Traveling while trans

Hi. My name is Theresa. (But please, call me Tess.) I look like this:

I travel for work a lot. I like my job, I like to travel, I don’t mind the jet lag, and I don’t hate accumulating all those frequent flyer miles. In fact, I’m boarding UA 990 (SFO → CDG) in just a few hours to attend meetings in Paris and Geneva next week.

The other day, the New York Times published How Changes to U.S. Gender Policy Could Affect Your Passport, by Juno Carmel. The word could in the title reads as a hypothetical, but there’s nothing hypothetical about this. Just like Hunter Schafer, the gender marker on my passport was recently changed without my consent.

This is because, mere hours after taking office on January 20^th, Trump issued Executive Order 14168. Among many other terrible things, this EO forbids the State Department from issuing to trans Americans like myself passports congruent with our gender and appearance. (See Erin Reed’s excellent Line By Line Analysis Of Trump’s Big Anti-Trans Executive Order, or What Will Trump’s Anti-Trans “Gender Ideology Extremism” Executive Orders Actually Do? by Riese over at Autostraddle, for detailed analyses.)

Now, putting aside everything I could say about trans rights, the inherent dignity possessed by every human, and the complete indignity of the current administration’s relentless attacks on marginalized people of all stripes, I want to say something about safety and international travel.

When you arrive in a country, you present your passport to a border control agent. You have a quick conversation, they stamp your passport, and then you go on your way.

Interacting with foreign border control agents is usually boring but it’s an interaction infused with the possibility of, err, excitement, shall we say. If the passport I present claims my name is Theresa, has a photo of me that looks like the one above, and has a gender marker of M, that’s strange. If a border control agent finds this to be particularly strange—and/or if local laws are sufficiently bad—I may be pulled aside, interrogated, detained, searched, refused entry to the country, or worse.

It’s not just border agents, though. In some countries, you have to present your passport to hotel staff when checking in. If the hotel staff can’t believe or trust the document they’re looking at, you may have trouble checking in or staying there. And, of course, there’s always the possibility of needing to interact with other authorities for any number of reasons during your visit.

Here’s what Grace Lavery had to say the other day:

Hunter Schafer’s response to the indignity of being listed as M on her new passport, has been both wise and inspiring. Trans women being constantly presented in the media as over-sensitive whiners, it was so important that she lasered in on the most important part of the issue: no TSA officer is going to believe that she is a man, meaning that she will need to explain elements of her life—very likely involving intimate disclosures, descriptions of genitals, etc.—every time she crosses a national border.

That’s not got anything to do with validity or whether trans women are women or whatever an adult human female is this week. It is a basic reflection of the fact that these words are given meanings in contexts, and when the state asserts a right both to determine a person’s sex and make it visible as a basic condition of civil personhood, then bodies are going to be invaded, and everyone will lose a little more of our bodily autonomy. Hunter Schafer is the fucking queen.

The basic duty of government is to protect its citizens. One of the reasons we carry passports in the first place is because they enable you to avail yourself of consular services and the protection of your government while overseas. And yet this policy change makes the world demonstrably less safe for me than it was under the status quo ante EO.

But, of course, that’s the point. My safety, and the safety of every other trans person, is not a priority of this administration. Quite the opposite.