Highlighting that reality, Petosky said one of the agents told her to “get back into the machine like a man”.
She missed her flight.
At 4:08 p.m. on Monday, a transgender writer and producer named Shadi Petosky started tweeting about an air-travel nightmare.
In her tweets about the situation, Petosky said that TSA agents calibrated the scanner for a woman, and the machine flagged an anomaly – “my penis”.
The image below shows what such an anomaly would look like on an airport scanner’s screen.
“I thought they would know how to talk to transgender people if this ever happened”, she said. Have a sandwich. Have an unexpected day in Miami but I’ll make that fun. “More often we hear about trans men having trouble with TSA, but occasionally we hear about trans women”. Are you a man or a woman?’
Petosky, who referred to the incident as “denigrating”, tweeting a photo of herself after she had clearly been crying, is not the first traveler to highlight the difficulties in navigating the TSA’s black-and-white gender policies.
She said she didn’t want to make a woman touch her groin area but felt uncomfortable if a man performed the search. Her version of the airport events could not be independently confirmed by NBC News.
During her experience she had two full pat-downs, had her luggage disassembled and was detained in a holding room.
Petosky, the founder of the interactive media company Puny Entertainment, tweeted that she flies all the time and did not expect this. “I am so dumb”.
She added: ‘This has nothing to with my sex.
Michael Silverman, executive director of the New York-based Transgender Legal Defense & Education Fund, said his office has received numerous complaints about TSA agents mistreating transgender passengers in recent years, including allegations that the travelers were patted down by agents of the opposite gender. I like tons of people with my body.
In a statement to the influential gay magazine The Advocate, a TSA spokesman said: “Our officers are trained to properly screen members of the transgender community”.
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.
The TSA released a statement this morning saying that after watching closed circuit television video of the incident and considering “other available information”, agency officials concluded that the Orlando officers did nothing wrong.
‘Supervisory personnel and a Passenger Support Specialist participated in the screening to ensure guidelines were met’.