Vivian, Venus Pirate 🏳️⚧️Call to action to cis people: be assholes anytime you get asked for your sex assigned at birth. Write letters, complain to staff, refuse to answer. Make it impossible to collect sex assigned at birth. Be really offended that anyone would ask you. Make enough noise that if trans people want to quietly not answer or give whatever answer feels correct to them, no one will notice.
Zumbador@Willow... and if you don't feel quite ready to do this yet, warm up to it by noticing how often you're asked your sex assigned at birth, and how seldom it is relevant. Seriously. Think about it. Then start making a noise. "why do you need to know!?"
x0
Cassandrich
Morgan ⚧️@dalias @x0 @Zumbador @Willow I think it's probably both. I've had at least one experience where the doctor saw the M on my chart, took me seriously, learned I have a uterus, and immediately ceased to take me seriously. It was night and day, and it was astonishing being able to view his behavior from both a male and a female perspective. Any cis men reading along, if you think a (male and assumed cis) doctor is great and really listens, ask a woman how he acts without you in the room!
d@nny disc@ mc²@raphaelmorgan @dalias @x0 @Zumbador @Willow i have had so many negative experiences with male doctors that i absolutely refuse to use them now
Ailbhe
Alecska 🏳️🌈🏴☠️🔮🧸🦄 📷@x0 @Zumbador @Willow in those situations, they need way more information than that letter can provide and that's why people like me don't get adequate healthcare (along with financial and accessibility barriers)
One letter causes false assumptions about what organs I have. The other causes false assumptions about my hormone balance. If they need to know either of those things, they need to ask the specific question
One letter causes false assumptions about what organs I have. The other causes false assumptions about my hormone balance. If they need to know either of those things, they need to ask the specific question
Juho MäntysaloIn some social contextes it may be asked for statistical causes. It is, for example, quite important to find out if some service is largely used by one sex/gender when in theory the usage should be equal for the whole population.
Tbs, many forms ask data just for funsies and/or for the newsletter-greeting (and ofc you HAVE to subscribe to it).
Can't understand if they want to start the newsletter with preferred name, they won't also ask preferred title?
Jeff Grigg@JeffGrigg @x0 @Zumbador @Willow
Some considerations:
- Product usage might reflect patterns unknown to the makers/users. For example: how we found out that many medicines didn't actually work on women (the testing had only used biological men, and the results were applied to women).
- That someone is presenting one gender doesn't mean they don't have needs of their biological one. (Medicine, but also pads, condoms, etc.)
- [cont]
@JeffGrigg @x0 @Zumbador @Willow
Every time data is asked, the case for which the data is to be used should explained. No "it might come handy" -questions. So if you ask for sex, you must declare why: to find out how the medicine works in a body, or what applications in addition to the obvious you have for condoms.
Second, and this is cultural (please don't shoot): binaric gender is a poor way in almost any situation to correlate how a person wants to be treated, and thus not worth asking.
RevolucianaNo, it's not actually *ever* medically relevant what you were assigned at birth. This information is used for shorthand in order for practitioners to make assumptions about your body, but those assumptions are regularly incorrect even when only dealing with cis people, let alone when you add in trans, intersex, chimerism, or other conditions.
Relying on sex as a significant piece of data is lazy medicine and any practitioner that clutches to it for literally anything is suspect.
Anatomy and hormones are regularly affected by so many factors from diet, hysterectomy, oophorectomy, cancer, environmental factors and exposures, injury, etc.
A medical practitioner who is doing a proper job is not going to treat you like a group, but as an individual with individual conditions, factors, and needs.
Lots of providers are increasingly choosing to do an organ index instead, at least when they realize that's even an option. My spouse and I have successfully urged providers in multiple departments/clinics to stop worrying about assigned sex and instead to introduce a (voluntary) organ selection sheet that lets the provider know what you do or don't have when it's relevant.
ChloChloaca@revoluciana @x0 @Zumbador @Willow
It's always been kinda a crazy concept to me. Like "oh what'd your body look like at birth?" And the answer is always "nothing like it does today."
We don't do karyotyping at birth, so I couldn't tell you what my chromosomes looked like, and I don't even for sure know what they are now.
People have surgeries, have accidents, exposure to chemicals...life happens. Our bodies change.
Ask me about what my body looks like *now.* Not how it was at birth.
I'm a trans woman, but I take E AND T, each for different purposes. And yet people wanna claim my AGAB matters bc my body might have produced a certain amount of T back then? Idk what my levels were before transition!
I want a doctor who treats me as an individual. Not as an average approximate of a human.
Ulrike Walter-Lipow
Karen E. Lund 💙💛