Originally Posted by
rsteinmetz70112
Gender Yes although there are a lot of ambiguous names in common use. Kelly, Ashley, even Lauren and many others. Sue might be a hard sell but there's always the old country song.
But I don't see how they could determine ethnicity from a boarding pass. There are a lot of people with names that don't match their appearance. Scott Fujita, a former NFL player would was adopted by a Japanese-American man and his Caucasian wife. I'm sure I can think of others. I know many Hispanics who don't really look Hispanic including some blond blued people and of course most African Americans have European names but if there is an issue out of a group of 50 I'd imagine a little BP swapping would take care of any issues, if you were willing to commit "ticket fraud".
I will admit that a couple of years ago one of my Asian male students managed to get through TSA as Sarah. We were on a legacy carrier and planning to change the name at the airport (for a fee). Unfortunately bad traffic left no time for this, so the kid just acted extremely confident and announced that his name was Sarah when asked by TSA.
Back in the day, before you had to specify male/female when booking, if I had to buy a ticket and I was not sure who would be flying, I would buy the ticket for "Pat Lee."