Smear appointment reminder with a Mx

[catin8oots]

Have a routine smear booked at my local surgery and just received a reminder text saying it will be with Mx Firstname Surname.

I have no idea if this person is a biological woman or a biological man.

Can I call and ask?

My family GP was an all-female practice, unusual for the 1960s; and all my gynae medicine and contraception were provided by female nurses and doctors from what I remember. "Women's clinics" staffed by women were becoming more commonplace from the 1980s onwards.

Having said that, it's clear from what the OP has said that her nurse did not intend to conceal anything. But "being unaware of how it might be read" is part of the problem. Management should not be telling nurses to pick and choose their pronouns. They should be telling nurses about informed consent and the right (and for some patients, the need) to know the sex of the person offering to care for them.

In one case I think the user was probably a man in course of transition.

If you had asked would you have been told? Or was it a situation where it didn't matter, not like intimate care?

The worker at Edinburgh Rape Crisis identified as "non-binary" and was determined that no-one should be told her sex. This was encouraged by the CEO (a transwoman) for their own reasons. My own prism is that at some time since the 1980s feminists took our eye off the ball and this is the result. Mx is not a harmless neutral choice, it normalises people refusing to say what sex they are.

I always thought it was Miss Ellie, and the first 5 Google references when I searched for TV Dallas Cast all come up with Miss Ellie too?

You're probably right (it was a while ago) but it's the way they say it. I was far too lazy to Google it before I posted!

I don’t think I’d heard of Ms when I watched Dallas, so it wasn’t ambiguous for me.

I did wonder why the mother of the family was referred to as Miss, though.