TSA rules change again

[magid]

I was driving home this evening, and heard this story on NPR about new TSA regulations going into effect this weekend requiring people to give their birthdate and gender as well as name when buying tickets, and my first thought was about whether the sites that will be collecting the data are set up with binary options for gender. How will this work for transpeople? There is, I suppose, legal gender, but if one is living in one's eventual gender but legally still one's birth gender, what answer is appropriate on a form that is likely only going to offer binary options? To choose an extreme case, if Sandy Traveler answers according to birth gender on a trip going to have surgery, after which legal gender can be changed in the home state's courts, how does this play out?

The rest of the article goes on to focus on birthdates, especially as a way to disambiguate non-terrorists from suspected terrorists; I'm unconvinced that gathering these two pieces of information is really the best use of time and energy to keep the country safe.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Gender or sex?

[magid.livejournal.com]

What I had understood was that gender refers to one's own body, while sex refers to which sort(s) of bodies of others one is attracted to.

[(Anonymous)]

Wow, that's totally not my understanding at all.

[magid.livejournal.com]

What is your understanding?

[(Anonymous)]

Humans have both sex and gender. Sex is the biological one.

[jaq.livejournal.com]

Sounds like you should be putting whatever it says on the ID you plan to use when you fly. It's just another matching exercise.

[magid.livejournal.com]

That makes sense.

[breedingimperf.livejournal.com]

uh, oh. This doesn't sound good to me at all. States differ on this, and driver licenses reflect that.

I'd best go read the TSA update carefully, before I get steamed.

[magid.livejournal.com]

I know that there are gender-neutral names and such, but surely, it's not likely that there are two people with the same name AND same birthday? Gender seems much less likely to be really useful for anti-terrorist security.