Disrupting Links: Gender, Identity and Security

This paper is about, as the title indic­ates, dis­rupt­ing cer­tain per­vas­ive and seem­ingly obvi­ous links.^[1] First, the link between gender and iden­tity, wherein gender is assumed to be a stable, reli­able determ­in­ant of an iden­tity that also assumed to be fixed. Fol­low­ing from the assumed fix­ity of iden­tity comes a link to secur­ity, wherein the more pre­cise we can be in determ­in­ing iden­tity, the bet­ter secur­ity appar­at­uses, in this case those found in U.S. air­ports, can func­tion (as more and bet­ter inform­a­tion leads to more per­fect secur­ity). The exper­i­ence of trans­gender people exposes the tenu­ous nature of these links, as non-​normative bod­ies and appear­ances con­found their basic assumptions.

In an art­icle describ­ing his exper­i­ence of hav­ing a heart trans­plant, L’Intrus, Jean-​Luc Nancy presents a num­ber of intriguing ideas about iden­tity, and spe­cific­ally iden­tity as it relates to the body.^[2] After find­ing that his ail­ing heart had become a stranger to him, and had really always been a stranger, he comes to the notion that, and I quote, “The intrus [the intruder or the stranger] is no other than me, my self; none other than man him­self. No other than the one, the same, always identical to itself and yet that is never done with alter­ing itself. At the same time sharp and spent, stripped bare and over-​equipped, intrud­ing upon the world and upon itself: a dis­quiet­ing upsurge of the strange, conatus of an infin­ite excres­cence.”^[3]

In other words, for Nancy, we are always – in a sense – grow­ing out from ourselves; iden­tity is in no tan­gible way stable or con­crete over time. Nor is iden­tity redu­cible to any one part of the body; not even some­thing as seem­ingly cent­ral as the heart is in any way con­stitutive of the self.

If one takes these ideas as a premise for under­stand­ing iden­tity, then prac­tices of iden­tity veri­fic­a­tion – as mani­fes­ted in secur­ity appar­at­uses – seek the impossible. If even at the level of the body, we are not con­sist­ent or unit­ary selves, what hap­pens when through the secur­it­iz­a­tion of iden­tity, parts of ourselves and our bod­ies are singled out as determ­in­ants of identity?

The answer, in brief, is that con­tra­dic­tions and con­flicts emerge, per­haps not so much for the state or reg­u­lat­ory agency, but for the people who do not fit into the rigid, norm­at­ive cat­egor­ies which under­gird secur­ity apparatuses.

This is pre­cisely the exper­i­ence of trans­gendered people when they pass through secur­ity at the air­port and in the vast major­ity of their inter­ac­tions with the reg­u­lat­ory appar­at­uses of the state. Gender, whether appre­hen­ded through an iden­tity doc­u­ment, an individual’s present­a­tion or a bod­ily con­fig­ur­a­tion, is taken to not only to be a stable cat­egory, but also a reli­able determ­in­ant of an individual’s iden­tity, of who they are or are not.

The Secure Flight and Whole Body Ima­ging pro­grams, imple­men­ted by the U.S. Trans­port­a­tion Secur­ity Admin­is­tra­tion in 2009 and 2010 respect­ively, illus­trate the impossib­il­ity of pre­dict­ing with abso­lute cer­tainty that some­thing about a per­son, even some­thing ostens­ibly sourced from or lodged in the body such as gender, will stay the same over time.

In an excel­lent example of what Mari­ana Val­verde and Michael Mopas have called “tar­geted gov­ernance,” these pro­grams seek to lessen poten­tial risks to air­crafts by attempt­ing to achieve “per­fect inform­a­tion” about pas­sen­gers before they board^[4] – with the under­ly­ing assump­tion that the more inform­a­tion you have about a per­son, the less risk he or she poses – iden­tity, for the TSA, is one of the “known knowns.”

Secure Flight requires pas­sen­gers to provide air­lines with their name, date of birth and gender prior to their arrival at the air­port, so that this inform­a­tion can be run against the No Fly List and Ter­ror­ist Watch List for poten­tial matches. Gender, it is argued, helps to reduce the pos­sib­il­ity of false matches, since “many names are gender neut­ral.”^[5] When pas­sen­gers check in, the inform­a­tion they provided is checked against their passport.

The Advanced Ima­ging Tech­no­logy pro­gram (the body scan­ners), in con­trast, is not an expli­cit site of iden­tity veri­fic­a­tion but provides a way, once an individual’s iden­tity has been checked and cleared, to ensure that they are not car­ry­ing any­thing on their body that could poten­tially harm the plane or its pas­sen­gers. [At the moment, where this tech­no­logy has been imple­men­ted, it is not man­dat­ory to pass through the scan­ners, but the altern­at­ive is an “enhanced pat down.”] How­ever, for trav­el­ers who have atyp­ical bod­ies, the body scan­ner serves as yet another place where their iden­tity is chal­lenged, as TSA agents are see­ing things in the body scans that they don’t expect to be there. So, for example, someone whose gender present­a­tion is female may have a penis, or someone with a male present­a­tion might have breasts.

Gender, through both of these pro­grams is effect­ively secur­it­ized, mean­ing that in order for an indi­vidual to pass through secur­ity without incid­ent, they must have norm­at­ively gendered appear­ances and bod­ies (or a let­ter from a doc­tor explain­ing why their appear­ances and bod­ies are dif­fer­ent as the TSA and some trans­gender rights groups advise).

Mark Salter points out that air­ports “con­di­tion and nor­mal­ize par­tic­u­lar iden­tit­ies.“^[6] More spe­cific­ally, in an exam­in­a­tion of effects of national secur­ity iden­ti­fic­a­tion policies on trans­gender people, Toby Beauchamp has shown how sur­veil­lance sys­tems are “deeply rooted in the main­ten­ance and enforce­ment of norm­at­ively gendered bod­ies, beha­vi­ors and iden­tit­ies.”^[7] When a per­son doesn’t meet norm­at­ive expect­a­tions about their gender — when their doc­u­ments do not match their appear­ance, when their bod­ies con­found norm­at­ive assump­tions — it pro­duces an anom­aly, and in the highly secur­it­ized envir­on­ment of the air­port, an anom­aly is an event. The anom­aly is imme­di­ately per­ceived as a poten­tial threat. Here are just a couple of examples of how this can play out in practice.

There is one case in which a “male trans­gender attor­ney was detained for two hours on his way to an out of town court hear­ing by TSA agents because his intim­ate ana­tomy, as indic­ated by a whole-​body image scan and a sub­sequent pat down, did not con­form to agents’ expect­a­tions of what a man’s body should look or feel like.” Dur­ing his deten­tion, he “was sub­jec­ted to humi­li­at­ing per­sonal ques­tions and com­ments” about the his­tory of his body and his iden­tity. But that’s not all: a bomb appraisal unit was called in to eval­u­ate him as a poten­tial threat. Even­tu­ally, he was allowed to board a later flight. But he was advised to carry “a physician’s let­ter regard­ing his trans­gender status whenever he flies” so that the situ­ation could be resolved more quickly the next time.^[8]

In another example, when my co-​author men­tioned to a friend that he was work­ing on this art­icle, the friend revealed that the same thing had happened to him: after walk­ing through the body scan­ner, and then under­go­ing an “enhanced” pat down, he was taken to a small room where agents announced they had found a “gon­adal anom­aly” that had to be invest­ig­ated as a poten­tial threat to the secur­ity of the air­plane before he could board.

This exper­i­ence is har­row­ing for any­one with non-​normative appear­ances and bod­ies. Blog­ger Kath­er­ine Cross provides a telling narrative:

I escor­ted my belong­ings, the worn leather boots that could the­or­et­ic­ally con­tain a bomb, the belt that could the­or­et­ic­ally con­tain a trig­ger mech­an­ism. Or cocaine. My hand­bag full of fem­in­ist lit­er­at­ure (now there’s some­thing explos­ive). That was when motion caught my eye and I saw some­thing omin­ously tower­ing over the old fash­ioned metal detector. The roun­ded slate grey hulk of an x-​ray machine scan­ning men and women in a sur­ren­der­ing pos­i­tion, arms held unthreat­en­ingly high above their heads. I swal­lowed thickly won­der­ing if the jig was up, if I would at last have to face trans­pho­bia at the air­port, if I would have to sit in a room listen­ing to imper­tin­ent ques­tions about what was in my knick­ers. ^[9]

This is not a unique exper­i­ence for trans­gendered indi­vidu­als. In prac­tic­ally any engage­ment with the reg­u­lat­ory or bur­eau­cratic appar­at­uses of the state, con­flicts and con­tra­dic­tions over the mean­ing of gender present ser­i­ous chal­lenges. As Cur­rah explains,

Sex changes. When some indi­vidu­als cross bor­ders, walk into a gov­ern­ment office to apply for bene­fits, get a driver’s license, go to prison, sign up for select­ive ser­vice, try to get mar­ried, or have any inter­ac­tion with any arm of the state, the legal sex of some people can and often does switch from male to female, or female to male. To com­plic­ate mat­ters even more, almost every state agency — from fed­eral to muni­cipal — has the author­ity to decide its own rules for sex clas­si­fic­a­tion. The lack of a uni­form stand­ard for clas­si­fy­ing people as male or female means that some state agen­cies will recog­nize the new gender of people who wish to change their gender and some will not. For most people, this does not appear to be a prob­lem. For oth­ers, it is.^[10]

Or as one woman testi­fy­ing before a New York City Coun­cil hear­ing put it, “I do not suf­fer from gender dys­phoria. I suf­fer from bur­eau­cratic dys­phoria. My ID does not match my appear­ance. I worry every time I apply for a job, every time I author­ize a credit card check, every time I buy a plane ticket, every time I buy a beer at the corner deli. I have changed my name but my gender con­tin­ues to be offi­cially and bur­eau­crat­ic­ally M.” ^[11]

The machine, in the case of the air­port, is not just the body scan­ner (as omin­ous as it is) but the whole secur­ity “assemblage” at the air­port. Iden­tity veri­fic­a­tion prac­tices at the air­port are part of a vast net­work and great machine-​like sys­tem where data is stored and cross-​referenced, where agents patrol and keep watch, where our bod­ies and belong­ings are scru­tin­ized to an aston­ish­ingly high degree. In our think­ing about this, my co-​author and I have turned to the concept of “assemblage” from Deleuze and Guat­tari. Assemblages can be under­stood broadly as “func­tional con­glom­er­a­tions of ele­ments” in which each ele­ment gains mean­ing in its rela­tion to the oth­ers in the assemblage (Cur­rier 2003: 203). The secur­ity assemblage at the air­port is a con­ver­gence of many parts, from tech­no­lo­gies and secur­ity strategies to bod­ies and social norms; it is, like the air­port itself, “a messy sys­tem of sys­tems, embed­ded within numer­ous net­works and social spheres.”^[12]

This machine, or assemblage, fet­ish­izes and pro­duces a par­tic­u­lar con­cep­tion of gender by dis­reg­ard­ing its socially-​produced char­ac­ter, assum­ing it to be nat­ural and immut­able, and mak­ing it a key facet of secur­ity; this is also true for iden­tity in gen­eral. Indeed, through the expan­sion of bio­met­ric tech­no­lo­gies, it is assumed that the body holds the ulti­mate truth about iden­tity. Of the pos­sible epi­stem­o­lo­gical sources of human iden­tity — what one is (a body), what one says about one­self (a nar­rat­ive), what one does (a per­form­ance), and what one has in hand (a token) — it is the is–ness of the body that reigns supreme in the quest for per­fect inform­a­tion. ^[13]

How­ever, epi­stem­o­lo­gic­ally speak­ing and as the exper­i­ence of trans­gendered indi­vidu­als shows, such assured know­ledge never really pos­sible. The link between iden­tity and secur­ity which is so assured for the TSA, is unten­able at best. How­ever, the con­sequences of this are not felt by the TSA but by those who are forced to fit into the cat­egor­ies which the state recog­nizes (even if those cat­egor­ies are mutu­ally con­tra­dict­ory). When mean­ings are con­tested, as Hobbes says, it is author­ity, not truth, that makes the law.

Nancy states that the “I” always finds itself caught in the bat­tle­ments and gaps of tech­nical pos­sib­il­it­ies.” ^[14] With this, he was refer­ring to the tech­no­lo­gies which sus­tain or pro­long life, but it also opens up think­ing about what hap­pens to the “I” in the secur­it­iz­a­tion of gender. The “I” is, above all, affixed to the body; a body that is norm­at­ively gendered and a body that does not change.

This entry was posted on 3 October 2011 at 7:27 am and is filed under Critical Legal Conference 2011, Critical Legal Education, Gender. Published under Creative Commons (CC) Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License: You are welcome to share and remix this content for non-commercial purposes. Kindly acknowledge and hyperlink the source.