Assistance please - why Sex not Gender on Immunisation Form?

[gardenbird48]

Hi all, I contacted Virgin Healthcare to ask why they use Gender instead of Sex on their forms and have had a nice response that they are reviewing the use of Sex or Gender (Options: Male/female/other) in response to several parents requesting that Gender is used instead of based.
I am drafting a response to make the point that Sex is hugely important for medical situations - there are sex specific immunisations (can’t remember what atm) - Rubella? so surely they need to know whether they are vaccinating a boy or a girl? I’m not sure if there are any dosing differences between the sexes at that age but can anyone help with any other relevant points please?

What they are considering this because several parents have asked? I’d be asking those parents a few questions to be honest.

Just hopping over here from a thread on this I accidentally started on this today after getting the same "gender" BS from our local NHS for the school flu vax.

For reasons why biology matters, I would add that as well as mattering for direct health/medical care, the accurate collection of BIOLOGICAL data also matters for the adequate commissioning and planning of local healthcare services.

How will the NHS know how much and what type of services/vaccines/heathcare products etc it needs to purchase and commission next year or 5 years after that if it has progressively duffer and duffer information about the actual sex of the humans living in its local area?

Sure for the time being we might have birth rate data by biological sex, but that tells you nothing about where those humans are living, what GP practice they are registered at, etc. Especially in large cities where the population turnover is high.

Nor will future "impact assessments" or consultations be able to work out how on earth changes to services affect people of different sexes (the protected characteristic under the Equalities Act of course, but no one seems to care about that) because increasingly surveys and consultations arent asking about biological sex, they are asking barely-comprehensible questions about gender identity. And even if they get the survey question correctly asked, they are losing their baseline data on the sex of their resident population.

Absolutely driver

My four points were:

1. Sex is a biologically defined measurable fact, gender has no clearly defined definition in law or general usage and could result in inaccurate data being gathered.
2. Knowing the correct sex of a patient is extremely important – in some instances, it can be a matter of life and death. Many medical conditions and treatments are totally sex specific and any confusion over that could be very serious.
3. From an immunisation point of view, it would be important to have accurate records of the sex of patients in case of any adverse reactions and the consequent need for investigation.
4. Under GDPR, requesting information on Gender is likely to be classed as capturing unnecessary data and would be illegal. Information on Sex is medically relevant and therefore allowable.

I’m not sure how that will go down - I’m still in the place where I’m expecting a reaction if ‘well who are you to quote the law/medical necessities etc’

I’m also writing to our NHS trust and they have quoted the wrong interpretation of Gender Reassignment as a protected characteristic- they are using it to allow self identification to access single sex spaces rather than just protection from discrimination (using the comparator = Male in case of trans women) for someone going through the gr process.
I am not a lawyer so I’m finding it hard to tell them that their advice is incorrect and I know better :-)) maybe I need to learn how to mansplain and not care?

those are really good points @gardenbird48.
I think my work place (not a healthcare provider) is taking a similar approach re self id and single sex spaces (obvs harder to argue against outside of healthcare, but it shouldnt be impossible). The comparators is where my head starts hurting on this. Please share your resources if you can. I'm sure you do probably just need to mansplain more and with more confidence.

thanks driver and great that so many people are on the case with these situations - as another pp said, better two threads than none :¬)) we can do a lot if lots of us do a little bit.

I am slowly getting my head around the comparators - this resource was mentioned upthread (I think - I've got fried head today) and I found this article which really helped me understand where the measure of discrimination lies.
legalfeminist.org.uk/2020/07/25/my-body-my-choice-privacy-and-consent-in-personal-care/
and this one helped enormously too: legalfeminist.org.uk/2020/07/17/does-the-law-say-that-trans-women-are-women/

those links are perfect @gardenbird48 - thank you.

I got a response from the NHS org I emailed yday. Pretty positive, thanking me for raising it and saying they will now review for next year and discuss imminently. It's from an actual proper person rather than a public relations type, so I'm really hoping it's genuine. I will ask them to let me know the outcome of their review and will feedback here.

so, I have received a reply - thanking me for the information which will be passed on for robust consideration to the regional Quality and Safety committee (I'm guessing for Virgin Care as a company).

Positive so far, I've got my fingers crossed and have gone back with some more background info (inc. the various legal actions) that may help with the discussion, so we will see what happens. Off to do some more chipping :¬)

Well done! I'm so pleased that you raised this and hope you succeed

On the back of this, I’ve just questioned my local immunisation team, as the DCs flu vaccination consent asked for gender.

and I've sent a letter in response to the local NHS Trust's transgender patients policy which was concerning (self-id onto female wards and if you object you get removed from the premises - somewhat harsh in my mind) me. They had been misadvised on the pc of Gender Reassignment and the scope of protection against discrimination that gives ie. it protects against discrimination on grounds of the GR process but it doesn't automatically confer the protections of the 'acquired sex' . This would be discrimination on grounds of Sex and for a male-born trans woman the relevant comparator would be a male etc - I hope my understanding of this is correct - I used www.legalfeminist.org to help.
i will update further on any responses anon.

People are going to sue big time...

Just FYI, the response I got back from our vaccination team after last year's flu campaign gave me the following link to the central template, which has not been changed and which asks Gender: Boy/Girl.

www.gov.uk/government/publications/flu-vaccination-in-schools

If I get the same form this year I will cross out gender to write sex, cross out Boy/Girl and replace with Male/Female and then tick the appropriate box, like I did last year. Then I will get onto contacting whoever is resposible for the central template.

thank you and brilliant carefulvulva Loelia Bodynegative and theshoe

I think if we all just keep chipping away at this - each time we see a mistake, it will have an impact. It definitely makes me feel better anyway.

I imagine that lots of organisations, if they are contacted by someone who asks them to make a change and gives a reasonable sounding (on the surface) justification, they don't really have time to give it too much thought, don't understand the wider consequences so can't see the harm in making the requested change (although you would hope that a medical company would at least give a bit more thought to their data collection requirements).

It struck me as being quite odd that parents would think to write to a medical company such as Virgin Care to ask for a change to the title of a box on a form that only parents need to use - it can't upset the child as they wouldn't see it and presumably the parents if they are involved in the transitioning of the child would understand the importance of sex for medical matters? Just a thought....

I imagine this very good piece by Maya has been posted else where too, but as this thread is such a good resource on the subject of gender ideology in the NHS I thought I’d bookmark it here too. It covers the issue of consent and the right to have treatment from a clinician of the same sex (and therefore the importance of knowing biological sex) and the inevitable disregard of that in the interests of TWAW and how the NHS’s quality regulator the CQC also uses gender not sex:

a-question-of-consent.net/2020/09/16/doctors/