Oh, Canada: Your Law Barring Trans People from Airplanes Is Not Supported by ... - Huffington Post (blog)

[PaperMan]

Oh, Canada: Your Law Barring Trans People from Airplanes Is Not Supported by ... - Huffington Post (blog)

This week bloggers exposed a regulation passed in July that could effectively bar transgender, transsexual, and gender-variant people from boarding airplanes in Canada. While it is still unclear whether the regulations have affected any trans people at the airport, the policy as it is written is disquieting -- and asks us to think about how gendered documents affect movement.

There are two clauses of concern in Canada's "Identity Screening Regulations":

5.2 (1) An air carrier shall not transport a passenger if ...

© the passenger does not appear to be of the gender indicated on the identification he or she presents; or

(d) the passenger presents more than one form of identification and there is a major discrepancy between those forms of identification.

Crossing Borders

In a recent report, Human Rights Watch explains, "For many trans people, one of the most distressing consequences to having the wrong gender in their identity documents is that they repeatedly have no option but to reveal to perfect strangers ... details of a particularly intimate aspect of their private lives, namely that they are transgender."

International travel can be a high-risk experience for trans people, as it calls for multiple identity checks in high-security environments -- namely airports.

Paisley Currah and Tara Mulqueen explain that at airports, expectations of gender often reflect the "common sense" that gender is an unchanging biometric characteristic, or

that there is a perfectly harmonious relationship between the sex classification an individual is assigned at birth based on a visual inspection of the body (what one was), one's current "biological sex" (what one is), one's gender identity (what one says one is), one's gender presentation (what one looks like to others) and the gender classification on the particular identity document one


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