Transexual TSA screeners are no longer permitted to perform pat-downs on passengers and are instead being limited to other duties. Individual airport security screeners report receiving a memo about this change, and a TSA spokesperson confirms the shift in policy to me.

In compliance with Executive Order 14168, Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government, published January 20, 2025, TSA has rescinded a policy from 2021 regarding transitioning and transgender officers. Male Transportation Security Officers will conduct pat down procedures on male passengers and female Transportation Security Officers will conduct pat down procedures on female passengers.

The change is linked to a Trump administration executive order defining gender in binary terms – and a requirement that male passengers receive pat downs from male employees, while female passengers receive them from female employees.

• Some TSA screeners feel restrictions on their duty assignment based on self-identified gender is discriminatory and a violation of their basic rights.

• While others feel that passenger discomfort matters – the screener will literally be patting down their genitals and some will feel uneasy being touched up by an officer who presents as same sex but was born or previously identified as a different gender (and may be in a state of transition).

Passengers, of course, already had the option to request a different officer if uncomfortable. Not all passengers may know this or may feel comfortable asserting themselves in the face of authority in a high stress environment. And they may not even be aware of the identified gender of the officer screening them.

Requiring same sex pat downs hasn’t prevented sexually-oriented abuse scandals at TSA in the past. For instance, at Denver airport it was revealed that attractive passengers were being flagged for additional screening by same-gender employees.

Ironically, what TSA employee were doing in that case was incorrectly identifying a passenger’s gender on screening devices, so that an employee would need to ‘clear the anomaly’ in the areas of a passenger’s body that didn’t appear as the machine expected.