I had my booking appointment this week

How would a midwife use pronouns incorrectly during an appointment? She would use your name or "you" as the second person personal pronoun.

I did have one midwife who called everyone "luvvy" regardless of how anyone felt about it.

The midwife will be using the patient's name and the second person singular when conversing.

Every single patient in every maternity unit on the planet is female. Every single human who has ever lived was gestated in and birthed by a female.

We are placental mammals; the female half of which gestates and lactates. It literally defines us.

How do you think you would feel if your midwife used the wrong pronouns for you in your antenatal appointments? It's about affirming, supporting and empowering your patients while they go through potentially the biggest transition of their life. Also, there may be things such as hormone treatments or previous gender affirming surgeries that need to be known about, or physiological differences, whether cis or trans.

Maybe she just hates the cringy and inaccurate phrase 'sex assigned at birth' so very much that she preferred to roll thendice with 'legal sex'. She'll often get the legal sex right by guessing. She'll never get the other right because no one is assigned a sex at birth. It's observed and noted.

Why is 'gender' relevant to medical treatment?

Wow thank you so much for sharing, I handnt heard that. I do apologise for offending you, I'll make sure to be more careful in the future.

Also apologies if unclear, I am not using it for the 'trans argument', I meant that midwives shouldn't be making assumptions about gender and sex at all because it is complex and sensitive.

Intersex should not be used as a term as it’s more commonly known as DSD, differences in sex development and I find it offensive in how it’s gets used in the trans argument. DSD is a medical problem and regardless we are either female or male, whether we like it or not. I was born with what they termed “ambiguous genitalia” and wasn’t assigned anything. Even 40+ years ago I was given a chromosome test to determine my sex.

Also this is tagged as feminism, sex and gender chat so I feel respectfully communicating information on the topic was fair

I thought @pink9798 was writing a parody.

I don't think I said any inaccurate? I've just realised it's because I was searching booking appointments! My mistake! I have a lot of lovely trans friends and I have seen a bit of misinformation in this thread so just wanted to offer some information, there's really no need to be rude :)

The way Mumsnet works months old threads do not pop up in the feed unless someone bumps them by adding a post. In this case the person who did that was you.

I assume in order to add highly inaccurate talking points.

It popped up on my feed lol sorry

I read a lot of journals etc but here's a quick link https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2018/10/its-intersex-awareness-day-here-are-5-myths-we-need-to-shatter/ though to be fair this is disputed a little! Regardless, there are definitely interest people that have babies

Intersex is a spectrum so some do have both parts some don't, some can get pregnant some can't, I was just saying its a shame medical professionals bring their own biases into these appointments when there is so much more to it than using correct pronouns <3 everyone deserves respect

First ZOMBIE THREAD
Second
Where did you hear intersex is as common as ginger? Why do you think intersex have both sexually reproductive parts?

I know this is not what OP was getting at but there is just too much misinformation in this feed. If they are a medical professional they should know that scientifically sex is biological and gender is socially constructed, plenty of trans people have children and they don't deserve to be dehumanised because one midwife doesn't want ask a question, trans people have been around forever it is not just a new fad - also intersex people are as common as ginger people, and despite biologically having male and female parts are often assigned one gender at birth. Many people don't even find this out until later on in life so biological sex cannot be assumed to be the same as gender even if you're a transphobe - especially in something as precarious and serious as antenatal care. The paperwork misunderstanding issues are more to do with the lack of accessibility than gender being too confusing.

I can tell you that the form filling that medical professionals have to do is beyond ridiculous. When I started nursing many moons ago there were questions on forms that I just used to ignore because its obvious when you have a patient in front of you that a lot of them didn’t need answering (unless of course you wanted to look like a complete idiot to the patient). I’ve just been in hospital and not once was I asked what I identify as!

op this is sort of linked and interesting
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/04/12/transgender-population-uk-inflated-ons-census/
"separate ONS data published last week showed that those who speak English “not well” or “not well at all” were most likely to be counted as transgender, at 2.2 per cent. This compared with 0.4 per cent of those whose main language is English or Welsh. As a result, those who speak English poorly are five times more likely to be transgender.
Furthermore, adults whose main language is not English made up 10 per cent of the overall population but, according to the census, they contributed 29 per cent of the transgender numbers. The figures also show that one in 67 Muslims is transgender, a figure which Professor Biggs claims is “not plausible”.

another example of people (particularly those for whom english isn't their first languagw) don't understand questions around trans/gender ID so we end up with ridiculous data

this is a particularly worrying example because if someone hadn't queried these results it's easy to see how they could be used for a basis to argue for increased funding, pass legislation, etc.

Absolutely this. I refuse to ask because it's fucking ridiculous

Right but if that is true she should have filled in sex at birth as female and left legal sex blank or filled in both as female.

Because in order to get pregnant OP would have had to be biologically female at birth. She couldn't be a transwoman and get pregnant.

However she could be a "legal" (trans)man and still be pregnant (although given presumably she had access to ops other records which listed her as Ms/mrs/whatever she could make a reasonable assumption OP identified as female but without asking her it was only an assumption).

In order to be accurate both boxes should have been ticked
If the staff member thinks it's bleeding obvious (and I've been the person having to ask these awkward questions!) then she should have left both boxes empty.
If for some reason she only wanted to tick 1 box then she should have ticked the one for sex at birth because out of the 2 options that's the only 1 she could KNOW without asking OP.

That's OPs point- it's very very likely that these forms aren't being filled in correctly or uniformly and therefore that's a huge worry for data collection.

Yeah, this. I'd ignore that question too

I'd agree the data must be a total mess. What a crapshow.

She probably leaves it blank as the answer is obvious and can't be anything other than female. Maternity doesn't have separate IT systems so the form is probably just part of a larger system and the midwife has taken the sensible approach of not bothering to ask when the person is pregnant.

Oh just realised my error on legal sex. So she assumed your legal sex. What a mess

Though obviously only the second question is needed at a booking in! "Legal sex if different from biological sex"

Doesn't make sense anyway, since as far as I understand any of this nonsense, sex, and sex assigned at birth, would be the same thing?

Yes, I suppose it should be "sex" and "legal sex if different" with a note on why the latter is asked for.