Gender is wholly irrelevant to the airline security issue and I can't see how it would make any difference whatsoever. If someone on a watch list is travelling they will need extremely high quality forged papers to pass existing controls and if you have those, why bother with a gender difference?
I mean seriously, can anyone contrive a realistic scenario where the gender marker makes any actualy difference? Surely he watch list isn't just a name and gender pair? I would imagine it's whatever info they have on the individual, i.e. passport numbers, photos, addresses, etc..
As a frequent visitor to the US, I'm constantly surprised by some of the symbology - marble pillars, senates, eagles, spanky shiny uniforms, gathering biometric data, all stereotypes of an authoritarian state if you were building a movie set (anyone remember that old Star Trek episode with the modern world version of ancient Rome?).
Maybe next they should take a leaf out of Ceaucescu's book - he had people break into citizens' homes and take sterile cotton swabs of the scent. There were warehouses full of bell jars containing cotton swabs, just in case they had to hunt you with dogs.
Hehe, I remember when the Berlin Wall collapsed ... there was an East German joke about what happened to the Stazi which claimed they all became taxi drivers. When you were drunk, you just got into the cab - you didn't need to say a word, because they already knew where you lived
