In 2019, a young, trans girl was told to strip in order to board her flight by North Carolina TSA employees. Now, she’s taking her traumatic story to the courts.
Plaintiff Jamii Erway filed an 11-page complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina on Monday which alleges that the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and an anonymous employee violated Erway’s constitutional rights and intentionally inflicted emotional distress.
Erway, who was only 15 years old at the time of the incident, was going through airport security at the Raleigh-Durham International Airport when she was stopped for an “anomaly” detected in her groin area by body scanners. This is a common reading for trans and nonbinary individuals—but while Erway explained to workers that she was trans, TSA officers refused to scan her again, opting instead to call over a supervisor to search Erway.
“According to the lawsuit, [the officer] told Erway that she would need to take her to a private room in order to ‘feel up in there,'” them. reports on the filing. “When Erway protested, [the officer] said she would not be allowed to leave the checkpoint until she complied with the request.”
The officer then reportedly told Erway’s mother to force her child to comply with the strip search. When her mother refused to subject her child to the unreasonable and traumatic procedure, Erway and her family were told they could not fly, and had to rent a car to drive the 600 miles home.
Erway’s report of the TSA workers demands directly goes against TSA protocol. In the case that a person’s body does not conform to stereotypical definitions of gender, airport employees are directed only to do a brief pat-down of the passenger. They explicitly prohibit strip searches and direct contact with travelers’ genitalia.
These rules apply for all passengers—including, and perhaps even more importantly, for children.
The mistreatment of trans travels by airport staff has and continues to be a widespread issue. Around 5 percent of civil rights complaints against TSA from January 2016 to April 2019 were about screenings of transgender people, according to ProPublica. That doesn’t include instances in which a formal complaint was not filed.
To put that in perspective, it’s estimated that 0.6 percent of American adults are transgender.
Erway’s story has renewed the demands for a re-haul of TSA protocol that would include trans-safe screenings. In 2020, Representative Kathleen Rice (D-New York) introduced the Screening with Dignity Act, intended to make flying easier for trans people and people with religious headwear.
