Correction: Hickey's position was eliminated, he did not quit.

Its been discussed at length here before but since Hickey's "pathetic" display of ignorance and knee-jerk response is not untypical here its probably worthwhile to briefly mention what the real issue with gender identity and transpasses is.

Basically SEPTA uses a poorly designed plan to try cut down on people sharing transpasses. For some reason they believe the single most important type of sharing of transpasses is between husband/wife, boyfriend/girlfriend couples. Its possible but an assumption based on zero empirical data whatsoever. So on transpasses they put sticker that says M or F to have the bus driver or person in the booth check the gender of each person using the SEPTA pass.

For trans folks this is an obvious problem, if they are often presenting as a different gender from what drivers arbitrarily determines to be "accurate" - some drivers let them go but some will kick the transgenedred rider off the bus, cause a fuss, etc. Trans folks may present very differently at different times depending on whether they are on an errand to say go buy cat litter or go to a day job and when they are going "out" and fully "dolled up" obviously. This SEPTA anti-fraud device essentially gives some drivers a mandate to discriminate against riders who maybe they may not feel comfortable with and in a very real way makes it impossible for some trans folks to use transpasses to get around. Trans people are in effect forced to use a single token for every stop on their trip. Effectively it picks on one particular group of people and makes it more expensive for them to use public transportation than every other group of the SEPTA-riding population on a rather dubious claim of fighting fraud.

On the other hand, nothing about SEPTA gender stickers on the transpasses stops a rider from sharing the same pass with their sibling, housemate, friend, romantic partner of the same gender. As opposed to say cities like Paris where your transit pass is an actual permanent picture ID the gender stickers do absolutely nothing to stop fraud in any number of other ways. Actually folks may remember the movie Amelie and its whole sub-plot about the photobooths which actually exist so folks can use the photos to make their permanent transpasses that they charge up to be valid for long term use. In other words as a policy, SEPTA's policy is decidedly uneffective in stopping fraud in untold numbers of ways but causes a direct and very real form of discrimination to a small segment of the population. And SEPTA has never even once tried to generate any real practical numbers as to how much extra fraud simply dropping the gender stickers would cause.

My theory is that since most people work during the same basic hours - the assumed sharing between opposite gender couples wouldn't really be very significant since both partners in the couple would still have to get to work, run errands, go to the daycare center, etc. during the same hours anyways. At a very practical level SEPTA is not particularly effective for many folks who work graveyard shifts generally and the whole idea thought process behind the stickers seems based on some poorly thought out assumptions about how people live and work that make no sense if you look at them more critically.

Bottm line - SEPTA's policy actively discriminates against a small portion of the general population in a way that is very real, practical and quite unfair. It does not effectively stop fraud or sharing of passes and Hickey in this instance is reacting as an unthinking bigoted jerk.

Edit - actually if Hickey wants to respond here substantively about why he thinks its swell to make "trannies" pay more to ride the bus to work than everybody else for no good reason except they might give some drivers the heebie jeebies, I, for one would love to hear him chime in on the subject.
-Sean
MrLuigi, my cat, actually only types half as badly as I do.

I never said it was "swell" to make trannies (I used the pejorative again only because I did the first time, and it'd be wrong to try and hide it now) pay more to ride the bus. My point was that considering the state of the city and world, we have much bigger problems to worry about and focus on.

That said, Sean puts forth a very solid argument, and having read it, I'll say this: If SEPTA wants to go and print up a third sticker for the passes (or, to actually be effective, use photos or other pieces of identification), by all means, they should just go ahead and do so. But, it doesn't change the fact that I think it's a colossal waste of time to carry the debate much further. It was never about bigotry (though others do, and will, claim otherwise); it was about the reality that the country's falling to pieces and bus passes don't rate as one of my concerns.

Trans activists don't want a third sticker on passes. They want SEPTA to drop the stickers all together. SEPTA has provided not one lick of empirical evidence the stickers reduce fraud significantly.

One could also argue that they could start program where they identify the riders by race with a W (white), B (black), A (Asian), and L (Latino) sticker and by the logic that gender stickers work, such a system would be even more effective at stopping fraud. But they wouldn't do it because a bus driver's qualifications to work are based on their ability to safely operate a bus, not to try and guess what racial classification to stick a lighter skinned Dominican American bus rider falls into before they get on the bus.

The same inherrent problem exists for transgendered riders. It shouldn't be a job qualification for SEPTA bus driver to arbitrarily decide what gender sticker really "counts" for a rider in transition.

The current system discriminates against a small proportions of the riding public unfairly. The argument that it stops fraud is based on an assumption that in the majority of opposite sex couples only one partner in the couple works or has any reason to use transit at all during the entire time the other partner is at work. Its quaint to think that in Philadelphia there are tens of thousands of stay-at-home June Cleavers who would never need to ride SEPTA at all while Ward is at work in the Comcast building but I would tend to believe the number of folks that would apply to is much, much smaller than the number of riders on the system a driver might have a hard time guessing the gender of in the split second it takes to show your pass and jump on a bus. In the real world above and beyond trans riders, there are an awful lot of "Pats" to recall the old SNL skit.

Alternately the city could adopt a system where the rider gets an I.D. that gets a monthly sticker and the ID/pass gets "charged up" for the month, as other cities have. Such a system would be nearly 100% effective against fraud without singling out transgendered riders. But again if SEPTA wants to discriminate against one group of riders, it really falls on them to prove the current system is in anyway effective at stopping fraud.

In terms of "more important things", simply dropping the stickers all together would cost SEPTA absolutely zero dollars and zero cents to implement. If they want to argue the deterence to fraud is economically significant, all they have to do is supply real numbers - instead they are wasting money fighting on legal technicalities (SEPTA is a state agency to discriminate against trans riders, but a city agency to discriminate against handicapped riders) for a system that discriminates in the courts. It would seem to me that SEPTA is the party going out of its way to focus on an anti-fraud scheme of dubious credibility to me.

One other thing - to read how the policy effects a real SEPTA rider on a daily basis, check this out.
-Sean
MrLuigi, my cat, actually only types half as badly as I do.