A text from my Doctor

[FlippinFumin]

I had a text from my Doctor yesterday asking if I would like to take part in a survey about attitudes to buying medication from a pharmacy rather than getting a prescription. Now, I am a massive advocate for buying over the counter medication, for example pain medication, antihistamines, creams etc from a pharmacist or supermarket. So I took the survey. At the end was the usual 'now some questions about you'. There was the usual age and there was even 'sex' as well as gender. And then the curve ball

'has there been a time when your gender did not fit with your birth sex' nope
'have you ever considered changing your gender'
nope
'have you considered surgery to change your gender to the gender you feel you should be' NOPE!

Has anyone else had this stuff? I wonder if it is another of those crowd funder ones, like the one we helped pay for about GRA? Apparantly those questions were tagged onto another survey and not a survey in and of themselves. I wonder who has paid for this one and what the implications might be?

You could ask the practice manager at Drs?

They may well have background to the survey as they are promoting it.

Ask for their privacy policy, it should tell you on there who they’re doing it for.

It won't have come from the GP, it'll be central from the CCG or another organisation. Your GP doesn't have the time or energy to be sending such surveys.

??? I’d be rather worried if my doctors were asking me that. It sounds like touting to me. I’d definitely be ringing the practice if I was you. I doubt any of that would get much traction round here but I’ll keep an eye.

More likely that the survey will provide anonymised data to the surgery but also (as seems the case) other interested parties.

Not from your doctor. Possibly a BigPharma sponsored survey to see what the market would be for hormones, puberty blockers and so on. This is big business. Coming soon to your area, a private gender clinic run by one of Dr Haddock's friends.

'has there been a time when your gender did not fit with your birth sex'

Confusing question - do they mean gender identity (don't have one) or gender stereotypes (I disagree with these all the time) or gender presentation (I'd say outside of physical characteristics mine is fluid anyway), and sex is mentioned separately, so they don't seem to mean that. Perhaps they mean the gender marker on my documentation? I mean, mistakes have happened in the past, but again, this seems unlikely, because why would my doctor be asking?

'have you ever considered changing your gender'

I thought gender identity (which I don't have) was fixed? And they can't mean gender stereotypes, because that makes no sense in this context, so the best guess is gender presentation. Well.. yes.. I've had different haircuts, my wardrobe holds many outfits... but that seems like a strange thing for a surgery to be asking. Perhaps here they do mean sex, even thought they didn't in the first question - but since that's clearly impossible (and they're doctors, they should know), that doesn't make sense. If it's M/F on my passport, then no, I can clearly say that I've never considered changing it.

'have you considered surgery to change your gender to the gender you feel you should be'

Lets go through the list again - can't be gender identity, because surgery does nothing for that, can't be gender stereotypes because surgery does nothing for that, must, again, be gender presentation - so I suppose - yes? I have considered a breast reduction - weird again to call it just 'gender' though, surely 'appearance' would be more appropriate, and no amount of surgery can change your sex, it can't be that - so again, I'm confused as to what they're actually asking. Can't be the passport question, because surgery has no bearing on that.

In Summary - these questions are unanswerable as they are.

At least those questions aren't actually conflating sex and gender - they're quite clear that they're separate things. And 'birth sex' not that ludicrous 'assigned at birth' phrase, and 'gender' not sex as a changeable property.

No idea where this could have arisen from but I doubt TRAs would approve of that wording.

I'm very sceptical as to the 'big pharma' idea - I should think they're extremely wary of anything so likely to lead to lawsuits down the line nowadays.

I find this rather disturbing - a survey which seems innocuous and then asks irrelevant and intrusive questions. What is the purpose of asking if you'd considered surgery? Is this an ethics thing? I'd question who is funding etc.

Your GP surgery has to tell you if you ask -

Who is running this?
Who is funding it?
Who gets the data and for what use.

Ask them. And if you don’t like the answers then make sure you tell them why.

GDPR is such a good thing :)

I don’t see what any of this has to do with buying medication over the counter. It looks like that’s just a pretext for asking questions about gender.