Asklemmy

I work in healthcare. I'm a data scientist. I get requests all the time where people ask for gender of their patients. Problem is, we don't capture gender. Or at least, we don't capture gender for most. We have a field for sex, which is filled in for nearly all patients. Gender is filled in on a separate form which many people are not trained on and thus only present for <5% of our patients.

When I let physicians know that we only have sex available, they inevitably still ask for it. I typically press them as to why- what clinical purpose do you need this for? Their responses vary wildly. Many realize when questioned that they are simply collecting it to collect it - it doesn't have a real clinical purpose. In some cases, incidences of certain disease states are tied to gender in literature, and knowing that someone is more likely to have a specific disease is something that can be clinically relevant. For these people I provide the information, but I have a short talk with them first. I let them know that the recorded sex often doesn't tell them what they actually want. There are many individuals with a variety of disorders which can affect what hormones are present in their body, what sex characteristics developed, or how at risk they are for particular disorders. In addition, many trans (and in some cases cis) people may have an inaccurate chart - I have heard plenty of stories of trans men with beards being asked about their prostate by a PCP and trans women asked about concerns related to child birth. While rarer, I have heard the same from some cis people who are androgynous. In most cases a parts inventory is more useful (or in some cases, an understanding of circulating hormones), albeit much like gender, is something we don't often collect.