My DS(17) attends a FE college a long way from home so he and a lot of his friends board, he started at this college when he was 16 so he is a child not an adult. The time has come to complete the residential forms again and I was surprised to see that the medical information form requested gender not sex, so I fired off a quick email pointing out that medically sex was very important. I received the following response;
"With regard to the medical form, I have discussed the matter with our Senior Residential Officer, , and we very much appreciate your response, and your knowledge and information on the matter, which is an extremely important one, and certainly valued. Apologies for the confusion, as we are aware that there is a big difference between sex and gender and that they are not interchangeable, and for these purposes we have requested the student’s preferred gender for identity reasons rather than for medical information. We have never requested the student to identify their biological sex on our medical forms, however to keep up to date with the college’s ethos on equality, diversity and inclusion, we are trying to included information such as gender and preferred pronouns on more of our students forms and paperwork.
If a student has a medical emergency, and if they are a new student that we haven’t gotten to know yet, or we have bank staff members or staff members unfamiliar with the student attending to the issue (for example if a first aider attends), then the first information we would refer to is on the medical form. As we have a large variety of students, who identify in many different ways, this is to avoid any difficult situations where someone may identify as non-binary, or not as their gender assigned at birth, it is for the staff’s information to be up to date and aware of how that student identifies."
Surely referring to the student by third person pronouns during a medical emergency isn't very inclusive, I would prefer my name or you, and for some reason "gender assigned at birth" really p*es me off.
Having just dealt with a similar issue at younger DS school I am fast running out of patience with this BS and any email I send at the moment would be aggressive and littered with obscenities. Please help me with my response.