My Body, My Privacy
“It is a consequence of my passing for cisgender, more or less, that the person groping me has always been a woman, and while this has made the person less intimidating, it is only superficially better than being groped by a man.To be groped is to be groped, no matter who gropes you, after all.”
subsequently determine what appears to be normal or abnormal on my body. When stripped of clothes, my body’s ambiguous combination of gendered traits, like those of so many transgender bodies, turns the assumption that gender is a binary anatomical characteristic into an insolvable paradox. To the scanner, am I a woman or a man? Either way, some part of me will be identified as anomalous. When I had silicon prostheses, it was inevitably the breasts.
Upon exiting the scanner, I may have been asked if I consented to the subsequent “pat down” of my breasts, but since, as before, my consent was already guaranteed, the question would have been irrelevant.
If, for a moment, we disregard the formalism with which the law considers this matter, to have one’s breasts groped when consent is meaningless is sexual assault. It is sexual assault because it is a violation of my bodily autonomy specifically at a site where anatomy and sexuality interact. It is an act of violence, if not by causing physical injury, then by eliminating my agency as a person over whether or not I allow others to touch me sexually. That is, it negates a fundamental aspect of my personhood. This is true experientially, even as the courts consider this kind of search as being legally justified, and therefore not to be sexual assault. Sadly, having experienced both a sexual assault in high school and multiple searches of my breasts by TSA agents, I can testify that the distinction between being subjected to one or the other is primarily a matter of location. Both are about equally unpleasant, regardless of their differing motivations and legality.
The only real agency I was given each time my breasts were “patted down” was whether or not it was done in public. I have always chosen the public option, for two reasons. The first is that I assume the existence of potential spectators – no matter how much their eyes may be diverted – might function as a check on abuse. The second is that, since I am spiteful, I want the person feeling up my chest to feel self-conscious, even ashamed.
It is a consequence of my passing for cisgender, more or less, that the person groping me has always been a woman, and while this has made the person less intimidating, it is only superficially better than being groped by a man. To be groped is to be groped, no matter who gropes you, after all.
My partner’s experience with the TSA has been similarly bad. One day, when returning home from college, my partner––who is nonbinary and uses any pronouns––had his crotch identified as an area of suspicion by a scanner. If I had been there with him, I do not know how I would have reacted, but I do know that I was outraged when I heard about it.
The sheer extent of the violence transgender people experience from the TSA underscores the necessity for thinking about how we have, as a society, elevated the interests of national security over human safety. This is an issue that should not concern transgender people alone. The effective suspension of not only privacy but also bodily autonomy, at airport security checkpoints, necessarily endangers everyone. Its violence only becomes uniquely evident when the ambiguity of the transgender body is identified as a threat that requires action.
“What I propose, therefore, is very simple: it is nothing more than to think what we are doing.”
––Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition