Bryn’s story is part of Broadly and VICELAND’s Traveling While Trans series. This story was told to and edited for clarity by Diana Tourjee.
I’m from North Carolina, but I don’t live there anymore. My parents have lived there since I was a teenager and, in my experience, it can be a cruel place for people who act faggy or seem feminine. That’s why, when I traveled back to North Carolina for the first time since I transitioned from male to female, I was nervous.
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The physical transition process itself was surprisingly easy. I expected that it would take a long time for my hormone replacement regimen to kick in and alter my appearance—but after a few short months, I found that strangers in public were seeing me as a woman; I was referred to as “miss” and “ma’am” for the first time in my life.
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Last year, North Carolina became a notoriously transphobic state after the passage of HB2, a law that strictly forbade trans people like me from doing normal, necessary things like using the bathroom. But I remember going back to North Carolina before the HB2 debacle began.
It was early in my transition and, like I said, the changes had come on quickly. My family expected me home for the holidays—so I went back to the South for the first time since I’d transitioned. A friend came with me, but even still, I was nervous.
Travel can easily become troublesome for transgender people. For some reason, people can’t seem to wrap their minds around the fact that trans women like me really exist. I was a bit nervous when I went to the LaGuardia airport in New York for my departing flight.
Airports are weird places for everyone; who wants to be scrutinized by some random TSA agent? But for trans people, the security at airports is a special kind of hell. Our bodies don’t always make sense to the people who work there, and we may seem suspect just because we’re trans. A few of my friends have been groped or prodded by TSA agents, and I know others have even been detained.
Gratefully, my experience at LaGuardia was fine: I went through security without incident. I’d just started hormones, but I was being perceived as a woman. I really wasn’t expecting it to happen so fast, but it did. So while my body finally began to look the way it should, there were a few other things that hadn’t changed yet. People assumed I was a cisgender woman, but my license appeared to belong to some dude with a beard.
While I was in Charlotte, my ID was the only source of my anxiety. I went to the bar with my friends and got carded. “No, miss, I need your ID,” one waitress said. I smiled at her and after a second her Southern eyes widened in shock. I kept asking my friends to buy my drinks for me. Other than awkward moments like this, my time in North Carolina was fine; it was the trip home, through Southern airport security, that I was really worried about.
People assumed I was a cisgender woman, but my license appeared to belong to some dude with a beard.
New York TSA has seen everything, but I was certain that I was going to get strip-searched, or experience some other humiliating torture at the hands of the TSA in North Carolina.
I waited in line nervously. As the people in front of me began to clear away, I could hear a familiar, comforting voice ahead. The agent who asked for my ID sounded like a cartoon version of a Southern twink. “ID and boarding pass?” he asked. I smiled at this frosted-tipped, pierced-ear TSA agent with relief.
He looked at the treacherous ID and put his hand to his chest. “Oh honey,” he said, giving me a look that screamed “I’m sorry.” Then, he waved me through without making me get scanned by the full body X-ray machine. I looked back at him and said, “Thank you.” His nme tag said Matthew, and I’ll never forget him.
Traveling While Trans is a sister series to VICELAND’s new show Twiz & Tuck, which follows the lives of a gender fluid person and his transgender best friend as the duo travel and take in all that is weird and wonderful along the way. Airs Mondays at 10:30 on VICELAND.
