Transgender & Flying, TSA Pat Downs:

Interesting read Via, Lezgetreal.com. Personally I couldn't care, but I can understand how others in the community might feel offended... especially those pre-op. Of course this can all be avoided by placing odd objects in your undies just to mess with their minds: candles, gerbils, or midgets....Six months or so ago I wrote up a piece about these full body scanners and, quite frankly, this has just gotten worse. At this point, I?d rather walk to England than fly. For the transsexual, this is an absolute nightmare. These scanners, even in the ?new? form where all they do is show a highlighted box on a generic figure is going to pick up the presence of non-standard genitalia and breast forms. It is already bad enough that breast cancer survivors are going to have their prosthetics show up, but also any wigs that they wear.This goes for transgender flyers as well. How many are going to be given ?special? treatment when it is discovered that they still have a male genitalia instead of a surgically crafted vulva, or a vulva instead of a surgically crafted male genitalia? How many are going to be harassed because their bodies are not standard, and that is going to happen. Let us not kid ourselves, there are a lot of people out there who find the notion of a transperson to be a wonderful target for bullying.Then we get into body discomfort. For me, the idea of being touched by a stranger- female or male- is rather abhorrent. While I am better able to tolerate the touch of a strange woman over the touch of a strange man, once it is found out that I was not born a standard woman, will I be assigned a male screener instead of a female one to do the pat down? A strange man touching me, especially in the groin, is likely to cause a major panic attack and flashbacks of being molested. Even if a woman does it, it will be uncomfortable in the extreme especially since many women are not exactly too thrilled to touch a transwoman?s groin.The TSA has managed to make a complete mess of things without needing to. There is no need for this kind of screening. There are proven methods which would work a lot better than this will, but those are not the equivalent of throwing the nation?s collective dick on the table to prove ?ours? is bigger than Al-Qaida?s. This testosterone poisoned thinking which equates a bloated military with effectiveness, threats with action, and waste with efficiency is going to ruin the US at the rate that things are going.

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