Are you traveling by air this weekend? Prepare to provide the airlines with your birth date and gender beginning Saturday, so they can see if you’re a terrorist trying to board a plane, stupidly, under your own name. What’s this? You don’t conform to those square gender check box norms? Then we imagine you should expect a full cavity search, in the interest of national security.
Julian Edward Domain
I can’t leave the country or even get a safe DL in many other states because of these zealots, Separation of church and state now!
strumpetwindsock
@Julian Edward Domain:
Erm…
I think this IS the state’s doing, darling.
Specifically the bean-counters and pencil-pushers.
Julian Edward Domain
@strumpetwindsock: Where do you think the state gets those that create this crap, weho? Those that don’t live in my shoes don’t realize it is those that are hateful making sure we don’t get fair treatment. And yes you have obviously been dead for the last 8 years not to realize the civil service has been stacked to the side of zealots through the neocons use of those pesky outside contractors. So no, it is those christofacists creating hurdles to my freedom of movement.
Alexander
None of this stupidity is going to change until people en mass just start refusing to fly.
hyhybt
I seriously doubt this has anything to do with religion at all, much less that they came up with a policy of more carefully identifying passengers just to inconvenience *you*.
Julian Edward Domain
@hyhybt: I’m not the only person affected by this. And of all places I should be able to vent my spleen about this dangerous herd mentality that is being exploited by the christofacists. I don’t really care what you have not experienced or more than likely never observed in what our society is morphing into, but history shows that we have been experiencing precursors to some serious repression. By pointing out the little erosions I’m hoping to get people to prevent a landslide.
hyhybt
@Julian Edward Domain: None of which has anything whatever to do with airport security.
M Shane
2No. 6 · Julian Edward Domain ‘little erosions'” ; that’s an understatement! What is going on in America is not disimilar to what the Jews experienced in pre Nazi Germany. It has been one of my major fears with pushing “marriage ” instead of “civil unions” .. Gay people here may very well be cutting our throats with what the religious facists in this country feel is a major assult on their beliefs..
This country allowed Bush to push us over into what was very nearly a Nazi coup. Civil rights were denied to people en masse, nobody paid attention because they’re “towelheads” . Reality has shown that 28 of 33 people held without charges or habius corpus were innocent. This is many hundreds of innocent human beings.
The makings of this is still present. It is not that distanced from counting us in the census.
The fact is that these rednecks are perfectly stupid enough to easily make scapegoats of us. This terror is not over in the U.S.
Cyrus Boone
Wait a minute…
The whole point of this is so security can reduce the number of people who have to deal with the hassle of a secondary screening. It is a simple process filter based on information that is already freely available.
In fact, this policy is about as invasive as showing your driver’s license to the doorman of a nightclub. How is that oppressing anyone with “square gender check box norms?”
Also a secondary screening is pretty far removed from a cavity search.
Exercise some perspective.
Julian Edward Domain
@hyhybt: How we as americans interpret our rights in security situations has eroded away from the bill of rights. And my transgender status being declared in yet another situation makes my life less safe.
Do you actually believe there will not be people abusing authority to torment trans individuals let see let me count the ways, denial of seating, air marshall harassment, lost luggage, excessive security attention, bad seating, poor service, that scratches the surface of how these feel they can treat us. And if we dare identify as our true gender we will be arrested! Do you want do announce you are queer before you get on a plane. Will you be worrying about the homophobic frat boys in line behind you bashing you during your entire trip? you bet! You think this will not erode to something more drastic? The borders are already getting fenced and you just want to let the christofacists continue with their plan of world domination ignoring the the loss of freedoms. No, this will not make us safer it has no other purpose than baby steps to the erosion of civil rights. I have no idea why you think you know more about my world than I do or even why you think this will never affect you. I remember how I was treated when I lived as a lesbian and the difference in how I was treated after I got my identification changed to my true gender was substantial. This does matter!
M Shane
Some perspective, if you look at the history of the whole “terror” fright escapade is that 9/11 was clearly no more than the bogus excuse to start an unprovoked preemptory War which caused the deaths of thousands of innocent people and put the U.S in more danger thsan anything possibly could. This was part of the “Wolfowitz Doctrine” 1992 to put fear into everyone. Goerbels even recomended that the easiest way to control a populace was to put them in fear of a threat and to convince them to give up their freedoms in the name of defense. The Patriot Act was the result of an extensive lie imposed on people in the U.S. to put and keep everyone in constant fear. There never was a need for these excessive measures. Of all the phone tapes they did they didn’t turn up one usefull peice of information.
Fear of forces outside; ” the axis of evil” fear of forces inside; the evil sodomites.
epluribusunumjk
Meh…no biggie. We do live in a society after all; sometimes, we just got to grin a bear it. If not, then next time take Amtrak or the QE2.
hyhybt
@epluribusunumjk: Well, you’re too late for that: the QE2’s been retired 🙂
damon459
I’ve never been on a plane in my life and you couldn’t pay me to get on one.