Are you sure most systems even need to record gender or pronouns? Outside of medicine sex is rarely significant, and if by gender you mean masculine or feminine traits then again (other to the person themselves) it’s largely irrelevant I’d have thought.
Pronouns can be useful in any system that generates text that refers to people in the third person, so makes sense to ask -- but it also makes sense to just let people put in whatever they want unless you are trying to aggregate data from it for marketing purposes, in which case imo you should stop doing that.
Outside of medicine sex is rarely significant
Frankly, even inside of medicine it's usually not terribly relevant, and is often a poor proxy for the information they really want out of it. Half the time a medical form asks you that it's literally just so that cis men won't get mad at you for asking if they're pregnant on a later step.
I won't be at all surprised if I get some kind of kneejerk reaction to this statement suggesting that it might be important in an emergency or something, but for the most part that's not really the case, and even where it is, if it's that important (ie. allergy level), it's not sufficient to avoid harm because you will have situations where neither "sex" or "gender" as commonly formulated on these forms will tell you what you really need to know (hormone balance, organ configuration, medical history). Any one of those could be out of alignment with whichever social construct of sexed traits you pick.
Frankly, even inside of medicine it's usually not terribly relevant, and is often a poor proxy for the information they really want out of it.
Sex is incredibly important inside medicine. It's probably the most important distinguishing characteristic when determining how to diagnose and treat someone (maybe weight is more).
Here are a few examples:
- 99% of breast cancer occurs in women
- any diseases affecting the female[male] reproductive systems can only impact women[men]
- 4x as many women suffer from osteoporosis
- Roughly 70% of those living with autoimmune diseases are female
- stomach cancer (2:1 men) oesophageal cancer (3:1 men) liver cancer (2:1 to 4:1 men)
These are statistical differences. If you want to know if they apply to an individual you need to know more. A checkbox on a form is not sufficient.
If you're usefully aggregating data for some purpose, say for a study, then go off ask all the relevant indicators you want.
If it's an intake form for an eye doctor appointment, it won't tell you dick all. If a patient came in for a breast exam, you already know they're at risk of cancer. If you're their family doctor figuring out risk factors, you already know their medical history.
And if they're trans or intersex, and you're assuming that either their assigned sex or their self-declared gender tells you which bucket they fall in, you know a lot more than anyone else about how those traits affect those things because they are woefully understudied, and almost certainly complicated by literally everything in their medical history.
If it's an intake form for an eye doctor appointment, it won't tell you dick all.
Where are you getting your information?
Results: Sex and sex hormones influence the lacrimal system, eyelids and blinking, corneal anatomy and disease, aqueous humor dynamics and glaucoma, crystalline lens and cataract, uveitis and retinal disease, ocular circulation, and optic nerve anatomy and disease. Systemic conditions, particularly autoimmune disease, and conditions that are unique to women, such as pregnancy and menopause, further illustrate the effects of sex hormones on the eye. Gender-based differences in ocular conditions and disease should be considered within the context of the underlying physical and social environment.
Skimmed the paper on Scihub. It looks like it's mostly a review of other studies that either show statistical correlations or are about hormone levels. I.e. it directly supports their point that sex is just being used as a proxy for the thing that you really want to know. (And most of it seems irrelevant for someone with healthy eyes getting a new pair of glasses.)
Proxies for the thing you really want to know are pretty useful when you can check the proxy cheaply and the thing you really want to know is (comparatively) expensive to test.
Like, I don't think the world would be better if we routinely gave cismen pregnancy tests, would it?
Again, we're talking about forms here. If you have a reason to want to know if someone has a uterus or might be or become pregnant, you can just ask that. Forms for things where this is important usually do anyways. Sometimes gated on an "if you answered female to the above..." which actually compounds the problem for some people who are not neatly categorized that way.
Likewise, asking a cis man if he is or might be pregnant should not be a horrible thing to do, nor a problem for record keeping, though like I alluded to in my initial reply here, it does sometimes cause confusion or even confrontation to ask them.
Those statistical differences are used to more quickly reduce the search space of symptoms when the cause is unknown. So yeah, they are still important, even for individuals.
In the marketing world, it's vastly predictive of behavior, similar to income level or political party. Men and women tend to have highly significant differences in shopping and purchasing behavior.
So, whether they 'need' gender or not, many places 'want' gender.
Comments
Are you sure most systems even need to record gender or pronouns? Outside of medicine sex is rarely significant, and if by gender you mean masculine or feminine traits then again (other to the person themselves) it’s largely irrelevant I’d have thought.
Pronouns can be useful in any system that generates text that refers to people in the third person, so makes sense to ask -- but it also makes sense to just let people put in whatever they want unless you are trying to aggregate data from it for marketing purposes, in which case imo you should stop doing that.
Frankly, even inside of medicine it's usually not terribly relevant, and is often a poor proxy for the information they really want out of it. Half the time a medical form asks you that it's literally just so that cis men won't get mad at you for asking if they're pregnant on a later step.
I won't be at all surprised if I get some kind of kneejerk reaction to this statement suggesting that it might be important in an emergency or something, but for the most part that's not really the case, and even where it is, if it's that important (ie. allergy level), it's not sufficient to avoid harm because you will have situations where neither "sex" or "gender" as commonly formulated on these forms will tell you what you really need to know (hormone balance, organ configuration, medical history). Any one of those could be out of alignment with whichever social construct of sexed traits you pick.
Sex is incredibly important inside medicine. It's probably the most important distinguishing characteristic when determining how to diagnose and treat someone (maybe weight is more).
Here are a few examples:
- 99% of breast cancer occurs in women
- any diseases affecting the female[male] reproductive systems can only impact women[men]
- 4x as many women suffer from osteoporosis
- Roughly 70% of those living with autoimmune diseases are female
- stomach cancer (2:1 men) oesophageal cancer (3:1 men) liver cancer (2:1 to 4:1 men)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_medicine
Yep, called the kneejerk.
These are statistical differences. If you want to know if they apply to an individual you need to know more. A checkbox on a form is not sufficient.
If you're usefully aggregating data for some purpose, say for a study, then go off ask all the relevant indicators you want.
If it's an intake form for an eye doctor appointment, it won't tell you dick all. If a patient came in for a breast exam, you already know they're at risk of cancer. If you're their family doctor figuring out risk factors, you already know their medical history.
And if they're trans or intersex, and you're assuming that either their assigned sex or their self-declared gender tells you which bucket they fall in, you know a lot more than anyone else about how those traits affect those things because they are woefully understudied, and almost certainly complicated by literally everything in their medical history.
Where are you getting your information?
Results: Sex and sex hormones influence the lacrimal system, eyelids and blinking, corneal anatomy and disease, aqueous humor dynamics and glaucoma, crystalline lens and cataract, uveitis and retinal disease, ocular circulation, and optic nerve anatomy and disease. Systemic conditions, particularly autoimmune disease, and conditions that are unique to women, such as pregnancy and menopause, further illustrate the effects of sex hormones on the eye. Gender-based differences in ocular conditions and disease should be considered within the context of the underlying physical and social environment.
[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19811761/
Skimmed the paper on Scihub. It looks like it's mostly a review of other studies that either show statistical correlations or are about hormone levels. I.e. it directly supports their point that sex is just being used as a proxy for the thing that you really want to know. (And most of it seems irrelevant for someone with healthy eyes getting a new pair of glasses.)
Proxies for the thing you really want to know are pretty useful when you can check the proxy cheaply and the thing you really want to know is (comparatively) expensive to test.
Like, I don't think the world would be better if we routinely gave cismen pregnancy tests, would it?
Again, we're talking about forms here. If you have a reason to want to know if someone has a uterus or might be or become pregnant, you can just ask that. Forms for things where this is important usually do anyways. Sometimes gated on an "if you answered female to the above..." which actually compounds the problem for some people who are not neatly categorized that way.
Likewise, asking a cis man if he is or might be pregnant should not be a horrible thing to do, nor a problem for record keeping, though like I alluded to in my initial reply here, it does sometimes cause confusion or even confrontation to ask them.
Those statistical differences are used to more quickly reduce the search space of symptoms when the cause is unknown. So yeah, they are still important, even for individuals.
In the marketing world, it's vastly predictive of behavior, similar to income level or political party. Men and women tend to have highly significant differences in shopping and purchasing behavior.
So, whether they 'need' gender or not, many places 'want' gender.