Here We Go Again-Transwoman Denied Entry At Dubai Airport

We've had increasing documentation of incidents in which transpeople have been denied entry at world airports in various nations or are harassed by customs officials when they do.

It was one of the reasons why the US State Department changed its policy last summer and allowed transpeople to acquire passports that have gender markers consistent with current gender presentation rather than being based on birth gender.


It was also one of the reasons international trans people became alarmed when the new Thai start up airline PC Air announced with the hiring of of several trans flight attendants that they were going to have them wear specialized gold colored ID that outed them to customers and custom officials.

PinayTG chronicles another story of a transperson who unexpectedly found herself being harassed and denied entry into Dubai due to mismatched ID.

All Jen Janice wanted to do before heading back to the Netherlands after a business trip to Kuwait was take a few days to visit friends in the UAE.    That side trip was one that opened her up to discrimination and disrespect..

Post Op Transpeople Denied Entry Into Egypt

One of the things that is a common problem for transpeople no matter where we reside on this planet is our identity documents.   Far too many national governments instead of making the process as drama free as possible, throw up roadblocks to doing so.

That inability to have identity documents that match our gender presentation can cause complications in our lives and open us up to embarrassment, discrimination or transphobic harassment.  

When we have to travel internationally, passports or ID's that don't match the current gender presentation can subject us to denial of entry into the country we wish to visit, harassment or worse by customs officials.

Transpinays and other Asian transwomen are reporting that when they travel to Hong Kong, they are being harassed by customs officials there


There was a recent example of what can happen according to an online article on the Al Masryalyoum website .

A post op Arab transwoman and a transman were both recently denied entry into Egypt recently.   They had arrived at the Cairo airport on a flight from Amman, Jordan and the Cairo airport officials noticed a 22 year old transwoman of 'outstanding beauty' disembarking from the arriving international flight.

When she presented her passport, it still had her old male birth name in it.  She told customs officials that she had undergone GRS six weeks before but hadn’t been able to modify her passport data.

On the same flight was a 19-year-old transman holding a passport with his old female birth name and because of the same problem.   He'd undergone surgery and also wasn’t able to update his passport in time for his trip.

Both passengers stories checked out, but they were denied entry into Egypt and sent back to Jordan

This situation is one reason why the US State Department made the decision they did last summer to allow transpeople to do gender marker changes on US passports without requiring surgical intervention.

Transsexuality Is A Medical Condition, Not A Community Identifier

There are times that Cathryn Platine and I are on opposite sides of debates in this community, but every now and then she says something that I just have to say amen too and I'm in lockstep agreement with her.

We've had a lot of sniping going on in the past two weeks about who is more 'transsexual than thou'.  In addition to not liking the heated internecine rhetoric going on between wings of the trans community,  I also agree and have since the 90's that the trans community shouldn't be using a medical condition (transsexuality) as a community identifier, much less a political one.

But Cathryn was more blunt about it than the diplomatic and historical context approach I took in that post.

Cathryn Platine: "Transgender" is an identity, a political motivated one. "Transsexuality" is a medical condition, one does not identify as a medical condition unless they wish to appear a fool. If you have cancer you are not a "cancer". If you have an ulcer you are not identified as being an ulcer American.

Amen, Cathy.

Transsexuality is a medical condition.  Transgender is a community identifier.   Granted it was coined by Virginia Prince who let's get real, hated on transwomen, but the word for political purposes does the trick in describing the vast array of gender variant humans.

Can we do a much better job in pointing out the differences between transsexuals, intersex people, crossdressers and genderqueer people?    Yes we can and should.    Do we need to do a better job of calling out the transwomen who hate on crossdressers and vice versa?  Damn straight we do.. 

But as I have said ad nauseum, our enemies aren't each other.   Our enemies are in the Religious Reich and the conservative movement who hate all of us irregardless of how we identify under the transgender political umbrella.  

If you don't like transgender, do what I do and simply call it the trans community.    But stop hating on each other and get it through your thick heads that transsexuality is a medical condition, not a community identifier.

TransGriot Note:  transgenderist was coined by Virginia Prince.   Transgender is a 1990's derivative of that term