Summary
Hunter Schafer shared that her newly issued passport incorrectly lists her gender as male, a result of Trump’s executive order requiring federal documents to use sex assigned at birth.
Despite selecting female and having her gender marker changed years ago, the new policy was applied to her application.
Schafer said she wanted to raise awareness rather than cause alarm, emphasizing that trans people will continue to exist regardless of government policies.
“A letter and a passport can’t change that,” she said.
See my comment to the other reply here
So you were in this exact scenario, TSA prevented the person from flying like we’ve been saying, but then didn’t prevent them from flying on a standby on the next flight?
Colour me skeptical.
Nope, this tracks. Travelling while trans even before the Trump presidency means hastle. Gender markers on passports often mean very little aside from potentially outing passing trans people to asshole agents when they don’t match what you look like.
Normally it looks like variations of this : You go through the body scanner and a guard makes a determination based on basically vibes and pushes one of two buttons, a pink or a blue. If you have boobs and the blue button is pressed or a dick and the pink button is pressed you get flagged as having something “unexpected” on you and then are subjected to a body search during which they might just stick you in a holding place for as long as they feel like while they figure out who to send to perform a rather humiliating discussion about your medical history while your privates are checked over by strangers.
Or, someone just looks at you, looks at your passport flags the sex marker or your photo as a “suspicious error” and pulls you out of line. It’s remarkable how poorly the whole bureaucracy suddenly operates when you don’t immediately fit someone’s exact expectations of what a trans person looks like. Most of the time this just wastes a lot of time as you wait around for someone to have a long ass conversation and they run the papers to check them.
These delays can mean missing a flight but the person who missed the flight could be in a place to sue if they don’t offer a solution hence… Standby flights. So this is more or less just going back to being the old sucky forms of travel discrimination versus an even worse form. The bar is in hell and folk are gunna feel about it based on what the bar was before it was lowered. Whether that’s “oh thank god” or “fucking hell life is shit” is a glass half full/empty reaction. Both are valid.
Trans rights are under attack, maybe let someone be happy if the found something to be happy about, why can’t you let them enjoy it?
And if you think that’s not something to be happy about maybe you need to get a look at what’s going on and reasess how bad it is
I mean cool appeal to emotion but that isn’t what we were talking about. The government is attacking the rights of people who are trans, including their passports, and pretending they aren’t isn’t helping anyone. When people were under threat from the Nazi’s in the 30’s would it have helped to tell people to just ‘let them be happy’ when the Nazi’s weren’t yet able to put them in camps?