Non-binary travellers call out WestJet for reportedly discriminating against them

Gender nonconforming Canadians are calling on WestJet Airlines to change its policy regarding gender markers when booking flights. The controversy comes after a traveller was reportedly denied the ability to board a flight on the popular airliner because they did not identify their sex assigned at birth.

“WestJet is just ignoring us,” the traveller, Iz Lloyd, told Vancouver-based news outlet Daily Hive. “They’re pretending we don’t exist.”

When Lloyd booked a series of flights last month, only male and female gender markers were reportedly available, and so they settled for choosing the marker they were assigned at birth, hoping to make the correction at the airport. According to Daily Hive, the drop-down menu on a later check-in form allowed four different options for marking one’s gender: male, female, unspecified and undisclosed. Lloyd said, however, that they received error messages upon selecting the last two options.

After this happened four different times on four different flights, Lloyd posted a series of TikToks denouncing the airline. Some of these videos have amassed hundreds of thousands of views.

Upon inquiring at a WestJet customer service desk regarding the situation, an employee allegedly told Lloyd the error messages are “by design.” They are intended to force people who don’t mark “male” or “female” to go through an in-person check-in process and have a gender assigned to them by a gate agent, the representative reportedly said.

Lloyd then telephoned a customer service representative, whom they said told them that “the only error made was that the agent told you about the policy because we’re supposed to do it and not say anything.”

The representative also argued that the policy was due to the fact that Transport Canada, the organization that oversees national transportation policies, doesn’t have a weight class for trans people. WestJet, however, does provide an average weight for individuals who do not specify or disclose their gender on its website. 

Lloyd isn’t the only person who has reportedly experienced discrimination while booking a flight on WestJet. Policy analyst Mattie McMillan told CBC News that they deal with this issue whenever they fly the airline for work, and said that they have been fighting with the company to fix this issue for the past three years.

“X-marker Canadians such as myself, people who go through the legal processes to get the X identifier, have to go through a lot of gates only to have the big fellas not comply with the law, not have to comply with Canadian values,” they said.

Earlier this month, McMillan sent WestJet a four-page proposal asking the airline to “catch up to federal standards of identity and identification.” If no action is taken by the end of this month, they said that activists will consider suing to get WestJet to recognize Canada’s own laws on non-binary recognition. Since 2019, the Canadian government has allowed citizens the option of using an “X” gender marker on passports.

Following the controversy, WestJet released a statement said it plans to fully recognize “X” gender markers by the end of the year by updating its current database.

“Originally, we anticipated the necessary technological changes required through our systems would take roughly one year to implement; however, due to several setbacks resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, we are disappointed that we have not been able to deliver upon our commitment in the time frame we expected,” the company’s statement read. “As we work to ensure the option of gender X across our systems, we apologize for the frustration and disappointment this has caused and know there remains significant work to be done in this space.”

In addition to the company’s issues with recognizing “X” markers, WestJet has been criticized for not including the gender-neutral “Mx.” honorific on its booking platform. Currently, the airline requires passengers to select a gendered honorific instead.

Although most North American airlines have begun allowing gender-neutral markers for travellers who do not identify as male or female, these inclusivity issues are not unique to WestJet. The U.S.-based Delta Airlines faced a similar scandal earlier this year after a customer tweeted that the airline wouldn’t allow her to purchase a ticket for her non-binary child.

Delta reacted by announcing that it would add a non-binary gender option for flight bookings later this year, becoming the third major U.S. carrier to to do so during the pandemic after American and United Airlines. Most other airline companies allow customers to change the gender listed on their tickets by contacting their customer contact centres, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Air Canada, Canada’s largest airline, allows non-binary individials to register as “other” on its booking site, although some advocates say they would prefer an “X” gender marker instead, according to CBC News.