A transgender woman has accused the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) of being ‘transphobic’ after an ‘anomaly’ between her legs set off the alarm.
Rosalynne Montoya from Arizona was flying from Phoenix to Los Angeles when she was stopped by security after a full-body scanner detected something between her legs.
Describing the embarrassing experience she had at airport security, Montoya said on TikTok: “Can we talk about how horrible it is to travel while being transgender sometimes? I always have immense anxiety leading up to going through security.”
She continued: “And this means that I totally recognize the privilege of having all of my documents correct. So, the gender marker on my license, for example, says female. But, going through the scanner, there’s a male scanner and a female scanner in the TSA checkpoint.”
When a person enters the full-body scanner, a TSA officer presses a button assigning the gender, either female or male, on the traveler’s appearance, the TSA website states.
“Looking at me, you know, I look like a woman and I am a woman. So, that’s great. I love having systemic privilege when I feel unsafe, which is in an airport,” Montoya continued.
“But, going through the scanner, I always have an ‘anomaly’ between my legs that sets off the alarm,” she expressed.
“And so (the TSA officer) asked me if I had anything in my pants and I told her ‘no’ and she’s like, ‘Well, maybe it’s just like the metal on your shorts, so let’s scan you again.’”
Montoya went through the full-body scanner and triggered the alarm again. She then told the officer that she was transgender.
“So, I was like look, I’m trans. Just pat me down. And her solution was, ‘Do you want to be scanned as a man instead?’ I didn’t. But, I ended up doing it and then my boobs set off the scanner because, of course,” she recalled.
“So, I tried to make a joke out of it. I was like, ‘Oh yeah, there’s a lot of plastic in there! It’s fine.’ So then she was like, ‘OK, well we have to pat you down. Do you want a man to do it?’
“I said, ‘NO! Absolutely not.’”
In a follow-up video posted on TikTok, she said: “Being pulled over by the police or traveling is terrifying for many of us because of our documentation not being accurate. This is a large problem because there is a lot of gatekeeping.”
She continued: “It’s very difficult sometimes to change your documents. Many states require you to have surgery, which is also difficult to access in the first place. Most states don’t allow non-binary people to have a genderless marker on their identification documents.
“So while my legal documents are changed, I truly hope that transgender people will be able to change their documents more easily in the future.”
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