“Will you wait here, please?”

The young man at the security desk scurried off to consult with his superior, leaving my travelling companion and I looking at each other across our massive pile of luggage as if to say, “Well, here it comes.” There’s a certain sense of inevitability that follows you when you’re travelling as a transgender person, the understanding that if this checkpoint goes smoothly, there’s always the next … and the next. Travelling long distances is disorienting for anyone, but for me it isn’t simply a matter of the time zones separating my destination from my point of origin, but of what I have come to think of as gender zones – those ill-defined fields of perception and official recognition within which my social gender is liable to fluctuate wildly in ways I can neither predict nor clearly perceive.

Gender zones are a fact of my existence. I move through them constantly every moment of my life. No matter where I am or who I am with, I’m never entirely sure how I’m being perceived. Nevertheless, there are some times in my life when the feeling is more intense. These are moments (going through security while preparing to board an international flight, for example) when the need to present identification or provide an official account of myself forces a breach in the barrier between all my different selves — the public and the private, the internal and the external, who I am for myself, and who I am in the eyes of others, particularly strangers. Under the gaze of officialdom the waveform collapses and all the complexities of my identity are forced, however incoherently, to speak in one voice.

“Is something wrong?” I asked the rather beautiful woman in a severe ponytail and an airport security uniform who was walking in my direction with a look of mild concern on her face.

“There is a question about your passport,” she said a bit hesitantly, fumbling for the words in English with which to politely articulate the problem. I doubt I could ever have explained to her how much the effort meant to me, but she needn’t have bothered. I knew without looking what part of the page she was pointing to. “It says here…”

“Yes,” I said, trying to keep as much of the fatigue and exasperation from my voice as possible. I’d already been waiting at the airport for several hours to be able to check in. “I’m transgender. I consider myself to be a woman but my passport still says I’m male. I haven’t been able to get my documents changed yet.”

“Oh,” she appeared to consider this for a second. “Alright. Did you pack your bags yourself? Are you sure someone didn’t maybe give you something to hold for him? …”

The usual round of repetitive security questions finished, we moved on to get in line to get our boarding passes. I was craning my neck to see how many more people were in line ahead of us when a voice called out behind me.

“Ladies?”

At first it didn’t occur to me that we were the ones being called to. When I turned around it was the same woman from security. “I will give you the name of my superior. When you go through the baggage check, ask for her so that you will not have to explain about these things again.”

There’s a certain sense of inevitability that follows you when you’re travelling as a transgender person, the understanding that if this checkpoint goes smoothly, there’s always the next … and the next. But sometimes, at this one, something happens — something you can take with you, to help face all the checkpoints to come.