip the system, I could quite literally pass through the TSA gatekeeping.
On a political level, I am keenly aware that the only difference between me and the trans, queer, or crip woman or person of color being frisked down at the body scanner is about $100. I know the exact cost of this privilege. This arbitrary and exploitative difference does not diminish the suffering of those abused by the system of gatekeeping but further underlines how sexism, transphobia, homophobia, ableism, and racism are enacted with razor thin rationale. If a trans woman is a terror threat until she slips the TSA a wad of cash, that evidences how the TSA never really regarded her as much of a security threat to start. Anyone could go through a background check but pressure is put on transgender and other marginalized peoples because they are the targets that our society wants to harass. Anyone could sign up for TSA Pre-check but I was given overwhelming reason. During a semester where I was flying from work to home, or work to conferences, nearly every week, I had a run where I was getting my genitals touched by the TSA once a week (sometimes twice a week) for ten weeks in a row. It forced me to say that I effectively existed in a chronic, sexually abusive relationship with the TSA. Thus, I was muscled and intimated and abused into paying off the TSA and submitting my background (the thing scanners couldn't see) for analysis. This is how the political is always personal. The battles over ideology occur across the bodies of the oppressed. Thus, on a personal level, I was desperate for the protection the TSA offered from their violence.
This protection is very contingent. It can be revoked or eschewed easily as my recent trip to England showed. TSA Pre-check saves me from the TSA's prying hands only on domestic flights. On this international flight, I was forced to go through the abuse all over again. As I spread my legs and listened to the TSA agent recite their lines about what they were going to touch and how (words I could now repeat exactly), I looked over at another security point where people were walking past the TSA without being scanned. Beside that security gate was a sign advertising an international version of the same security check and payments I made on a domestic level. The TSA agents and procedures were the same. I was the same person. But because of the terminal I used, my gender and my genitals were again a security threat. That is, unless I paid even more money and submitted myself for another round of probing I would fall back into mechanisms of abuse. That is the systematic nature of the TSA's violence against transgender persons and other targeted groups: the discrimination and assault is the normalized state of affairs to which vulnerable bodies will continually be returned, while the escape from this cycle of violence is only ever a temporary and contingent exception to the rules. As a trans woman, gatekeepers work to keep me in my place, so that the privilege of travel always comes with a cost and a precariousness that reminds me that the TSA's disciplining power is only momentarily withheld. That is Michel Foucault's understanding of power at its most efficient: discipline that functions without the need for actualization; that is, the power of fear that makes violence redundant. Another term for systems that function by instilling fear is "terrorism." So in short, by promising to secure the nation from terrorism, the TSA has taken on the role of terrorizing transgender bodies.
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Transgender Stories of Place and Travel
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