this is along with name, race and other demographic information
They don’t have a gender field, and it really feels like they are just reducing sex and gender down to “you are what you were assigned at birth”, and then hiding behind amorphous medical “reasons” as justification …
I thought it was a restaurant and was enraged until I did a quick ecosia search and:
American pharmacy
now it makes sense lol.
Had something similar happen when I made a new bank account. They asked me for my name (obviously) and my name at birth…
It’s probably just a standard workflow for them to prevent easier money laundering but they didn’t need any proof either…? It just felt very very strange
Is Walgreens the only available pharmacy?
Ours closed down because they refused to treat customers like humans and locked everything, so you always need an employee to get anything.
There’s a local pharmacy that I get my prescriptions from.
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I agree that the capacity to be pregnant is medically relevant, but asking someone what they were assigned at birth (based on a quick genital inspection) is not the same as asking them to disclose if they are capable of being pregnant.
You’re not wrong. That’s the hamfisted part. Among the older generations, asking “if you fuck, can a creampie result in a baby?” is more offensive than “when you were born, what parts did you have?” because the latter keeps the jizz further away.
Source: I am old.
The medical forms here just ask if you are or could potentially be pregnant, because that’s the actual relevant question.
lol, that’s a whole lotta fuck, creampie, and jizz in a sentence for a supposedly fellow sensitive, old person 😆
I guess you’re right - socially it’s totally normal to infer pregnancy capacity from genitals (nevermind how insensitive this may be to women who struggle with fertility issues, or who choose to sterilize themselves), but when I go into an ER or hospital they don’t ask me my assigned sex at birth, they just start running pregnancy tests on me, or they ask for my last period or if I could be pregnant.
The point being: they only ask assigned sex at birth when they can’t look at you and determine that with their eyeballs, and just like how they can get it wrong when they quickly glance at your genitals as a baby and assign your sex, they also get it wrong when they see me and assume I was assigned female at birth - not because I’m not female or a woman, but because I have a medical history that is atypical for other women, and I’m an outlier when it comes to fertility.
Not that thinking in terms of most common cases is such a crime or anything, but when dealing with large enough populations it does mean you are going to run into exceptions like me, and so it’s certainly better if a system like that has enough flexibility to account for those exceptions.
I said I was old; I didn’t say I was sensitive. I just have my finger on the pulse of the aged.
And don’t get me wrong, there’s definitely a whole lot of active and open malice towards trans people. It’s a good idea to consider these kind things with suspicion first, because your safety may be in question. Even with this comparatively benign incident, there’s a safety aspect: if a trans person answers truthfully, well, that’s on record somewhere now, isn’t it? Who has or will gain access to that information, and what might they do with it?
Be careful. Make the decisions that keep you the safest. Don’t burn up all your mental effort on plain outrage. You will need it for action.
So replace it with a checkbox that says “I can get pregnant”
There are plenty of cis women who can’t
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Medication does not care about your sex. Dosages tend to be smaller for women because of a smaller body size, but to prescribe a dose based on assigned sex is medically irresponsible because an individual could be any size at all. Assigned sex matters most for things like screening various body parts for cancer.
Besides which, the medical doctor is the one who needs that kind of information to help you make medical decisions. The pharmacist isn’t going to accidentally murder someone because they gave girl statins to a boy.
You’re being reductive. Just because a trans woman and a cis woman have different needs doesn’t mean that a trans woman and a cis man have the same needs. Similar with pre-op vs post-op, and trans vs intersex. You know who generally handles those intricacies? Your doctor. Walgreens generally isn’t handing out prescriptions. They don’t need your medical chart, that’s for your doctor to deal with. It’s especially not needed for a flu shot like OP got.
Take bloodwork as an example. I’m a trans woman. Shitty endocrinologists send in my blood work order as male, but when my levels are compared to typical male ranges, literally everything is a red flag. It’s useless. When compared to female ranges however , a red flag indicates that there’s actually a problem. As another example, cis men have never had to go to a gynecologist.
Pregnancy can have some pretty serious interactions with certain drugs, both of which are quite common, which is why it stands out.
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Please stop calling us “males” and “females”
not that walgreens actually needs to know this for me to get a flu shot 🙄
but yeah, it would be nice if in medical contexts they just marked down what is relevant, e.g. presence or absence of a prostate, presence or absence of a uterus, capacity to become pregnant, etc.
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This is more likely to hurt patients though. People metabolize medications according to hormonal sex, not genetics. If you report your assigned sex at birth, some dumbass is going to try and give you a medication dose based on that, not your hormonal sex. It’s just an invitation to bigotry and medical errors. Even people who are nominally allies may still think “well I support your identity and pronouns, but your medical needs are obviously still those of your sex at birth.” Medical people tend to be pretty ignorant about trans bodies, and trans people need to look out for our own interests, because the system certainky won’t.
Not to mention that hormone levels vary wildly among cisgender people and no one should ever be medically treated based on trends rather than their actual individual medical status.
Then that should be the questions asked, not some arbitrary “sex” question with only some of the possible answers as options.
It should be apparent, especially now, that those things never were never enough to determine these things anyway. There are tons of types of intersex people which are not an insignificant percentage of the population.
So, there are some things that loosely follow AGAB for the majority of people, but the assumptions made based on that, end up causing more trouble for those whose bodies don’t conform. And that’s not a small portion of the population. Basically between intersex people and trans people who have had HRT and/or surgery are at very, very conservative estimates, around 3%, but since there’s no finding and it’s now unsafe to track even in the US and UK and other western countries, it’s likely much higher in reality. These people are poorly served by the current system of AGAB only.
For me, many of my lab tests show abnormal because it should ask what is my body’s primary sex hormone or ask to select for the specific test, what range is normal for my body if they want to get it really right. And honestly, body weight is more impactful on a lot of things anyway, why aren’t we asking that of every person (rhetorical question, but essentially asking if you were born with or the doctors modified your body at birth to have something that looked closer to a penis than a vulva, should be just as uncouth)? Also, insurance won’t pay for gynecology/urology kind of stuff or mammograms or prostate cancer screenings even if you have the right body parts to need it, if your AGAB is wrong without a long and drawn out process each and every time to prove you have the right part. Heck it’s not even good for marketing if you have the wrong one listed because it has to be your AGAB rather than the gender you present as and thus the high profit products you’re most likely to use.
So it really has a low usefulness compared to asking more relevant questions whether for medical or commercial reasons.
Walgreen’s is the goody-two-shoes couch fucking Vance of the pharmacy world in my experience, so this totally tracks.
Last year when I went in to get my covid vaccine, they asked a ton of questions and then turned me away because “technically I said yes” when they asked if I’d been in contact with anybody in the past 14 days who tested positive for covid. I even explained that it was outdoors and from a distance after my neighbor briefly stopped their car to say hello and then tested positive a few days later.
I literally drove down the street to Walmart right after and got the vaccine. They only asked me about my insurance info and which arm I wanted the shot in.
What was the purpose of all those questions and why was it necessary to begin with?
LIE. LIE TO THE CORPOS.
Hack the form!
lie :3
Yikes. I would take my business elsewhere for sure. I don’t use Walgreens currently, personally. My current pharmacy seems pretty alright, they changed my GF’s name on her pill bottles when we transferred the prescription, no problem.
Just put your hormonal sex. That is the most accurate sex you can use for any pharmacology purpose. If you’re hormonally female, you metabolize medications like any other woman, regardless of your genetics. Systems like this are built by ignorant fools who think that someone’s assigned sex at birth maps directly to their medical needs. They think being trans is just something that involves changing clothes or surgery. When in reality HRT rewires your body at the cellular level.
Exactly, you would be surprised how many cis people really are confused about the medical and biological situation, they assume your chromosomes are more relevant for everything, when it’s mostly the hormones!
The main exceptions I can think of are:
- trans women who have prostates, though it’s debatable how much prostate cancer risk exists when living with estrogen dominance (and usually androgen suppression or absence)
- trans men who can get pregnant
Those still aren’t pharmacologically relevant, except maybe screening drugs that could harm a fetus?
Would love for medicine to catch up and become more “trans and intersex sensitive” in its training and application (and let’s be real: its research), but that reality feels increasingly distant to me.
Any chance this is a client side web form which could be modified to allow an additional choice of “None of your business, Walgreens” injected into the form?
Just change it to [object Object]
Yes! This is the way!
The hiding behind vague medical reasons is infuriating. When I went through this form, I was thinking “don’t lie to me and I won’t have to lie to you.”
right!? It definitely feels like they don’t have any right to ask this given the context, and the way they are applying it feels like it’s denying trans identity (as well as not accounting for the existence of intersex folks, some of whom are neither male nor female).
If you were intentionally trying to design the page in a way to deny trans people their identity, I don’t know what you would do differently from this.
A binary ‘Sex’ field could at least have the cover of “Sorry, the code is 30 years old and we don’t know how to change this field in the database without breaking things.” Labeling the field as Sex Assigned at Birth means they considered trans people and considered them worth hurting.
Edit: I do think asking for sex is a CDC thing. But only asking that means you can be misgendered at the pharmacy and also ignores that hormones have a major role in your health. A doctor or pharmacist going off your birth certificate to treat you is a bad doctor/pharmacist.
what are the options on the drop down menu? I refuse to supply any demographic information under all circumstances.
I have started picking the “not saying” option where I can now too, for everything. If loads of people do, it doesn’t stand out as different when someone does.
Plus at work they recently started asking about stuff like autism, my real answer is not diagnosed but no one would be surprised. So confirming yes or no feels kinda dishonest too.
Just Male and Female.
ok good to know never setting foot in walgreens ever.
can confirm, it was just male and female
I refuse when there is an option to, but in this case you had to make a choice between male and female, it was a required field to schedule a vaccine.
It sounds like a medical records thing and you should use whatever gender is listed on your medical records, which should probably match your social security records.
Some people only change state records so they have to respond differently depending on who’s asking. I think in this case its related to federal records.
i just put f because that’s what i am; only my pcp knows my saab and that’s only because i know and trust her.
I’m debating whether to even tell my PCP - I will have to tell someone to get access to hormones, but I would really prefer to not have to disclose my trans status for so many reasons … (one of those being the poor medical assumptions made when they assume I’m “male”).
There’s always DIY.
that’s true, but less ideal in some ways … especially I haven’t figured out DIY progesterone - I like having access to safe, regulated HRT but I see DIY as a viable alternative in a worst case scenario. I’m not sure I would DIY just because I’m uncomfortable being out to my doctor 🤔
it really all depends on your location too and whether or not you feel safe. for me, my pcp was who i initially talked about being trans with and she gave me some pointers on places to go (i also get my hormones and see my endo through fenway health which is a dedicated lgbtq clinic) so definitely only do it if you feel safe (erin’s hrt map helped out a lot to find places near me)
I’m definitely in a safer place now, ironically I was completely out to my doctors when I lived in a very unsafe state, but that was because I had initially transitioned then and needed access to care. I’m not really out to anyone in this new city, except to the other trans people at a trans support group.
I am not worried about safety as much as all the problems that come with disclosing trans status, such as suddenly not being seen as your gender (even when you were passing before), and all the ignorance that comes with being trans.
I was once turned away for a scheduled covid vaccine at a Rite Aid that had been bought out by Walgreens because one of the pharmacy assistants couldn’t figure out how to put my gender into the system.
Same thing happened to my buddy Robert’); DROP TABLE Gender;–
this is the dumbest shit I’ve ever heard
I’m guessing they’ll assume your genitalia match your ASAB and shove even more annoying ads into your face. Either that or leak it to the Federal Bureau for Conversion Therapy so that they can pay you a nice visit. You never know with capitalism in decline.
