i sometimes cannot stop myself from fisking such ignorance, especially when it is obviously willful and backed by hate. so here goes:

It is actually quite possible for people to change their official gender on their ID, and does not, yep, does *not*, require the person to have surgically transitioned.

some fucking -proof- please? have you looked into it? i have, because i am fucking TRANS, which you obviously are not. the vast majority of US states, as well as the US Federal government, requires you to have surgery before you can change the gender marker. The remaining states do not permit a change under any circumstance. surgery is very expensive, is not covered by insurance, and is difficult to obtain with all of the ridiculous gatekeeping that one has to deal with. but you would not know that, because you did not bother to research that before spouting your nonsense.

Changing one’s name is also not that big a deal.

Oh, no? Three months of bureaucratic delays, over three hundred dollars in court costs, and $40 per certified copy of the court order. Not that big a deal? I could afford it at the time I did it, but there’s a lot of poor trans people who cannot.

I also don’t think the world is that full of hate against trans people

twenty trans women per year are murdered in the US, and many more throughout the world, JUST FOR BEING TRANS. The majority of these trans women are poor women of color. Some of these trans women are murdered by POLICE.

Police regularly harass, arrest on false pretenses – usually dummied-up “prostitution” charges – and phyiscally and sexually assault trans folk, again overwhelmingly victimizing poor trans women of color. Law enforcement authorities, including the TSA, regularly target us on the belief that we are somehow “deceivers” and therefore a danger to national security. Do you really think that the people who arrest, detain, abuse, and disappear brown people for being brown, really give a shit about another group of people who don’t meet their standards for “good, legitimate people?” You might want to use google to find the article about the TSA issuing a bulletin identifying “cross-dressers” (as they call us) as potential terrorists.

do your basic googling and reading and listening – with your mouth kept shut – to our life experiences before you come to a blog like this and make your ignorant and hateful comments.

If you want to be willfully ignorant on trans issues, and call the very real things that trans people struggle with every single fucking day easy and no big deal, that’s up to you, but you’re not at all welcome to do it here.

But. It is actually quite possible for people to change their official gender on their ID, and does not, yep, does *not*, require the person to have surgically transitioned. Changing one’s name is also not that big a deal.

I also don’t think the world is that full of hate against trans people, and the threat of rape or assualt by airport or airline staff just sounds…bizarre. There are regulations. It just isn’t realistic that they are going to spirit the trans person off to some back room – I doubt there is someone where no-one ever goes, and I doubt searches etc. happen without supervision thanks to the obvious threat of allegations of assault.

Kate, I fail to see why you had a problem with that. I assume you wouldn’t want a male searching you?

Thanks so much for the comment and your additional insights. I’ve just added a note to the post telling readers to be sure to check out your comment for what I missed.

First, as Kate mentioned in her comment, their is a tremendous risk of trans folk being detained, arrested, raped or otherwise sexually assaulted. and this will only increase as more airports install the whole-body scanners that effectively strip off one’s clothes and reveal one’s genitals to the machine’s operator. this will be an instantaneous “the genitals don’t match the gender, we have a terrorist” alert that will guarantee abuse, and this is a trap that intersex people will fall into as well. These machines will reveal that i have both breasts and a penis, so even if i try to present as male, i will still be trapped.

Second, this affects every trans and intersex person, including those who have already chosen to stop flying. How? Because our government is telling mus, quite frankly, that we are not human and that we are, by our *very existence*, a threat to national security. i did not vote for Obama to have his administration tell me that they’d prefer that i don’t exist.

Finally a TSA agent came over and said, “I do not want to offend you but I need to ask you if you are a man or a girl so I can assign an agent to pat you down.”

My gender identity hadn’t even crossed my mind until that point. I didn’t know what to say, I wasn’t asked for ID, so I just said, “I’m a woman”, but my identity in that moment changed. Gone were my assumptions that when people look at me with hostility it is about being female, being queer or being fat – now I had to consider the possibility that the hostility was about transgender issues. Now transgender issues were something that were relevant to me.

Reminds me several months back when I was driving my trans friend to an event on an army base, and we both had to show ID to get on the base. We were a little worried because she was there in a dress but her ID identifies her as male and with her male name and even the picture looks male since it was before she came out. Thankfully, they just waved us on through without issue. I’m sure many others aren’t that lucky. :(