The story of Shadi Petosky makes no sense to me. She’s a transgender woman — a perfectly normal thing to be — who was trying to take a flight — another perfectly normal thing to do. TSA freaked out at an “anomaly”, the fact that someone presenting as a woman happened to have a penis. Apparently, like shoes, there’s a fear that one of those might be loaded with high explosives, although no one has ever stopped me from boarding an airplane because of my dangerous genitals.
She was screened and searched and probed multiple times, and taken aside to one of those featureless little rooms where they stash the suspicious people. She missed her flight, and they seemed downright truculent about helping her get another one. And then there’s the business of telling her to “get back in the machine as a man or it was going to be a problem”, whatever the hell that means.
TSA agent Bramlet told me to get back in the machine as a man or it was going to be a problem.
— Shadi Petosky (@shadipetosky) September 21, 2015
It all seems to have escalated absurdly. They needed two police officers, four TSA agents, and an explosives expert to wrestle with their own ignorance about what genitals are supposed to look like.
There are now 2 police officers, 1 explosives specialist and four TSA agents. They're taking my phone for screening
— Shadi Petosky (@shadipetosky) September 21, 2015
You can follow Shadi Petosky on Twitter if you want to see how it all turns out (it looks like she’s not home yet).
I guess TSA needs to learn that trans bodies are not anomalies.
This wouldn’t have been a problem if she had Jerry Seinfeld’s penis.
I saw some of the tweets on this the other day.
Damn, TSA is a pack of fucking idiots. Not too long ago they refused a passenger passage through security because the TSA goon didn’t know that Washington DC is part of America.
I would pay EXTRA to fly on planes with 9/10 levels of security.
Dean Spade discusses how the expansion of the security state has proven particularly dangerous for trans people.
Didn’t the TSA “reassure” everyone when they were rolling out their big maximum-invasive scanners that they wouldn’t be using them to check out peoples’ junk?
NYT: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/23/us/shadi-petosky-tsa-transgender.html
Lord. The continued existence of the TSA is an indication of the lack of real democracy in America.
numberobis @ #5
Oh, good. TSA has investigated itself and found that there isn’t a problem. Everything is OK. Phew! I’m so…I don’t know…relieved, I guess. If they had found something, god knows, perhaps they would have shut themselves down, or slap a wrist.
While I hate to play devil’s advocate to the TSA of all people, I do vaguely recall that the scan machines need to be adjusted for body type; ie, if the machine is told the person being scanned is a woman, it’ll assume a penis is an anomaly because it’s not “supposed” to be there, so when they say “go back into the machine as a man,” they may have meant: “Get rescanned, only this time we tell the machine you’re supposed to have a penis.” Of course, they still handled it poorly and obnoxiously, and so I won’t count this as an exception to the TSA’s previously unbroken history of never doing anything right.
@8: But then her breasts will be flagged as anomalies.
If these systems could determine such things aren’t anomalies, they wouldn’t need differing scans based on male or female.
I just count myself fortunate that I haven’t gotten stuck in this sort of situation.
I did notice, from scanning her tweets, that it appears the local police were actually helpful and respectful. Some tiny sign of progress maybe?
I supposed the machines just had to be designed with pink and blue buttons. I suppose there was no possible way for the machines to be designed to recognize different shapes of genitals as genitals regardless of whether a tech pushed a particular color button. Everyone knows computers just can’t be programmed to do things like that. It’s unpossible.
@11
…nor apparently is it possible for the operators to say “oh, in that case we’ll just set this switch and have you go through again; we’re sorry for the inconvenience”.
I only see two options. 1 the TSA agents were horrible people. 2 the body scanning devices are worthless. I’m gonna go with #1.
borax, 13
Those two options are not mutually exclusive…
The TSA’s x-ray thingies flagged my pockets in SFO this summer. They were empty, but apparently the cloth was a little bunched. So, yeah, the machines kinda suck.
Oddly enough, earlier on the same trip, I found out I’d been able to get on a flight from Minneapolis with my multitool in my carry-on. But that was at the smaller terminal, and I’m a white cis male.
Very true MattP. But at least the body scanners make people feel safe even if they are actually useless. Snark.
Jake Harbern
If the people who programmed the machine didn’t know that women can have penises then the fault lies with them, not the woman with a penis.
And, of course, a certain trans exclusionary feminist with initials similar to those of Chris Brown (I’ve heard she likes to google herself and turn up, and maybe that’s just a Bloody Mary style myth but I doubt anybody wants to find out for sure, so I’m going to refrain from saying her name) was ranting at her on twitter, asserting that she is definitely, definitely male, and something something explosive gloves. Good times. In more positive news, however, it looks like Randi Harper has started working on a terf autoblocker so people at least don’t have to deal with their bullshit as well as pointless discrimination out in meatspace.
Their treatment of Petosky is inexcusable.
However, I’ve exploded so many brains, some of them on purpose and all of them, whether exploded knowingly or un-, while intending to affect the conduct of at least one government, and sometimes even doing so on the world wide web, that I suppose I would have to concede the TSA is only being reasonable if they ever decided to label me an international terrorist under 18 USC chapter 113B, where the definitions (s2331) state:
Looks like I’ll never get on a plane again.
cd
*soft pouncy hug*
Give a bigot even the tinniest amount of “power” and they’ll abuse it to spitefully hurt people…
I’m rather impressed the police seemed to do a good job in this case, though…not necessarily spected.
as for the police in this case I suspect that police do not like the TSA personnel very much and like to get at them in ways like that by not cooperating or just jumping at what ever the TSA tells them. They sure as hell do not feel that the TSA is in any way superior to them, the cops are not the flunkies.
uncle frogy
robro@7: indeed, the TSA saying with a straight face that everything it did was according to its policies is pretty much the epitome of the TSA.
unclefrogy @22
Hey, nobody likes the TSA.
=====
Those body scanners are complete bunk, man. They shouldn’t even be showing genitals, at least that’s what the TSA promised back when the damn things were installed. Looks like they lied.
@24 They don’t show genitals. They just put anomaly blobs over a cartoon person and go “Hey! This is a bomb here! Operator person!”
tangent alert:
the scanners, because they actually do show a person’s privates (even though the goodTSA said it would be just a blurry rendering) require that a male TSA monitor the males getting scanned, and female TSA for females being scanned. So the TSA were *shocked* that their female monitor was presented with a male privates, unexpectedly. The TSA then had to inform her to “go through as a man”, to shield their poor little TSAgirl from blurry maleness imagery.
pfft
aside from all the snark in that tangent: the bit about the sex of the monitor using the scanner, may have been part of the kerfuffle.
Sounds to me like these TSA agents are working off a rule book that is inviolate (they could be fired or even arrested for going against it) but which doesn’t account for a wide enough swath of the human experience and thus gets caught up in “situations” like this. Their bizarre request for that person to identify as “a man” smacks of different rule sets for different gender body types from a rule book with no concept of gender identity.
Their complete lack of care for getting this person rebooked smacks of a complete inability and lack of authority to arrange such a thing themselves. For them, this was a “bad day” they weren’t equipped to deal with. For the person getting checked, the day was surely worse. Frankly, a lot of the blame goes to people above the TSA agents.
I know this could be fixed with a few changes to that rule book, but I’ve a better idea. Let’s just get rid of these ridiculous body scanners already and the rules that came with them.
@15 gmacs
Yeah, last year I was subjected to a pat-down because I’d stuck my boarding pass in one of my pockets without thinking about it before walking through the machine.
I’m an overweight white male. I get flagged for some area on my waist every time I fly. Not always the same area, but apparently the overlap of shirt and pants confuses the machine. It’s been years since I got through without a bit of touchy-feely.
She made it home, finally.
I wonder if I’ll be listed as an international terrorist now (as an American/Canadian dual citizen living in Canada), after I angrily tweeted at the TSA yesterday to go fuck themselves and to respect trans people.
They shouldn’t even be showing genitals, at least that’s what the TSA promised back when the damn things were installed. Looks like they lied.
They absolutely lied. The machines display the pseudo-monochrome image in a back room, where an operator can tap a screen and transmit the “look here” flag to the person operating the machine. That way the sucker going through the machine sees an abstract outline of a person, and colored areas of interest, and doesn’t realize that they’re getting nude-shotted by the operator in the other room.
Another thing they lied about is that the machines don’t keep the images. Of course, they do – the images go to a computer, over a network, with a hard drive. At the very least the operator can screenshot them if they want a personal copy to take home on a USB stick, but the images reside for a period of a couple days on the system (because they might need to go back and re-examine images in the event that an auditor is able to sneak a test object past them). Another thing about the machines that TSA doesn’t make much of is that auditors have been quite good at getting things past the machines. No surprises there. Especially since the process is effectively manual.
In May 2011 TSA employee Rolando Negrin was charged with assaulting a coworker who made jokes about the size of Negrin’s penis after Negrin received a full-body scan. Uh, yeah…
One of the companies that makes backscatter machines has produced a mobile version that goes in a van; basically you drive it along the street near a sidewalk and it looks at what everyone is carrying under their clothes. This is not just a proof of concept: the have sold over 500 of them to government agencies in the US and abroad.
(ref: http://www.as-e.com/products-solutions/cargo-vehicle-inspection/mobile/product/zbv )
Early in DHS/TSA history, when the backscatter machines were first being mandated for every airport in the US, high-ranking TSA officers did what any self-respecting public official would do: they were granted and bought stock options in Rapiscan. Former homeland security secretary Michael Chertoff was a key player in that game, but George Soros got to dip his beak, too.
PS – US Marshals service admits to saving thousands of images from backscatter machines:
http://www.cnet.com/news/feds-admit-storing-checkpoint-body-scan-images/
The last time I flew, I opted out of the scanner. Yes, this means a pat-down. I’m sure there are are assholes in that department too, and I have a variety of privileges (starting with my white skin) that make it easier for me. But for frequent travelers, it might be worth trying once just to see how it goes.
From numerobis’ quote #5:
This is no excuse, as all this means is that these ‘strict guidelines’ need thrown out and a set needs written and used that don’t subject certain people to unnecessary indignities and delays merely because genitals of an unexpected nature are detected.
I asked the TSA via Twitter how much of a threat a trans person’s genitals posed to a plane and how much explosives and weapons can be packed into a trans woman’s penis. I have yet to get an answer and I suppose I never will.