Gatwick airport have a section on transgender at security - and they keep mixing up sex and gender but the important bit is you can choose a security guard of your preferred gender. Poor women who are tasked with doing examinations of men if they say they are women. I wonder if they were asked?
I worked at Heathrow security, over 10 years ago, and that was the policy then. On one occasion at the walk through machine, an obviously male person in female clothing set off the alarm and my male colleague went to him but he walked to me instead so I did the body security check. It’s a slightly different body search, depending on if you’re male or female. I can remember my team laughing about there being “ added extras” in the search and it being a man. I don’t remember feeling anything “ extra” and it is over very quickly but it wasn’t pleasant. It was the only case that I saw.
There were two men pretending to be women in the security staff. They only seemed to be in staff search or outside of the terminals, and then, you could ask for a different member of the team to body search you ( there were teams of 6, 3 men and 3 women). They were both so obviously men, they looked very odd in the skirt uniform.
Some countries have had a unisex policy for a long time eg Holland.
I expect there are a lot more cases now. I wonder how they get round it as we had many asian women working there. I think the teams are smaller now too, so what if all the female members refuse. Maybe senior staff members do it. I would hope that no female staff member is coerced into doing it. There are probably more of the enclosed body search machines now, but if something showed up, then that area would still have to be searched, possibly in the private rooms. I can see there being lots of issues!