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 …
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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.