The issues the TSA has with treating transgender or androgynous individuals is very related to the “Ethics in Design” article.  In the article, it is said that an automatic soap dispenser has difficulty recognizing a black person’s hand beneath it because the design was not tested on black users, nor where there black people on the design team.  These two aspects – lack of thorough testing and lack of diversity on design teams – show up in the TSA struggles as well.  The protocols used by the TSA are made primarily for, and by, gender conforming individuals.  So when someone who does not fully subscribe to or resemble their birth gender goes through the TSA, they run into problems.

Perhaps designing a variant of the system for transgender and gender nonconforming individuals would be beneficial, especially with the input of such individuals in the design process.  You can not predict how a design will affect all people by testing it on a subset of them.

The body scanners take in an input from a TSA officer: which sex the TSA officer thinks the individual being scanned is.  This is an issue for transgender individuals who do not present themselves as their biological sex.  This is important because men and women generally have different body compositions.  So if an individual presents themselves as female but is biologically male, it is likely that the machine will find something “wrong” with them.  This will then result in the unpleasant experience of being lightly interrogated and then being pat down.

The TSA does have a policy where an individual can request to forgo the body scanning and opt for just the pat down.  But that is not particularly enjoyable either.  According to the TSA’s official policy, “If a pat-down is performed, it will be conducted by an officer of the same gender as you present yourself”.  That may work for many transgender people, but individuals who are gender-nonconforming and are uncomfortable with being pat down by anyone will possibly be unable to proceed through security.

To me, the body scanner is far better than being pat down, it’s less physically invasive and emotionally stressful.  So to fix the problem of the TSA agent misidentifying people, they would just need to enter whatever sex is on that person’s ID, which generally is biological sex as opposed to gender.  That will make the machine treat the makeup of the individual’s body correctly, and not report what’s not dangerous, but unexpected.