Flying while trans: still unbelievably horrible by Cory Doctorow.
Cory writes:
Cary Gabriel Costello is a trans-man in Milwaukee. Two-thirds of the time when he flies, the TSA has a complete freakout over the “anomalies” his body displays on the full-body scanner.
…
See Cory’s post for his commentary on this atrocity.
What Cory describes is a precursor for an episode of Babylon 5 with the title Infection. The gist of the story is that an alien race had been repeatedly attacked so they created a biological weapon that would destroy any entity that wasn’t “pure Ikarran.”
The definition of “pure Ikarran,” like “loyal American,” was set by fanatics, extremists, the result of which no Ikarran could possibly fit the profile of a “pure Ikarran.”
Here’s how the use of that weapon ended for the Ikarrans:
Sinclair: So who set the parameters of what it meant to be a pure Ikarran?
Franklin: A coalition of religious fanatics and military extremists that ran the government. They programmed the weapons with a level of standards based on ideology, not science.
Sinclair: Like the Nazi ideal of the perfect Aryan during World War Two.
Franklin: Exactly. The next invasion, eleven of the machines were released. And they stopped the invaders by killing anything that didn’t match their profile of the pure, perfect Ikarran. When they were finished, the machines turned on their creators. They began a process of extermination based on the slightest deviation from what they were programmed to consider normal. They killed; they kept killing until the last Ikarran was dead. (Dialogue from http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/countries/us/guide/004.weapons.html)
Now the TSA is using a profile of what a “loyal American” looks like in a full body scanner. Data mining is already underway of social media to determine what a “loyal American” says online.
The Ikarran experience lead to complete genocide. That won’t happen here but security fanatics are well on the way to taking all of us to a far darker place than the Japanese internment camps during WWII.