The issue of whether the use of body scanners in airport security is ethical to transgender and androgynous-looking passengers has arisen in recent years because security workers often misgender them, causing the scanners to go off and the passenger to go through additional inspection. The body scanners themselves are not unethical; they simply scan the individual based on male or female anatomy and are used in airport security for the protection of the passengers. As the TSA website explains, transgender passengers are “encouraged to use the same name, gender and birth date as indicated on your government-issued ID” and the administration provides their employees with training on how to screen transgender passengers as well. This problem can be solved by providing extra instruction to the security workers: If they are slightly unsure about an individual’s gender, they should immediately ask the individual for their official sex. This way, they learn to be more aware about identifying the passenger’s gender and correctly scan the individual, limiting the extra time needed for all the passengers to go through security. The expectation that all individuals will be treated exactly the same is ideal, but additional questioning and security checks are inevitable for the safety of all passengers, which should always be top priority.

For the problem of TSA employees’ lack of knowledge about medical devices, they should also change the training program to include a wider range of devices. In the article by Julig, airport security workers ended up breaking a woman’s CPAP machine for sleep apnea because of their lack of knowledge about these devices. Sleep apnea is a relatively common disease and if the airport security workers had known the basics about sleep apnea and its treatments/devices, they would have known the woman’s machine was a medical device and would not have broken it.

These issues relate to the “Ethics in Design” article because they bring up whether airport security workers are acting ethically and whether the use of body scanners is ethical. Sgarro points out that inclusion and diversity is a major issue today involving the use of technology. As stated earlier, the issue with body scanners is mostly not because of the product itself because it includes both male and female sexes, which most people fit into (according to their birth certificate). The issue of the scanners may be with individuals who are intersex (do not fit into either male or female anatomy), and in the future scanners will likely have the ability to scan intersex people, which fixes the diversity issue. The ethical problem mostly lies within the training of TSA employees, who often misgender passengers, causing the scanners to go off as a result, and do not recognize passengers’ medical devices, sometimes breaking them. If the security employees are given additional training about these topics, then airport security would be more ethical and provide travelers with a secure, more efficient way to get through the checkpoints.