You nearly-never need to know a user's gender, actually

A common instance of data overcollection and a result of legacy systems and legacy datasets more often than explicitly oppressive viewpoints. There are ways to conform with legal or operational requirements without arbitrarily placing trans and gender-variant people at disadvantage.

Notes

Section titled “Notes”
  • You probably don’t need this data at all.
    • This includes gender, sex, maiden name, title
    • Title isn’t required for mailing and other communications such as email rarely use formal address.
    • Gender and sex are personal information that is collected mostly arbitrarily and not used
    • Marketing segmentation is not a good enough reason to store this data imo, it is likely you’re misjudging or overgeneralising the needs of your audience
  • If you really actually do, consider:
    • Do you mean gender or sex?
      • You probably only need one or the other
      • Asking for sex alone is often discriminatory
      • Where this is often actually required and pertinent is often a medical setting but this is still often clumsy and over-reaching
        • eg if an illness presents the same regardless of sex, you don’t need to know
        • eg if a medication isn’t affected by pregnancy status, hormones etc, you don’t need to know
  • Ask more specific questions.
    • eg Do you need to know if the patient is a woman, or are you actually asking if they currently menstruate?
    • This benefits multiple oppressed groups eg:
      • safer and more comfortable for trans and gender-variant people to make intimate disclosures
      • gives clarity on information required to those with cognitive impairment or cognitive differences
      • gives space for disabled people and disease/accident survivors to be more accurate on parts they do or don’t have and how they function
      • leaves room for those with both temporary and permanent hormonal differences, eg
        • intersex conditions
        • fertility treatment
        • pregnancy
        • menopause
        • etc
      • cross-cultural and cross-language interactions?? may remove ambiguity if respectful but specific language is used but not sure at all on this
        • this may not be transferable to certain cultures’ methods of healthcare and discussing these topics
        • I do respect patient-focus over blanket ‘solutions’
        • I need to find other sources on this, my own context is particularly loud here
  • If gender is deemed necessary:
  • If there are system/legal reasons to include it, consider
    • contacting your EDI department or IT department
    • making these fields optional
    • adding free text fields for self-identification
      • anecdotally and from personal experience, gender-variant people will abandon web forms with inadequate options if we can afford to
    • leaving this data empty
    • autofilling already held data
    • hiding this data from the user
    • autofilling blanket values for all records
    • updating data sources for enumerated options
      • eg more recent sources for title include Mx
      • use sources from reputable organisations with input from those affected