Despite his name and his demands that the rest of us play pretend along with him, Danielle Mittereder is a man. Or at very least, he is a male. Despite his delusions and fantasies, or more likely in this age of absurdity, because of them, Danielle Mittereder is also a TSA agent. That’s absurd enough in itself: a man who is in the grip of severe confusion and delusion doesn’t seem on the face of it to be well-suited to the job of identifying and stopping potential terrorists, but his story gets much worse from there.
Since Mittereder’s bosses at the Transportation Security Administration are aware that the name of the agency is not the Transgender Security Administration, and because they also know that Danielle Mittereder is really a man, they don’t allow him to pat down women. And now the enraged Mittereder is suing them, because he really, really wants to pat down women, and also because he really, really wants the TSA, and the world, to play along with his fantasies and pretend that he is really a woman.
The Western Journal reported Sunday that “a self-proclaimed [is there another kind?] transgender employee of the Transportation Security Administration filed a lawsuit over his inability to perform pat-downs under the Trump administration.” Mittereder filed this suit over the TSA’s policy that stipulates that only male agents can pat down men, and only female agents can pat down women.
The point of this policy is obvious, or at least should be. TSA pat-downs are humiliating and intrusive enough without having to add in the possibility of some perverted agent committing sexual assault in the guise of checking for weapons. Yes, this can happen in same-sex pat-downs as well, but it’s much more likely to take place with a male agent and a comely female passenger than it is in any other scenario.
Heedless of any need to guard against that possibility, however, Mittereder is “challenging the Department of Homeland Security over its new policy ensuring that TSA agents can only screen members of their actual sex.” He claims that the same-sex pat-down policy “violates federal civil rights law.”
Yeah, those intrusive, unwarranted, and unnecessary TSA searches are a “civil right” now. Yes, of course we have to stop jihad terrorists from trying to bring down airplanes. But treating every passenger as if he or she were a jihad terrorist is just security theater, not actual security. It would be much more efficient to identify people who are genuinely threatening, as Israel does, but that would involve “profiling,” and is hence verboten. Security theater? Yes. And the show must go on.
Mittereder’s lawsuit complains “solely because she [sic; he’s a guy] is transgender, TSA now prohibits Plaintiff from conducting core functions of her job, impedes her advancement to higher-level positions and specialized certifications, excludes her from TSA-controlled facilities, and subjects her identity to unwanted and undue scrutiny each workday.” The Trump administration put the same-sex pat-down policy in place after the Biden regime’s wholehearted embrace of delusion and confusion, and before that, everything was sunshine and roses for Danielle Mittereder. His lawsuit says that he has “‘identified and presented as a woman’ throughout his tenure” at the TSA, and this involved his doing what is now forbidden: he “‘performed pat-downs of female passengers’ between October 2024 and Feb. 7, 2025.”
But then came Orange Man Bad, who signed an executive order on Feb. 7, 2025 that forbade federal agencies to pretend that men were women and women were men. Accordingly, Danielle Mittereder’s professional jollies were suddenly sharply curtailed: “By prohibiting Plaintiff from conducting pat-downs because she is transgender, TSA discriminates against her for failing to fulfill traditional sex stereotypes.” This, the lawsuit says, caused poor Danielle to suffer so much “anguish and humiliation” that he had to leave his job early on Feb. 7, 2025 itself. Then he took Feb. 8 and Feb. 11 off, poor thing, to try to recover his equilibrium.
Related: Transportation Secretary Duffy Calls for the Recovery of ‘Civility’ in Air Travel
The establishment media is, of course, enraged that Danielle Mittereder is not being allowed to pretend that he’s a woman in every way he wishes to do so. The Associated Press asked the Department of Homeland Security to comment on his lawsuit, and DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin was ready. “Does the AP,” McLaughlin asked, “want female travelers to be subjected to pat-downs by male TSA officers? What a useless and fundamentally dangerous idea, to prioritize mental delusion over the comfort and safety of American travelers.”
Indeed. But this ain’t over. Not by a long shot. Mittereder’s attorney, Jonathan Puth, says that the Trump policy is “terribly demeaning and 100% illegal.” That could be. But it is one thing as well: it’s common sense.
Establishment media outlets that report on this story will present Danielle Mittereder as a courageous, heroic victim of an unjust policy. You have to come to PJ Media to get a more realistic and honest perspective. That’s why you need to become a PJ Media VIP today with promo code FIGHT for 60% off.
