Signs of a welcome return to reality in healthcare?

[WorkingItOutAsIGo]

I was thrilled to get this email from private healthcare phone line saying (terribly carefully) that from now on they need to know your registered sex at birth, not your gender identity. I dropped out of things like the Zoe surveys because they switched to gender not sex, and I am so pleased to see reality breaking through.

Anyone else seeing welcome shoots of sense?

Excellent.

Thank you OP.
Health care based on fantasies and beliefs was always unsustainable. Turning this toxic tanker round is taking an age but the small steps of facts and reality are a return to safe medical care.

It’s great isn’t it! It’s so negligent of health providers to do anything else, as we have seen in some high profile very sad cases.

Good. I signed up to Zoe recently (for the trial with a glucose monitor so worth doing for me) - it was still the GI question then, I've forgotten the wording but there was a text field so I delivered a short lecture on why as a woman I didn't have one.

I used my GP online appointment booking service for the first time today and was asked for my sex registered at birth not my gender identity as this is important in assessing how your appointment request is treated. A possible sign of return to sanity?

That sounds really good!

OP, I was asked for my biological sex by an NHS online consultation form to my surprise.

Lo and behold there was an information box below which when clicked apologised for the blasphemy above and Informed that by 2024 there would be no need to ask for sex or 'gender'.

Now, if it's a case of merely identifying my record then fine, they can do it in my name and date of birth and it beats the hell out of the 8 genders my dentist asks me and potentially my children to choose from. If it's all or nothing, then nothing wins.

But if this information was intended to be used to feed into wider health data and sex based statistics then there is still a problem.

Had an x-ray in hospital today, the form still asked for gender - I did the usual, cross it out & write ‘sex’, since that’s the info they actually need 🙄

Good. More of this, please.

Wuhu Op, allay effin lu ya!

It is obviously a good thing given where things are, but how on earth have we landed in a place where the convoluted - and also potentially confusing - construction of "sex registered at birth" is progress, when just a few short years ago the entirely unambiguous "sex" was being used and clearly understandable by everyone.

I don’t know whether to call you PaleBlue or Moonlight - but 🤣 yes you’re quite right! Here am I celebrating this and it really is only in comparison to the f-ing stupid gender identity and assigned at birth nonsense.

it just so grates on me when scientists and doctors fall for clearly unscientific tosh that any little improvement feels amazing!

NHS111 online assessment.

To be fair, NHS111 triage was always predicated on sex rather than gender.

I'm just reading Caroline Criado Perez' newsletter that dropped into my inbox today. She is discussing PPE, specifically face masks, and how there was a failure to appreciate women needed a different fit to men, during the pandemic.

"Having been blocked by politicians insisting there was no problem, I decided to get hold of some data to prove them wrong. Every time a healthcare worker uses a new model of mask, hospitals are meant to perform a “fit test” and record their results – so, in April 2020, I sent a freedom of information request to every NHS trust I could find. If I could show that women were failing their fit tests at a higher rate than men, surely the government would have to listen?
But here again I was met with, at best, a failure by trusts to collect disaggregated data by sex on fit-test outcomes; at worst, a strong implication that I was the one creating problems with my frivolous questions about worker safety (didn’t I know there was a pandemic on?). One of the trusts, Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals, which originally replied to say it did not disaggregate data by sex, went on to retrospectively do its own analysis and found that female staff were almost twice as likely as male staff to fail the mask-fit test. They have since committed to always collect sex-disaggregated data on fit tests."

I must say I'm amazed that Brighton of all trusts would be the one to wake up and admit to sex (assigned at birth) differences and do a study in it.

Study link:

Respiratory personal protective equipment for healthcare workers: impact of sex differences on respirator fit test results - British Journal of Anaesthesia

https://www.bjanaesthesia.org/article/S0007-0912(20)30851-5/fulltext?utmsource=substack&utmm_medium=email

For the study there was difficulty as "Sex and gender data were not recorded during fit testing; therefore, gender was inferred from the names of staff members, and sex inferred from the gender."

I'm not sure why they could get permission to retrospectively access the tests, with names of staff but not request HR check the EDI records to supply sex/gender or even just email each member of staff to ask that question which would seem the most straightforward way to do it imo.

And I'm very confused as to a system of inferring gender from a name and inferring sex from that gender. For trans staff presumably one would infer gender from their name as they are likely to have changed their names in keeping with their gender.
For the rest of us we mostly will have names chosen by our parents at birth which will reflect our sex at birth although some names are unisex and some people may be giving names which aren't their birth names eg women who choose to be called George rather than their given name Georgina even though they don't consider themselves to be male and aren't trans but just like that nickname, I've certainly known a few George's who are not in any way trans.

Anyway, they did the study and had a stab at it and it did find that more females failed fit tests than males because the masks didn't fit the female face so well.

And it was Brighton. Having to face up to sex differences.

And I'm very confused as to a system of inferring gender from a name and inferring sex from that gender.

I think it's written like that to clarify that we can't accurately infer sex from a name, and that there are 2 distinct sources of inaccuracy. They can guess the 'gender', with quite a bit of inaccuracy as some names aren't gendered. Sue would be 'feminine', Matt would be 'masculine', Robin isn't strongly gendered. And then when inferring sex from gender, statistical data says that ninety-whatever percent of people with 'feminine' names will be women.

Not health related but in the charity sector, so on the RSOH in general.

After a visit to Charleston in Lewes, an arts centre, I was asked my sex, and then on a new page my 'gender identity', including 'N/A' as an option.

I was offered 'intersex' as an option for my sex, but excuse this as goodness they are trying.