on passports
and moving freely
At the airport recently, a TSA agent sent me back to my airline’s ticket counter because my birthday was wrong. It wasn’t a big deal to do, though it was naturally annoying, after having stood in line, to go stand in line again so I could… stand in line again. (Later I realized I actually didn’t have to stand in line again—you can cut the line! But I didn’t notice until that was of no use to me.) I had plenty of time.
Like any dealing with TSA, this was a little stressful. I was supposed to take my corrected boarding pass back to precisely the same person and lane as before but when I got back to the head of the line, she was gone and I had to go to somebody else at a different desk. Would it matter…? No, as it turned out.
But maybe it could have mattered if somebody had wanted to jerk me around because they were bored—I don’t know. Really, you never do know in these situations.
Hunter Schafer, an actress best known for her role on Euphoria, has announced that she has to identify herself as “male” on her passport now.
I find this level of deliberate humiliation both disgusting and disturbing and while I have little to say beyond that… it felt worth saying. Schafer is almost certainly stuck now having fraught, weird interactions with security every time she has to travel outside of the country for work; like these creepy signs at the University of Cincinnati proclaiming that biological males can only use this or that bathroom, the effect and I imagine the point is to make life for trans people stressful and demeaning even when it comes to having to pee.
I opened with my little non-story about the TSA because I suspect that we all understand why that situation—in which nothing is at stake really and in which no particular aspects of myself could be used against me—is nonetheless stressful. Where are the limits of their authority, you wonder, and you don’t really know.
But I also knew, at heart, it would be fine. If I were Hunter Schafer I would never know that it would be fine. I wouldn’t know what level of hostility or bigotry I was opening myself up to just by trying to get on a plane and do my job, or take a vacation, or whatever else.
Like I said I have no remarkable analysis to offer here. But I think this is a terrible thing for my country to have done and since I am free to say so… I am going to say so. I don’t like writing about the news on here and I don’t intend to make a habit of it. But sometimes (as an old post said) it’s important.
ETA (02/022/2025): This from
is very helpful—do it!