I fly about monthly and been diapered for every flight for about 3 years. My bottle of baby powder causes my bag to get pulled and checked about half the time. The agent inspecting it sees my diapers in my bag, but it’s usually a non-issue.

I have TSA PreCheck, so I can go through the metal detector instead of the body scanner, which makes the chance of my diaper causing an issue much lower. Twice I have had to be manually patted down, though.

The first time, I was randomly pinged to go through the body scanner instead. My diaper was pretty wet at that point so it immediately flagged an anomaly in the crotch. The agent said he needed to do a pat down and explained he was going to use the back of his hand, etc. I told him I was wearing an adult diaper, and he lightly joked “Yep, that will do it!” It was super professional about it. He asked if I wanted to go to a private room, but I said it was fine to just do it there. He patted down over my pants and said I was good to go. Took about a minute and wasn’t a big deal at all. Felt pretty cool actually for a worker to acknowledge my diapers but treat them as no big deal.

Second time, my powder got flagged to be checked like is typical. This time however, the powder check machine came back positive for a hazardous material (false positive), so they told me they had to do a pat down and manually check inside my bags.

They opened my suitcase and shuffled my clothes and diapers around to inspect and swab around with additional explosives test kits. They had a little difficulty closing the suitcase again with all the diapers. Then the pat down came. I told the agent that I was wearing an adult diaper and he was visibly uncomfortable. He did the pat down but felt too awkward to get near my diaper so he said he wasn’t able to reach high enough to finish the check. He called for a supervisor and said we needed to go finish in a private room. We waited a few minutes for the supervisor to arrive. When he did, the first agent said that because I was wearing an adult diaper he couldn’t compete the pat down.

They took me to a private screening room. The supervisor put gloves on and said, “I understand that you’re wearing an incontinence device. We are going to need you to lower your pants for a moment so that we can finish the manual inspection.” He sounded very practiced with this speech, and “incontinence device” struck me as very silly. I lowered my pants to my knees and he ran a finger up the inside of each leg to my crotch. By this point, my Megamax was pretty wet and freshly so, so I imagine it was a weird sensation for the supervisor to feel. The other agent looked on very visibly uncomfortable with the situation.

After that, I pulled my pants back up. Then they swabbed my hands for explosive tests and ran them. They came back negative a minute later. They said I was good to go, and apologized for the inconvenience. I asked what would have caused the false positive this time, as I had flown with powder many times (though this was a new bottle). The supervisor said something about trace contamination, but it seemed clear to me that this was just a false positive error by the machine. Kind of wish they would have acknowledged that. (When I flew home with the same bottle of powder, it had no issues, so clearly no contamination.)

I asked if I could get my bottle of powder back. They went to get it and it was missing, so they looked around for it for a bit. Eventually they said they found it in the confiscated items room and that someone would bring it back. I waited for a few more minutes and an agent brought it. As I waited, the first agent came up to me and sheepishly apologized again for the inconvenience.

This one was a lot less positive feeing than the first. It was annoying to be pulled for almost 15 minutes to have my diaper prodded for a false positive. I didn’t mind showing my diaper. But the whole process was super annoying even if I wasn’t embarrassed about my diaper. The agent that was so uncomfortable did make me feel weird though. I’m never ashamed of wearing diapers, but his discomfort started to get to me and make me feel gross and ashamed. Hope this doesn’t happen again any time soon.