And interesting conundrum that we explore over at AMERICAblog Gay.
In the end, I don't think we're even talking about gender. I think we're talking about sexual orientation. The idea is that you don't want someone feeling you up who just might be turned on by it (though it's absurd to think that some TSA agent who does hundreds of pat downs a day is getting off on it). Nonetheless, I think that's the rationale. So shouldn't it be based on sexual orientation of the patter downer, and not the apparent gender? Now, having said that, I'm more comfortable stripping down in front of a male doctor than a female one, regardless of sexual orientation (theirs or mine), and I think I might have been more disturbed had a woman touched my "junk" that day in the Amsterdam airport than had it been a man (though I'm not sure it would have mattered - and hell, I could see some men preferring a woman touching them than a man (cooties!), and that's a whole other issue). But that still might be the odd cultural bias that's bred in to me about "oppose genders together equal sex," regardless of my orientation.
