I heard a pretty distressing news story this week. Apparently one TSA (the airport security people) employee just assaulted another one. Why? The second one had been teasing the first about the size of his penis after seeing it in a staff training demonstration of new security equipment. The story is here.

I’ll let you sit with this one for a second. They were testing new airport security scanner equipment  that is able to look through your clothing and actually see what your genitalia look like. The idea is, eventually, to replace or augment existing scanners with these machines in airports. Perhaps more disturbingly, these machines have been in major airports since 2007. According to this Fox News article, written this past December, they’re already used in six airports as the primary type of scanner. Call me old fashioned and prude, but I’d have liked to know about these machines before they were installed, not after.

I’m an avid reader of science fiction. This is the type of stuff that I’m used to seeing in books. Loss of privacy being sacrificed for the good of the city state? Big Brother is always watching? Par for the course, if you’re painting a picture of a totalitarian regime of the future. But in real life? This stuff isn’t supposed to happen.

For me as a trans person, this becomes all the more terrifying. See, my mind always goes to the worst case scenario. And the worst case scenario, the one that I’ve been playing over in my head repeatedly all day since hearing about this, is as follows: I show up to the airport security area, dutifully remove my shoes, belt, laptop, liquids, watch and ipod. They go into one box. I walk into another one—the new scanner. The way it’ll work is that one person will be scanning me while another, remotely, watches the images and then gives the person scanning me the ‘all clear.’ The idea is  that the person looking me in the eye isn’t the same one looking at my proverbial balls.

That’s the problem, though. I’ve got none, and this scanner will be able to show that. That in itself makes me uncomfortable. But what makes me more uncomfortable is the possibility that the person watching the images will say to the person scanning me something along the lines of “She’s fine,” or “You can clear her.” And the person scanning me will pause for a moment. They’ll look at me again, maybe call back to the person watching pictures and say “No, you don’t understand. You must be looking at the wrong picture.” Or they won’t, but they’ll look at me with a smirk of knowing, one that says everything they’re thinking.

Is this an issue of privacy? Yes. But for trans folks, it’s more than that. It’s an incredibly potent issue of safety. I can imagine a scenario where an incident like that happens, except the person looking at me or any other trans person is a huge homophobe. A homophobe who considers it their duty to inform me of the rules I’ve transgressed. These people exist, and I’m not so naïve as to think they don’t exist in airport security.  I don’t know whether I’ll ever run into one such officer of the law, but I know that trans people as a group will, and it’s scary to think about what comes next.

I get the need for security. I get that terrorism is a threat and there are weapons that aren’t detected by the regular scanners. And I get that airports need to be hyper vigilant to protect the folks flying. I agree with all that. But I don’t agree with the actions towards those goals that the people running the airports have made. I don’t agree with the whole hog sacrifice of everyone’s right to show their body to only the people they’ve chosen, not a random TSA employee. And while I agree that we all need to make sacrifices for the safety of our country, I’m not okay with the safety of trans people in this country being a sacrifice that is unacknowledged but is all too real. Terrorism or not, putting such an unwelcome, disproportionate burden on trans folks isn’t okay, and I don’t buy that this is the only way to guarantee safety. We can do better, and we must.