Gender not sex on medical consent form - UPDATE

[TheShoesa]

It's been a long time coming, but I have finally had a response to a query about my children's flu vaccination consent forms asking for gender rather than sex.

Previous thread (from 2018!) www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/a3384328-Gender-rather-than-sex-on-medical-form

The wording on the local consent forms is from a national template. So I need to follow that up with NHS England and PHE - although I contacted both in 2018 and got nowhere.

BUT The person I emailed last autumn accepted the points I raised and said that perhaps using 'gender' was not appropriate in this day and age and that the local unit would no longer use it on forms with immediate effect

It feels like a small win for accuracy, but I will wait and see what is on the forms this autumn before believing it.

However the email went on to say that the issue would be raised with the equality and inclusion team and I would get a further response, so it may yet be overturned. I imagine a compromise would be to have both sex and gender identity on the form if the E&I team feel the need for the word gender to be on there. If that happens I can just ignore that question or write 'none'

Will the NHS England online consent form also be updated? I had to do one last week.

In this ‘day and age’ with GDPR, what justification is there for asking gender on a flu vaccine consent form?

TwoHeaded I have no idea. I will contact both NHS England and PHE again, but having got nowhere in 2018 I decided to try going local this time.

Aesop I agree there is no need to ask for gender, but then I have no idea why sex was ever changed to gender in the first place on forms and suspect E&I departments probably influenced that decision. Depending on what I get back after their meeting with E&I I can raise the GDPR point.

Thanks for the update, and for keeping on it! Fingers crossed for accuracy.

TheShoesa thank you for doing this.

Thanks for doing this.

I crossed it out and wrote sex.

Well done! I am on the constant look out and complain when I see gender where sex should be.

DD’s 27 month questionnaire - boy/girl

For how long???!!

Why do they even need to know someone's sex to give them a flu shot? Surely boys and girls get the same shot?

I can think of a couple of reasons.

They may want to monitor whether uptake varies between groups of people.

Or they may need to look for patterns in different reactions to the vaccine for the two sexes.

Deck Sex is needed for reporting of potential adverse reactions to see if they are sex based and also to look at uptake patterns in terms of who to approach if one sex is vastly under represented in a campaign like this.

One of my children had flu this winter (GP diagnosis) despite having had the immunisation. Sex based data would be useful in situations like that too if lots of children of one sex still became ill, because it would indicate that the particular type of vaccine used was not working as well in one sex, allowing potential changes to vaccine programmes etc

February said it much more succinctly!

The person I emailed last autumn accepted the points I raised and said that perhaps using 'gender' was not appropriate in this day and age

That's good - because it suggests that this person has realised that the use of 'gender' on forms may have started merely as a polite euphemism for sex, but that now its meaning has changed and politeness has been subverted into tacit approval of genderism.

Thank you & well done.

Deck, I believe there can be some situations where sex does make a difference. Medical situations, I mean, in terms of reaction to vaccines, immunity, etc

www.nature.com/articles/s41590-018-0310-0

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28992436

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6373179/

' Specifically, females typically develop higher antibody responses and experience more adverse events following vaccination than males. This enhanced immune reactogenicity among females is thought to render females more resistant to infectious diseases, but conversely also contribute to higher incidence of autoimmunity among women.'

• so yes, I think it matters.

Invisible Women - great book by Caroline Criado Perez - sets out the importance of sex disaggregated data in developing & testing drugs. In pharmacology, sex matters.

I've got Invisible Women, but have yet to read it. Too busy firing off pointed emails!

The Nature article is behind a paywall, but the second one quite neatly says what I was trying to!

'Although males are more likely to receive vaccines, following vaccination, females typically develop higher antibody responses and report more adverse effects of vaccination than do males'.

@KapteenKrusty

When patients are handed over from one medic to another they state the patient’s sex - male or female.

Do you think this is done for a) fun because medics haven’t anything better to do, or b) because sex is relevant to incidence, treatments and outcomes of disease?

Quick hint - answer is b

I assume when you or your family are treated you want medical staff to know the difference between male and female anatomy, physiology and path physiology etc and why this is relevant.

Such a non issue that TRAs have gone all out to replace sex with gender. Strangely it only becomes a ‘non issue’ when someone points out sex is relevant.

Not a non issue when it comes to medical records and consent. Or when checking whether abdominal pains could be due to pregnancy related complications. Or looking at heart attack symptoms which are different in males and females. Or trying to find trends in diseases and healthcare programmes.

Not a non issue to me.

but then I have no idea why sex was ever changed to gender in the first place on forms and suspect E&I departments probably influenced that decision.

Not necessarily. Gender started appearing as a replacement for sex in many instances at a time when most people were using them interchangeably. Often gender was chosen because that was the word the person making the form used in their everyday speech, or sometimes because people thought it sounded more polite. In some cases also because then you wouldn't get teenagers and such filling out the forms with things like "lots" in the sex field.

Do you think this is done for a) fun because medics haven’t anything better to do, or b) because sex is relevant to incidence, treatments and outcomes of disease?

Agreed. Too many clinical trials have ended up with a dosage recommendation that largely suits men. When it is implemented, women show 'Adverse Events' at a rate that didn't show up in the trials. And then there is data gathering etc. until such time as there may be a clinical need for a guideline that recommends a reduced dosage for women.

And there is an interesting area of what is known as an "academic diagnosis." That's essentially where a disorder exists but there's no treatment for it - so it's academic whether you spend the money on a niche diagnosis because there's no treatment beyond best supportive care.

So, for some current "academic diagnoses" there's a sex disparity. It's thought that the profile is 9 men for every 1 woman - but who knows and it's not worth the money to find out.

Now, a treatment is available. You will suddenly move into needing a verifiable diagnosis. Now you're looking for it, you're finding far more women have this condition. You're still sticking with it being a disorder that's more prevalent in men, but now you're proposing a 7:3 - tho' there's nothing to base that on. Yet, given the nature of the disorder, there's no biological/physiological reason to suspect that it's anything other than 50:50 - yet, guess who moves into the diagnostic pathway faster and stands more chance of being treated at an earlier stage that might delay the disease progress and improve quality of life.

Sex matters enormously. And there isn't always sufficient acknowledgement of that in clinical practice.

@Goosefoot

I think you are right - initially used as a synonym for sex. I remember filling out a form at secondary school (early 90s) asking for my gender and I didn’t know what it was. I asked my friend and she didn’t know either.

Not taught about gender or that we were in the wrong body.

How lucky were we at school!!

Speaking to a GP today about a menopause issue - it was over the phone so I couldn't high five her - she said "cos we have wombs, right"?

I had to complete a form to access online patient bookings etc..

It too asked for my gender. I complained and said it was inappropriate in terms of correct medical assessment.

And initially I got a good response and wanted to hear more from me and the person responding said they would raise it with their manager.

After that I got a one line response saying it was in line with accepted practice agreed by NHS England. They gave me the link to the document and I am sure I posted in on another thread here. I will try and dig it out.

And as others have said in the past no one had any problem with filling in forms where you were asked your sex.

The movement to blur the lines of the difference between sex and gender is part of the result of queer politics taking a foot hold in universities in the 80s, which led to women's studies being closed and gender studies being set up.

It is part of what is now obviously a long term campaign to change language to suit the desired outcome of denying the reality of biological sex.

This is why the NUJ was pressurised into stop using the word sex in news reports and replace it with gender (in the same way as they stopped papers from saying prostitute and say sex worker instead).

So the graduates from 80s universities who were taught (brain washed) into the gender choice concept went on to be researchers, journalists, MPs, teachers.

what we are experiencing now is the long term consequence of a movement that took hold in elitist but influential organisations so that they can then impose it on the wider population without revealing what their intentions were.

At least religious fundamentalists make clear that they are out to convert you.

Gender choice fundamentalists work behind peoples backs to gain positions where they can then impose their view of the world on everyone else.