aviation
Is it illegal to alter your boarding pass?
<p>So the problem is my legal gender on my id is non-binary (&quot;X&quot;), but the airline (Frontier) only allows you to choose male or female. I went around in circles with their customer support and their supervisor on this for hours and got nowhere with them. As a result my boarding pass gender and my ID gender are not going to match. I'm worried that TSA either A) won't let me through or B) will demand a <s>free grope</s> patdown because my gender information won't match. Would it be illegal for me to simply pre-print my boarding pass to PDF, edit the gender to match my ID, and then print it out to bring with me?</p>

<p>I recognize your difficulty, and I'm not sure about the formal legality of it (which would go to the materiality of the alteration, which if material would probably be a presentation of a false document to a TSA officer).</p>
<p>But more practically, when you present your boarding pass and ID to the TSA officer before going through security, their system checks your boarding pass against the boarding pass in the computer system. If those don't match, you are sent back to the ticketing desk.</p>
<p>My wife and I had to do this on a recent trip simply because folding up our boarding passes to put them in my wallet caused smudging that was enough to cause the TSA system to conclude that our boarding passes weren't in the system. This also triggered heightened bag searches and pat down searches for both of us going through security the second time around.</p>
<p>In your shoes, I'd try my chances with a TSA officer accepting the ID v. boarding pass mismatch with your brief explanation instead. Due to the limitations of airline software, discrepancies between IDs and boarding passes are common enough for reasons like the inability of airline software to handle two word surnames, very short surnames, hyphens, and apostrophes.</p>
