PA Transit Company Doesn’t Think Outing Transgender Riders is a Big Deal

William Penn wanted Philadelphia to be a mecca for tolerance. The city’s name even translates to “brotherly love.” The Southeastern Pennsylvania Transit Authority (SEPTA) has decided that this love shouldn’t extend to gender non-conforming and transgender citizens. SEPTA’s current gender-identity policy involves a mixture of singing “la, la, la, la!” and wearing earplugs.

If you haven’t been following Change.org’s posts on SEPTA, the transit company currently requires its monthly transpasses and trailpasses to be marked with M or F stickers denoting a passenger’s gender identity. To add further insult to injury, SEPTA recently stopped all debate about the policy at the board level, silencing discussions between many of those with the power to change the policy. About three months ago, a Change.org petition was started to stop SEPTA from discriminating against transgender and gender non-conforming transit riders. So far, SEPTA is ignoring our emails.

Speaking to Change.org, SEPTA spokesperson Jerri Williams said, “I don’t want to sound like I’m minimizing, but I think that the complaint and the general displeasure is in the passes themselves. The incidents where a person has been questioned do not happen as much as people think … The policy itself is what the issue is as opposed to if a person is actually confronted.” Williams went back and forth over whether her company had received complaints about gender-identity discrimination as she sifted through the transit giant’s bureaucratic red tape.

In the end, SEPTA confirmed three complaints this year. These are in addition to about a dozen gender-identity discrimination testimonials the company received in October of 2009. In a complaint logged this past February, a transgender rider said that he was not only questioned but was not allowed to use his pass.

Not only is SEPTA slapping discriminatory stickers everywhere, but the officials who are questioning passengers aren’t receiving gender-identity sensitivity training. With a climate of escalating violence towards the LGBT community, it should come as no surprise that people are uneasy about having their gender scrutinized in front of a bus or train packed with strangers. Who knows what will happen late at night between streetlights?

Explaining SEPTA’s position, Williams said, “If we were to change [the policy], we would deal with a tariff change and would have to go not just before the Board but for a public hearing. It has been decided that we are not going to do this at this time. We are going to continue to use the passes as they are with the theory that 50% [of pass-sharing has been deterred by the stickers].”

Max Ray, a member and co-founder of Riders Against Gender Discrimination, a local group fighting the policy, told Change.org that SEPTA General Manager Joe Casey has the power to make temporary changes without board approval. Ray added, “[SEPTA] just went through a public hearing process and they didn’t put the sticker issue on the agenda.” The stickers probably aren’t significantly reducing pass sharing. Ray says that 2/3 of SEPTA riders are female. Do we really think that SEPTA is going to lose money by removing the stickers?

SEPTA is pretending that the Change.org petitions coming in are about the policy and not in regards to actual incidents. This theory no longer holds water. SEPTA has now confirmed three incidents that have happened this year and confirmed receiving further complaints in a meeting in 2009. It remains to be seen how long transgender and gender non-conforming passengers are going to have to wait for justice. Let’s hope they get it before something truly atrocious happens.

Photo Credit: Artico2