And it made me acutely aware of the barriers trans people might face while traveling. ![]() I’d heard of plenty of trans people getting harassed by airport security, and I wondered what other trans men and transmasculine folks do, especially if they haven’t gotten the gender marker or name on their documents changed. It was quite easily the most unexpected but perhaps the most appropriate going away gift I got.Īs Keyes and I headed to the San Francisco airport to begin our journey in Asia, I was unsure what to do with it. When I asked about the packers they had in stock-the cost, the styles-my friend said, “Well, I have one the store gave me, but I’ve never used it. Really, I told myself, I was lingering for Keyes, who identifies as a non-binary trans man. Yet, during the course of my stay in San Francisco, I visited a friend of mine who worked at Good Vibrations, a feminist, sex-positive, queer- and trans-friendly sex toy store with several locations in the Bay Area.Īs my friend gave my travel buddy Keyes and I the grand tour, I stood before the packers with curiosity. I’d just bought my first binder a few months before and had begun wearing it with more regularity.Īnd while I’d made plans to potentially pass as a man while I traveled (for safety as much as anything), I hadn’t planned to bring a packer. When people called me “ma’am,” I felt a knee-jerk rejection, and when asked about my pronouns, I’d begun to offer both “they/them” and “she/her” as options. I knew I was somewhere on the non-binary spectrum and had settled for a while on the term “gender non-conforming woman,” though more and more I simply called myself “gender non-conforming.” At the time (and perhaps still), my gender identity was in flux. This all began last May, when I was passing through San Francisco on my way out of the country for a yearlong adventure around the world. How would explain myself when they pulled out my soft, heavy, penis-shaped packer? I wasn’t doing anything wrong.īut as they unzipped the lowest pocket of my pack, plastic gloves on, and asked me if they could search my bag, I braced myself. ![]() My language was limited, and as the bag went back to the conveyor belt, I started running through worst-case scenarios: With my limited Japanese and their limited English, how would I explain the thing I was carrying in my bag-the thing I knew they were looking at, the thing they couldn’t quite understand? It was one of the few words I knew-along with some basic greetings and a handful of numbers. When the security guard in the Tokyo Narita Airport asked to put my bag through the X-ray machine a second time, I couldn’t help but tense up.
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