Shadi Petosky, a writer and producer, tweeted about the ordeal over her anatomical “anomaly” as it happened, saying she missed her American Airlines flight on Monday due to the incident.
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Shadi Petosky, who runs a Los Angeles interactive entertainment studio, said she was trying to fly out of Orlando global Airport but was stopped after entering the scanner. “When I stepped out, they said they had detected an anomaly”, she said in a phone interview Tuesday. At one point, she was left in a room by herself with an officer holding the door shut.
In a statement released early Tuesday morning, the TSA defended its officers’ actions.
Calls to the airport press office were not returned.
An American Airlines spokesman told The Times that Petosky would be placed on a new flight free of charge, though Petosky said on Twitter that an airline worker at the airport had charged her card. The National Center for Transgender Equality has long provided guidance for transgender people about how to handle these situations, noting that they have the right to a pat-down from an agent of the same gender in a private screening area with a witness of their choosing. “I have never been flagged in the groin before and didn’t want to make a female officer touch there, but didn’t want a man to do the pat down”, she said.
The Transportation Security Administration recommends transgender travelers travel under names and genders reflected on government identification and to request a private screening or speak to a supervisor while trekking through security. But her experience should not stand out as a unique example, but merely the most recent of too many.
After what appeared to be a few moments in detention, Petosky tweeted that a TSA agent named Bramlet told her to go back through the agency’s body-scanning machine “as a man or it was going to be a problem”. According to a National Transgender Discrimination Survey, 17% of trans people reported being harassed at the airport or on an airplane and 11% said they’d been denied equal treatment.
Richards said she did not file a complaint against the TSA in 2013 because she simply wanted to forget about the experience. It’s hard to see whether the TSA actually changes any policies around the flagging of transgender travelers. “After examining closed circuit TV video and other available information, TSA has determined that the evidence shows our officers followed TSA’s strict guidelines”, he told the Advocate. This has to do with the perception of my sex/gender by the TSA agent.
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What followed was gruesome detail about how her experience being profiled, humiliated, and forced to miss her flight by airport security, all because she is transgender. She was told that she would have to be physically searched by an agent and was asked whether she would prefer a male or female TSA agent to conduct the patdown.
